Remembrance of Comics Past Archive

There’s nothing new about my love-hate relationship with the comic book reader/collector community. While I adore the medium and possess copious amounts of nerd-knowledge I’m also very myopic in my approach and collecting philosophy. I collect Amazing Spider-Man – it’s the only series I give enough of a damn

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I understand that when I stopped buying and reading Amazing Spider-Man comics in the 1990s, I missed a lot of major storylines involving the fate of his clone and his family, not to mention the return of one of his long-dead rivals in Norman Osborn. So when I eventually

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In pasts posts I’ve talked about the psychological benchmarks for collecting, and how they often guide, or in some cases, dictate your approach once you seemingly pass one. After writing about the J. Jonah Jameson storyline in Amazing Spider-Man #20 earlier this week, I realized that this particular issue

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While it was not intentional, I realized that this week’s posts had trended towards a theme – one that discussed Peter’s relationship with first love Gwen Stacy, and then a follow-up about a new issue that feature another former flame in the Black Cat. So I thought I’d complete

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My acquisition of Amazing Spider-Man #101 is a tale filled with a lot of blank spots and unanswered questions. I can’t guarantee you how interesting any of this is going to be, but since this is my ball of yarn, you’re free to watch me spin it from a

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As I alluded to in last week’s “remembrance,” my re-entry into the world of Spider-Man comic book collecting was very deliberate, filled with countless one-toe-in-the-water moments that ultimately went nowhere. In general, I have a tendency to get obsessed with certain things and then abruptly burn out, lose interest

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Despite growing up a mere 40-minute train away from New York City in the suburbs of Long Island, I never really grew to know and love the “Big Apple” until I was in college. Interestingly enough, it was also during this time in my life that my interest in

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While I’m undoubtedly a Spider-Man fan and enthusiast, my introduction to the Marvel universe and eventually Amazing Spider-Man comic books came through Marvel’s Secret War series in the mid-1980s. For those unfamiliar with Secret Wars, it was a 12-issue mega-crossover that starred pretty much every character who mattered in

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If you’re buying comic books as a collector, you can’t get lazy. Because if I learned anything in my 20+ years of collecting, it’s that if you slack for even one second, that’s when you end up with a less than satisfactory purchase. At least that’s the case behind

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Most collectors going for a full run of Amazing Spider-Man will probably identify ASM #28 as the bane of their existence. Not because it’s a particularly hard to find issue, or even all that expensive (relative to earlier issues of the series, of course). They’re probably cursing that issue

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