YOW!

I love comics. I grew up with--quite literally--hundreds of thousands of them at my fingertips. My parents owned a number of used bookstores and they dealt in old comics. So they always had them stored by the roomful in warehouses, storage areas, closets, etc.

No wonder that I became a dealer in collectibles when I found myself with all of that stuff. I spent the better part of my adult life traveling around buying and selling old comics. Over the years, I lost track of how many copies of things like The Amazing Spider-Man #1 that I bought and sold.

But that was the thing. Comics--even the ones that I genuinely loved--were never something that I felt able to keep. I was running a business and there were always bills to be paid. So I would move the better stuff as fast as I could buy it. I rarely had the hard-to-find issues of things like Spider-Man and Fantastic Four more than a few weeks before some collector would purchase them.

Now, though, I find myself with a certain amount of disposable income and the ability to buy old comics as a hobby. It's where I always should have been. I'm closing in on a complete set of the Steve Ditko issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. Only three to go.

Yep, they knew how to make comics in those days.

(Gonna be gone for a few days. We're off to the beach for some relaxation.)