A Journey Through Comic Book Addiction
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I used to collect comic books. What started as whiling-away my lunch hour from work in the local comic book shop just a few doors down from the office I worked in, developed into a serious addiction that consumed whole chunks of my life. Initially I'd buy the odd comic here and there to read in the break room at work, which would be tossed in my locker afterwards. One day I opened my locker, and there it was... A considerable pile of comics, easy somewhere around a hundred or so, I'd inadvertently started a comic book collection. I was now well on the road to becoming a comic book geek!
It was the early 90s, the days before the Weird Wide Web, and so the only way to connect with other collectors was through furtive grunts and nods over racks of bagged and boarded comics at the comic book shop. You had to think on your feet, as new comics arrived almost daily, which were the ones to buy and the ones to deride in an off-hand air of feigned expertise. I got myself a comic collectors price guide through mail order, though I had little or no idea what all the little codes and acronyms meant at all. It was utterly useless really, but for being stuck in my jeans back pocket when hitting up the comic book shop. And it taught me to seem knowledgeable about what bags and boards to ask for. Mylar, acid free, generally standard size, even though Silver Age comics were a snug fit. |
I'd been reading comic books since as long as I could remember, as any kid growing-up in the 70s and 80s did. But they were throw-away, without any value or significance once read. They ended up on my bedroom floor, sometimes swept into a corner, but never cherished as objects of collectible desire. I didn't care if I missed an issue, each comic was an entity unto itself. It was what we did to entertain ourselves, in our alone time, back when there were only three TV channels and little programming on those catered for kids. My friends read a lot of war comics, Warlord, Commando, Victor. They didn't interest me. Like many kids of that era I regularly read The Beano. You were either a Dandy or Beano person, and my feet were firmly planted in the Beano camp, with weekly deliveries arriving on the doormat. I'd buy Whizzer and Chips, Cheeky, Topper and alike with my meagre pocket-money from the local newagents. Sometimes I'd splash out on an American comic, I was mostly a DC dude, Marvel didn't float my boat. Sure the odd Spiderman, Incredible Hulk or Fantastic Four would pass through my hands, but for me Superman was were it was at. I guess that was down to Superman the movie coming out in 1978. I remember going to see it with my dad, queuing up on a Saturday afternoon with all the other kids and their dads. He even bought me a movie poster of it from the cinema foyer, that remained on my bedroom wall well into my late teens. The first comic I ever bought, under the knowledge that this was a keeper, was the Superman #1 over-sized reprint that came out in 1979. I still have that boxed away somewhere under the stairs to this day. Although I has lost its original stiff cardboard cover, and is seriously dog-eared.
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Anyway I digress, back to the 90s and this pile of comics sat in my locker at work. I took them home, sorted through them, bagged and boarded them and placed them in a plastic crate. As far as genre, publisher, age and style, they were all over the place. There were some that were part of a series, with a few gaps here and there. So like any new collector, I endeavoured to fill the gaps. Some were easier to do than others via the local comic book shop. That was when I discovered "mail order" from the United States, and that's when my addiction really kicked-in! There was a whole world of comic books available from the USA that even the local comic book shop (which did have a very extensive selection) simply couldn't match up too. I discovered independent publishers, one-off prints no-one else at the time seemed to value. Weird, wonderful and quirky stuff. I was in geek heaven. Suddenly my collection exploded, quickly it was in the many hundreds. So much so that I began to catalog them on a computer database.
I was buying multiple copies of the same comic. They publishers like DC knew how to get you. I bought the news-stand editions, the special editions, the die-cut silver embossed collectors cover editions, all of the same basic comic. I'd even sometimes buy an extra one to actually "read!" They had me, and they had me good. When DC did its "Year Zero" gimmick in the mid-90s, I had them all. And I mean all of them. "Death of Superman", yup! Every single one of them too. I knew what they were doing to me, I knew they had hooked me and were reeling me in, but I just couldn't help myself. I had to have them. |
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Then there were the EC Comics reprints that came out, which lead onto collecting all manner of vintage horror comics. Piles of them landing on my doorstep every week. No rhyme nor reason to the purchases, anything and everything would do. Then I discovered the Hernandez brothers, Love & Rockets back issues. I knew and loved Gilbert's Heartbreak Soup series, I had them and avidly read them since they came out in the late 80s. But now, Love & Rockets became my thing. Then, there was Eightball! The first time I picked up a copy of Daniel Clowes's Eightball, I was immediately in love with it. It was issue #11, the first Ghost World story was in it. I dug through and found earlier issues, I bought the lot. No-one seemed to appreciate them, the "comic book guy" sneered dismissively as I slapped them down on the counter. I didn't care, I knew he was wrong. I knew that Eightball was something different, something special, something to be treasured. This was unlike anything else in the shop, the artwork, the dark and twisted dead-pan delivered story-lines. This was a comic book that was written for me, for me as an adult. Yes I know that the likes of Dark Horse and Fantagraphics and others had been publishing adult themed comic books for years, but there was something about this comic book that stood head and shoulders above the others.
The last remnants of my comic book collection.
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So much so that it broke the spell. My vast collection of DC, smattering of Marvels and hundreds of horror, sci-fi and "quirky" comics paled by comparison. (Actually I still loved old-school horror comics, and still do!) But in one fell-swoop the addiction was broken, I was free. No longer a cherished collection, I saw my plastic boxes full of comics for the burden they had become. I started to off-load them, selling them on in job lots. Sometimes making back the money I'd spent, mostly not. The odd comic here and there in the collection sold for surprisingly good prices. And as the collection dwindled, I kept a few aside. They got thrown into a box with a lot of my other possessions when I packed-up and went travelling Asia, and didn't see the light of day until just over a year ago, when I finally returned back home almost 10 years later. And what an odd and eclectic little collection of comic books they are.
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What I have left are issues #1-3, #11 and #12 of Eightball, a random selection of Marvel horror comics from the mid-70s and The Young Cynics Club by Glenn Wong from 1993. But hey, the are reminders, reminders of a time when I was a collector, an insane, manic obsessive collector of comic books.
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