So, there I was in college, comic books readily available, a check book, and only a long bike ride keeping me from going there every day to buy more.

Well, the checkbook wasn’t that full …

I had my boxes of comics in my room — cardboard booze boxes, cut in half. I was quite popular among my geeky friends, though I really tried to keep from loaning the things out. I knew I’d never see them again …

Things sort of exploded onwards from there. I got blown away by Claremont/Byrne’s Dark Phoenix saga, and though the series went downhill from there (at least until the Paul Smith art days), it was still something I read avidly.

On the other hand, there was plenty else to read. One series that particularly stands out from the era was Walt Simonson’s work on Thor. Incredible. He brought back the majesty of the Kirby days, but leavened it with plenty of actual Nordic sorts of stuff. Best Thor ever. His Ragnarok was the best of all, and that shadowy figure hammering out DOOM among distant stars was jaw-droppingly fabulous. (Some, but not all, of the Simonson Thor work has been collected in a couple of volumes by Marvel. They are worth the investment.)

(A tip of the hat to Jay Shayer, btw, for a fine site that has lots of X-Men and Thor info on it.)

I continued to go to the Upland comics store for a couple of years, then it closed. This was to become a recurring theme in my comic-buying life. There was another shop down at the Pomona Mall that I went to for the rest of college, and a few years thereafter. Eventually (this is down the road a few years), I found a place in San Dimas that would actually do comic pulls from the Diamond list. What a concept — pre-ordering comics, rather than hoping I spotted everything I wanted to buy! Amazing!

[We pause for a moment, as Kitten has made her way downstairs and made a bee-line for the bags of M&Ms. So it’s time to get her set up, and get me some coffee in my cool Blogathon cup.]

So, anyway, I started buying comics. And, eventually, bags and comic boxes.

And I went to the San Diego Comic Con a few times. It was a lot easier when I was in California, natch. But it was wild, seeing the comic companies, the panels, the actual Writers of Stuff (not to mention artists). Boxes of back issues. Books. Videos.

It was all so cool, I volunteered for a number of years. Which gave me a chance to meet folks like Jack Kirby and Rob Paulsen (Pinkie). And Joe Straczynski, of course. It also netted me some faboo t-shirts, taught me valuable lessons on crowd control and how not to set up lines, and showed me first-hand the mania that was Image Comics (bleah).
One comics-related side note was that in ’83 or so, I kept my pal Dave Sutherland up-to-date on various comics while he was in the wilds of Costa Rica on a semester abroad, by transcribing various issues of X-Men and Thor. I wish I still had some of those transcriptions, because it was a lot of fun, and did some goodly honing of my writing skills.

(On the other hand, that was also the era that I began my first novel, which is still unfinished. So not all the skills got all that honed.)

Comics collecting proceeded apace. When I moved into the Phillips Ranch condo. one of the first tasks was building a set of mongo shelves in the downstairs closet onto which to stack the boxes.

My 3-month “business trip” up to Martinez caused no end of collecting difficulty. Margie, bless her then-only-girlfriend heart, still stopped by my comic store to pick up things (even as she went and took care of my condo and cat). But I was still missing things.

Fortunately, I found a nice little comic store in Walnut Creek, near my hotel. And I discovered the wonders of trade paperbacks. And I had plenty of disposable income, and absolutely nothing to do in my evenings. It wasn’t just cases of Napa wine in the back of the car that weighted it down on the trip back south when the assignment ended.

When we moved to Colorado, the comics sat in storage (mercifully) for some time, though of course I had a year to gather up new ones in the interim before we got the house. I discovered Mile High Comics locally, and found there was a store right in downtown Denver that I could visit on my lunch hour. (They’re not downtown any more, alas — but, then, neither am I.)

But the joy of working with Mile High was that, when I moved my account to another store, my pull list went with it. And I could (after a while) maintain my pull list online, which was handy.

And then I got gorilla racks down in the basement for my comics. And I started entering my collection (in fits and starts) into ComicBase.

And I had a daughter, whom I could buy issues of Scooby-Do and Powerpuff Girls, and watch episodes of Justice League with.

And I got a blog …

And the rest is (ongoing) history.

The first comic I remember reading was a Justice League issue, featuring Red Tornado. Not an auspicious beginning, perhaps. It was at some store we went to in Mountain View, Calif., near the Shell station — a combo variety and grocery store, or at least the two were attached. Don’t remember the store name(s), but I remember that they had a comics spinner, and I read through some of them on rare occasions when I was able to stand there by myself as the parental units did something shopping-wise. Since I was no older than seven or eight, that wasn’t often.

Comic books struck me as cool, but just not something I could ever get into. We didn’t buy things like that, and “allowance” was not a word I was introduced to for many years.

Flash forward to Diamond Bar, growing up through elementary and junior high. I had an acquaintance, David Shoop, who lived up the street from us. He had a stack of comics about 18-20″ high, and one day he asked me if I wanted them.

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