Initation

Suggestions were made, ideas bounced around a bit, and here I am writing a blog.  Take the years of otherwise useless information floating around inside your head and do something with it.  That was the notion put before me given the twenty-plus years I have spent reading the 32 pages or so of multi-color fantasy otherwise known as comic books.  Really, it's more like 23 pages minus the ads and various other gaga thrown in for good measure, but that's neither here nor there.  It's enough to say that comic books are a hobby (spelled: obsession) for little old me.

Ever since my dad bought me a copy of Uncanny X-Men #224...



...at the Denver Airport in...1987...when I was...eight...well I've been hooked.  From Uncanny to Classic to Wolverine's 1st on-going to X-Factor, that first year or so of mutant reading opened me up to a whole new world.  Suffice to say I became a little obsessed, started using the titles of stories as stand-ins for the summer book reading contests at my local library, and fell hard down the slippery slope of back issue bins. Thank you Capital City Comics.

Now here I am....creeping on the end of 2010, and my palate has expanded beyond Claremont and Silvestri, Claremont and Byrne, Claremont and Buscema, Claremont and...well, you get the idea.  As a matter of fact, I've become more of a DC guy, with a strong Batman bent, and...at least according to friends...have an unhealthy obsession with everything birthed from the brain of Grant Morrison. 

That's the basics....and it all started with that cover.  That cover was oh so epic to the eyes of an 8 year old kid told he could only get one book to read on the flight home, and that piece of personal history actually holds up when I look at it now.  It screams of adventure and excitement, teasing you with events to come, and all for only 75 cents!!!  I still have that ish actually, cover hanging on for dear life by one small scrap of paper somehow attached to the top staple.  I look at it now and think....

...are comic books, gas, and cigarettes the things that have been hit the hardest by inflation or what?