When you gave up comics...

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... and started collecting them again.

― Chuck Tatum (Chuck Tatum), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:06 (twenty-two years ago)

I've never consciously given comics up, as such, but every few years the titles I read dwindle and then fall off completely because of creative team changes or cancellations. For a couple years in high school I all but stopped reading them because I had no way to get to the store 20 minutes away, and then I discovered a guy who owned a store an hour away came to the flea market every Sunday morning with back issues and new Vertigo issues, so I read Sandman and occasional issues of Hellblazer or Shade. Got back into them more regularly when I went to college near the Words & Pictures comic book museum.

― Tep (ktepi), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:24 (twenty-two years ago)

I stopped around Invisibles #7, when I realised my incredible need to read the next issue of any given comic had completely vaporized. Most of the creative teams on my favourite titles had left or been axed (GM from Animal Man, Doom Patrol, PM from Shade, Giffen&D from JLA). Plus, like most people I knew, I think I moved from being geekily obsessed with comics to being geekily obssessed with music, which for some reason seemed more... adult.

I started collecting again 'round the time of the From Hell pbk and discovring David Boring in Eightball.

― Chuck Tatum (Chuck Tatum), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:29 (twenty-two years ago)

I never really collected as a kid...I liked comics and somehow came into possession of a decent number of trades (mostly Batman, X-Men and some other obscure stuff) but I didn't have the money or the means of transportation to actually go to comic book stores and follow titles.

Then, I dated my current girlfriend for about a year before realizing, "Hey, she reads comics...why am I not reading comics?" And then she gave me the complete Invisibles run in singles, I read it and found out that he was currently writing New X-Men, and that was that.

― Jordan (Jordan), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:41 (twenty-two years ago)

I read/collected voraciously from about '83/'84 to 90, then I slowly petered out my buying as I got more seriously into music and girls and stuff. At my peak my file included nearly every superhero comic DC was putting out, and then the last year I just read Hellblazer and the odd other thing.
About two years ago, I started venturing back into the comic shop. I started off slow, the first thing I bought was the first 100 Bullets collection. I didn't buy again for a whole year, until last summer when I got the Kingdom Come tpb. A few months later, Chester Brown came to town and was doing a signing at a local comic for the release of his Louis Riel hardcover. I covered it and left the store with a small armload. Then I started going back every two or three weeks. And I've been doing it ever since. I'd like to get more into non-superhero stuff, but I admit I have absolutely no idea what's any good. So I largely stick with what I know. Though I have lately (thanks to ILComics) branched out to read some Marvel, namely Daredevil.
But it was so cool when I plopped down my credit card and bought over $100 worth of comics, which was unimaginable for me back in the day.

― The Huckle-Buck (Horace Mann), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:45 (twenty-two years ago)

I used to bike all the way across town every Friday after school (or ride the bus in the winter) to get to the GOOD comic store in my old home town. Comics used to get there on Friday, and I remember one winter day, I must have been about 12, the shipment was late and I waited in the small shop for four hours until they showed up. My parents freaked out.

― The Huckle-Buck (Horace Mann), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:47 (twenty-two years ago)

Uncanny X-Men 300.

― @d@ml (nordicskilla), Thursday, 6 May 2004 17:02 (twenty-two years ago)

Started again...I don't know, because of Clowes and Kaz and Bagge (whom I am discovering in retrospect).

― @d@ml (nordicskilla), Thursday, 6 May 2004 17:03 (twenty-two years ago)

I read a lot when I was a kid (more UK reprints, but quite a lot of US ones too), then stopped in adolescence, as so many do. Then a good friend at school, when I was about 16 in I think 1975, brought in some issues of Howard The Duck and The Defenders to read, and I've not entirely stopped again since. That friend and I started a zine about comics in 1981, and I was reading loads all through my professional career in comics, which ended about ten years ater. Since then I'm largely out of touch and only follow a few old favourites and friends and people I worked with.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Thursday, 6 May 2004 17:21 (twenty-two years ago)

I never really started as a kid because baseball cards distracted me as my primary collecting hobby/complete waste of money.

I think I started getting into comics fulltime in college, when I met a chap who was in a poetry workshop and resparked my interest in all things Batman. (I'd kept it with Batman through the godly Animated Series.)

Then someone recommended Sandman, and that was all she wrote. So I do have something to be grateful for re: Sandman.

― Leeefuse 73 (Leee), Thursday, 6 May 2004 17:28 (twenty-two years ago)

As a kid I really wanted to be Wonder Woman, and those were the first comics I had. Didn't have any for a long time, and then, being a girl, I read all of Sandman and Books of Magic and some X-men. I also watched X-men and Batman cartoons, and my dad bought me a Batman comic (A Death in the Family) when I was 14, but I was too cool to appreciate the gesture at the time. Then in college nothing, until my friends really started to like manga, so I would hang around the shop and peruse the spandex while they taught themselves Japanese. One day a friend mentioned he had to review the "From Hell" movie for the college paper, and he had read the book and was explaining it to me, so that piqued my interest... Last year I lived somewhere quite lonely, and that's when I really started reading comics again. Yesterday I actually found myself saying to a friend "Argh! Tom Sawyer was not in the comic!" in the middle of an ice cream store. How nerdy.

― Jocelyn (Jocelyn), Thursday, 6 May 2004 18:18 (twenty-two years ago)

Jocelyn, you might be interested in the latest run of Wonder Woman, as written by the esteemable Greg Rucka. It's very West Wing meets superheroes.

― Leeefuse 73 (Leee), Thursday, 6 May 2004 20:35 (twenty-two years ago)

And I mean the good, Sorkin-penned West Wing.

― Leeefuse 73 (Leee), Thursday, 6 May 2004 20:35 (twenty-two years ago)

stopped july 1993 when i left town to bum around for the next few years. never started again. still like them but haven't had ANY money to spend since, oh, 1997.

― mullygrubber (gaz), Friday, 7 May 2004 01:54 (twenty-two years ago)

I gave up on 'em in 1994 or so, which turned out to be a pretty good time to bail. Sure, I'd pick up the occasional Sandman (which I ended up getting in hardbacks for the most part) or odd interesting thing, but was pretty much out cold turkey. I got back into them in 2002 or so, when I re/discovered the wonder that is Grant Morrison (hell, he made the X-Men readable again, he can do most anything). I'm back in it full bore and have even geeked out to the extent that I'm writing a weekly column on comics.

But I'm still relatively damn picky about what I shell out cash for.

― Matt Maxwell (Matt M.), Friday, 7 May 2004 02:35 (twenty-two years ago)

i left town to bum around for the next few years

gaz, you are so cool.

― @d@ml (nordicskilla), Friday, 7 May 2004 02:48 (twenty-two years ago)

were

― mullygrubber (gaz), Friday, 7 May 2004 04:28 (twenty-two years ago)

I never had a break in reading comics. As a small kid I read Tintin, Asterix, Lucky Luke, Spirou and all the classic European comics. A few years later I added superheroes to my diet, and was an avid follower of Marvel comics for some time. When I was maybe 15 I felt I'd outgrown superheroics, and moved on to the non-kiddie stuff: Vertigo, Corto Maltese, Ralf König etc. I've never really returned to the spandex stuff, though I occasionally borrow a superhero collection form the library. But it's mostly "mature" comics an newspaper strips for me nowadays.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Friday, 7 May 2004 06:58 (twenty-two years ago)

Thanks Leefuse, I'll definately check out the Wonder Woman. I read the first Queen & Country last night and I'm in love.

― Jocelyn (Jocelyn), Friday, 7 May 2004 12:33 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm back in it full bore and have even geeked out to the extent that I'm writing a weekly column on comics.

Is it online?

― Jordan (Jordan), Friday, 7 May 2004 13:13 (twenty-two years ago)

Yup.

http://www.brokenfrontier.com/columns/fullbleed/fullbleed.htm

Sorry if that doesn't actually make a link. It's been so long since I've posted here that I've forgotten how to make a working URL.

― Matt Maxwell (Matt M.), Friday, 7 May 2004 13:31 (twenty-two years ago)

In high school, I used to cut up comics and make collages for mixed tapes. Now I collect for real.

― Vermont Girl (Vermont Girl), Friday, 7 May 2004 14:16 (twenty-two years ago)

read the first Queen & Country last night and I'm in love.

Rah! More Q&C readers!

― Leeefuse 73 (Leee), Friday, 7 May 2004 20:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Not sure where to post this, but I'm interviewing Will Eisner. yay!

― Chuck Tatum (Chuck Tatum), Friday, 7 May 2004 22:31 (twenty-two years ago)

You could have started a new thread Chuck. ; )

― Leeefuse 73 (Leee), Friday, 7 May 2004 22:52 (twenty-two years ago)

Niiiice. Has he read Understanding Comics? I always wondered what he thought about that. I'm sure someone asked him ten years ago, when UC still excited college students and the people who shopped at the comic stores they worked in.

― Tep (ktepi), Saturday, 8 May 2004 02:28 (twenty-two years ago)

My Finnish copy of Understanding Comics has a praising Eisner comment on the back cover, so I guess he's read it.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Saturday, 8 May 2004 09:46 (twenty-two years ago)

I've interviewed Eisner as well! He's a good subject, as long as you don't get him on to waffling on about how great Lou Fine was.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Saturday, 8 May 2004 15:17 (twenty-two years ago)

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