Four Nerds

For me it was never about the money. I just get a thrill out of managing a collection and going back and reading the stories. Generally on my first pass of a book I don't truly appreciate the art. That's just me, I'm more impressed by clever verbiage than wowed by pretty pictures. Also a story arc I didn't love when reading in installments can take on a whole new life when read beginning to end.
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I think Trade Paper Backs are a wondrous invention, they make sold-out items accessible and allow for a story arc to be presented in its entirety.

I also think as the hobby slowly dies (I hold no delusions that the comic book will most likely end with this generation), the monthly book will be replaced with the quarterly trade. This will give the creative talent more time to work on the stories and would be way more cost effective for the publisher.
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I'm currently going through the process of putting all my books in a database. 20+ years of collecting has resulted in an unruly mess occupying my basement. I had the Mylar, the backing boards, and the long-boxes. The only problem was I had no idea what was in them.

When I was a kid I collected everything. Marvel, DC, it didn't matter. Then when I was about eighteen, I walked away. I'd like to say I matured, but no, I had just become fed-up. Between the multiple titles and the eighteen variant covers and...Image. Oh God, Image in the early days I feel helped dethrone comics. They got their shit together eventually, but it took some time.

As I go through all my boxes I can see why people threw in the towel. Robin II which came out around 91' had 4 different versions of the first cover. OK this I can live with (sorta), but then each cover had the possibility of having four separate holograms. That's 16 copies you had to buy. Like a schmuck I did, along with six copies of the "Death of Superman".

After about eight years away I realized I truly missed it collecting and thankfully in that time it changed. New stars rose (thank the lord for Bendis) , old ones fell (buh-bye Liefield), and some greats stayed but were shadows of their former glory (ohhh poor Frank Miller and Chris Claremont). But the over-arching change seemed to be the loss of some of the greed. There seemed to be a bigger focus on just telling a good story.

Now, the pendulum is swinging back a bit. Recently they started calling second printings "limited editions". If it's limited, why does it sit on the shelf for six months, and the first edition is sold out?

OK enough about what we don't like. Let's talk about the titles we like.

Here's my current favorites list: Runaways Powers Y: The Last Man Exiles Fables The Authority and quite a few more, but I've talked enough for now.