I’ve been off from work this week so I can invest a little extra time toward completing the writing I need to finish on my thesis.  I’m writing a lot about my late middle school/early high school years and some of the things that my friends and I used to do together.  This led me invariably back to my brief but serious comic book phase.

I remembered how we enjoyed collecting and reading comics (especially all those Marvel mutant titles), but 1991-1993 was also a sort of hey-day for treating comics like commodities or investments.  We were mesmerized month after month by the pricing guides as much as we were by the books we were reading, and the publishing companies obviously took advantage of that, will an endless parade of limited editions, special #1’s, hologram covers, foil embossing, and can’t-miss crossovers (like the Death of Superman, and the Valiant “Unity” series).  I can’t remember if we were just ignorant to the fact that they were printing so damned many copies of every issue that they would never be worth anything, or if we just didn’t care.  Either way, it’s probably best I got off the train when I did, about halfway through my freshman year of high school.

Nevertheless, it is nice to pull these things out once in a while and give them another read.  No matter what a waste of time and money our parents thought it was, there was some decent writing and compelling characters in some of these comics…