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Showing posts from July, 2006

Confessions of a closet comics junkie, part 1

When I was nine, I saw a classified ad about "comics for sale." The address was in the same apartment development, so I went over to check this out. I was thinking this would be a cheap way to feed my addiction. Not so. At the time the price of a new comic was 12 cents. This kid (with his dad, natch) pulls out a couple of titles from a box where they were stored and starts quote prices in the range of five and ten bucks. My eyes glazed. I realized I had come to the wrong place. The plastic bags should have been a dead giveaway. I'm not a collector. I don't have file cabinets full of originals encased in archival sleeves. Collectors are interested in the object: the original magazine. For me it's about the content: the drawings, the stories. I'm not a purist, anthologies and reprints are just fine - better in some ways than originals, since I've always liked to pore over the pages, re-reading the balloons, studying the drawings. Brittle newsprint in plasti