My first experience of Comicdom started in Elementary School when I was sick at home and my dad brought me several of the sealed Whitman Marvel 3 packs from Sears. One of the sets was The Amazing Spider-man, including the First Appearance of the Black Cat, issue 194. I still have that beat up copy. I was hooked and became a Spider-man fan for life.

From there, my mom would give me a few dollars to buy comics at the local 7-11 before we went to a long night of bingo. What I loved most about those times besides staying up way late on school nights were all the new adventures I got to read. To this day, I still have every one of the stories I bought including those I seemed to have misplaced the covers. BTW, how much is a Hot Stuff the Little Devil in fair condition going for now days anyway? It’s amazing they’ve made it this far even if there are only about 500 issues in those 4 boxes.

A few years later I stumbled onto the X-Men during the Chris Claremont days and DC’s Hal Jordan Green Lantern series. For some reason, I never could buy them in sequential order. I’d give my dad my list of missing issues and sometimes when he was on business trips out of town, he’d pop into the local used book store to see if they had the issues. When he got back late Friday nights, it was like Christmas. I was so excited to see what he was able to find. I still have the original bags with the cut up piece of paper saying VF $1.00 or GD $.50. I didn’t care what grade they were, I was just happy to read them.

One Christmas, I filled out those mail order cards Marvel would put in the comics for subscriptions and gave them to my Grandparents asking them if they would buy them for me for Christmas. They bought me Amazing Spider-man, Spectacular Spider-man, the Fantastic Four and The Thing. I loved running to the mailbox to see if the brown wrapped comics had come in. I didn’t even care that the US Postal Service would mangle and bend them or even send them through the shredder from time to time. OK, I did, but I kept them anyway.

I stopped buying comics right before McFarlane's famous issue 300 of Amazing Spider-man. Boy, do I regret that decision. A few years later, the whole Image comics launch sucked me back in for just a while, but it eventually lost my interest. Since then, I lost track of the day to day comics, but continued being a fan of the pop culture comic books created.

At some point, the Marvel Cinematic Universe starting taking off and I started getting sucked back into the stories. DC kept me hooked with their cartoon series, especially Justice League and Batman Beyond. I'd rent the animated movie releases and yet I found myself wanting even more. From time to time, I'd hear about a really cool storyline and go gobble up a very detailed write up somewhere.

About 8 years ago, I found this site for sale and I had this crazy idea that I would start writing about comic collecting and investing in an effort to get back into it. Sadly, it just sat there with little attention. You may see some of those old pages and I'm trying to revisit them and give them the attention they need, but it's slow going. What finally sucked me back in was the idea that I could figure out a way to flip newer hot comics, save up the money and buy some of the older issues I had always wanted. I love my original copy of ASM 194, but I'd love even more to have a 9.6 or better yet, a 9.8 copy stashed away somewhere. Heck, I've even considered crazy things like buying a nearly falling apart copy of Amazing Fantasy 15 just to say I have one. Come on, you know that would be awesome!

And that's why I'm here. I can't tell you all the different ways Wolverine avoided death, but I have spent many adventures with him in my younger days and in all of those darn Netflix cartoons, more recently with my daughter. I may even wear a t-shirt or two with his picture on it. Reading and writing about this makes me happy and I love the idea of chasing down the dream of buy a few key issues that always seemed unobtainable. So I'll keep working on this site and let you watch my progress including my failures and my successes. Hopefully you and I will both learn something about this America Pop Culture classic called the Comic Book.

Atomm