The Collection Obsession

So I took advantage of this to hit three of the regional comic book stores which my friend Bruce clued me into last year: That's Entertainment, Webhead Enterprises, and The Outer Limits. They each have good back-issue and trade paperback selections, with varying emphases, and between the three of them I found quite a bit of good stuff.

I do enjoy pursuing my hobby of collecting comics, although given the price of housing space in the Bay Area it is a bit of a drag that my collections (comics, books, CDs) take up so much space. Still, it's not like I don't know other people in the Bay Area who aren't also amassers of paper. So, it can be done.

What sort of stuff am I picking up? Well, in some cases I'm buying better-condition copies of comics I already have, generally comics that I know I'll be keeping for a long time (i.e., probably for the rest of my life unless I someday decide to sell off my whole collection) and which are inexpensive (say, a buck apiece). In others I'm filling in parts of a series I've decided to collect, either because it's well-regarded and I figured I should read it (as I did with Iron Fist over the past year) or because I figure it will just be fun to read (such as all the Spider-Man yarns from Marvel Team-Up, which I pretty much intend to turn around and sell once I've got them all and read them). And in some cases I'm just picking up stuff I know I want and either didn't know existed, or didn't previously know that I wanted. I like browsing, basically, and I sometimes find some interesting stuff.

Collecting is fun, but it can be kind of a lonely hobby. I don't really have any friends in California who are also comics collectors, so I can't really share the hobby with anyone out there. (It is, to be sure, a relatively obscure hobby these days, given the hard times the comics industry has fallen on, and it's always been a very male-dominated hobby.) I've never really gotten into the comics convention thing, and I have a suspicion that, as with science fiction conventions, they've probably evolved past what I would really enjoy at this point, that they're largely dominated by teenagers reading lightweight material and/or just watching the TV shows related to comics.

It was pretty enjoyable in Madison when I was lending big chunks of my collection to Tracy for her to read. Although she never graduated to buying them herself, we had a good time talking about the series I lent to her.

Last night I went into downtown Boston for my annual dinner with my aforementioned friend Bruce. I think I've talked about him before; we met through APA Centauri back in 1988 or so and have kept up our correspondence ever since, though we've both long since dropped out of that APA. Bruce has been knocking on the door of the comic book industry for years, even writing an entertaining volume called The Batman Chronicles: Gauntlet, but he hasn't had a lot of luck, as it seems like his editorial contacts keep disappearing out from under him, and he hasn't had those one or two breaks that have helped a few of his contemporaries. A pity, really.

If I lived in Boston, I'd hope that Bruce and I would see a lot more of each other, as we do have many overlapping interests and seem to get along great in person. We both read comic books and science fiction (Bruce is more widely-read in literature than I am), follow Boston sports (we both expect and hope that Patriots coach Pete Carroll will get the axe after this disappointing football season, and were delighted with the Red Sox this past year), enjoy old movies, and so forth.

We usually meet for Italian food in Boston's North End, as we did tonight. We set up shop around 5:30 and stayed until near onto 10:00 and had a grand time. I always look forward to seeing Bruce on these trips. It's a joy.