Tuesday, February 12, 2008

My God.... It's Full of Stars...

I did it. I finally did it. I signed up for Marvel comics online. Now I can read through their library of thousands of comics in beautifully scanned gloriousness... What's even better is that if I pull up an old issue of, say, Uncanny X-Men to get the background of a particular character, they'll also let me know if that series of issues has been reprinted in a trade recently so if I wanted to own them in hard copy format, I could. But I like that this gives me a chance to read some books that I'd never bother to buy--never will I be bored on the internets again!

The tipping point was helping our collections department go through a collection of comics acquired from a local business scion's family on Monday. We wanted to grab some stuff that was likely to get used in the exhibit, and since I have a lot of basic knowledge about comics from the era during which this collection was amassed, I got to be the helper bee. Which meant in the course of about 7 hours I looked at the covers of probably about 10,000 comics. Mostly Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Hulk, X-Men in all their various stripes, and Fantastic Four--but plenty of other stuff too. It was great fun, pulling out suggestive or otherwise entertaining covers to show each other--Spiderman covers from the 1970's are endlessly hilarious--and of course tons of it was a trip down memory lane for me. I started collecting around 1985 or 86, and spent about $20 a month on comics until around 1996 or so. The collection we were picking up was amassed by a guy about my age, who spent more like $200 a month on comics during that exact same period of time. Our tastes were similar; so many of the books he had, I have, and I remember reading them with great fondness.

Might be time to drag out the longboxes and start reading from the beginning....

2 comments:

kyree said...

I'm trying to place the quote... "2001: A Space Odyssey"?

The Wax Lion said...

Close. 2010. :)