My Collecting Pedigree
Update February 2007: Though Any Eventuality started as something like a comics blog with a few movie reviews, “one year later” it seems to have developed into more of a film blog with the occasional post about comic books (perhaps due to DC’s loss of momentum with their One Year Later titles). The shift did not reflect a conscious decision to change the direction of the blog, it was just the result of whatever I felt like writing about, which I’m sure will continue to evolve with my interests. But the following is the account I offered of my personal odyssey as a comics fan; perhaps in the future I’ll add one as a filmgoer.
As a kid I read comics occasionally, usually Spider-Man, which my dad bought for me at the supermarkert. However, at ten years old I became obsessed with basketball and it wasn’t until I happened to stroll into a comics shop in high school that I rediscovered the joy of my youth. When I picked up a comic that said Star Wars on it, Cam Kennedy’s art (in the Dark Empire miniseries) bowled me over and I realized comics were a proper art form I had been missing out on.
That was the autumn of 1995 and I slowly began to get my bearings in the Marvel universe of my childhood. Unfortunately, the Clone Saga was still unfolding in the Spidey titles so I kept up with events but didn’t collect them. Heroes Reborn seemed like a good jumping-on point for me so Captain America got my attention and led me to the TPBs of Waid and Garney’s fantastic pre-Reborn stories (collected in the Operation: Rebirth and Man Without a Country TPBs). I liked Salvador Larocca’s art in Heroes Returns so I followed him to the Fantastic Four for his two-and-a-half-year run. As long as Larocca was inked by Art Thibert, he was fine, but the new style he adopted for Uncanny X-Men didn’t appeal to me.
I only dabbled in the DC universe — a few Kelley Jones issues of Batman — but the artwork was very bland in the Dan Jurgens-era Superman titles and the Cataclysm era of Batman. I picked up a few of Damion Scott’s early story arcs during the No Man’s Land event but for the most part I only collected DC miniseries like Superman for All Seasons or Batman: Dark Victory.
I finally began collecting monthly issues of DC titles when Jeph Loeb took over Superman with Mike McKone, followed three issues later by Ed McGuinness. I was bored by ordinary representational artwork so I was happy to see DC “risk” their flagships with distinctively stylistic artists. And back then, if you read one Superman title you had to read all four (cursed numbering system!), so I collected practically all Superman comics for three years (2000–2002).
At the same time, I began collecting Batman regularly when Scott McDaniel took over in January 2000 and continued through the end of Hush in 2003. By then, however, I had graduated from college and began the transition to just collected editions. Along the way I had begun collecting many other monthlies, like the new Green Arrow series and all of the titles in the Ultimate universe since 2000, but I gradually phased them out and by 2004 I was finally free of my weekly addiction.
These days I almost always “wait for the trade,” and while Spider-Man was my childhood favorite, J. Michael Straczynski has made him nearly unrecognizable to me, making me now almost exclusively a DC man. My interest in comics has evolved from a primarily artistic focus to more of an emphasis on story, so Infinite Crisis has inspired me to learn more about the history of the DC Universe, and thanks to their excellent practice of collecting material it seems there’s always another unexplored corner of the DCU waiting for me to discover it.
