I'm reading an old Robin comic where Tim Drake becomes Robin. It is funny, because I remember my mom showing me a newspaper article where it was announced that a new Robin was being introduced in the comics. My mom continues to send me newspaper and magazine articles about the stuff I am interested in to this day.
A few years back, another new Robin was introduced when Stephanie Brown became Robin for a short time in the Robin comics. I remember reading those as well.
And a couple of years later, a new Robin was introduced as Batman's son, Damian. So, all things counted up, I've lived through 3 Robins in my life. Actually, four if you count Jason Todd's time, which wasn't too long before I started reading the Batman comics on the regular.
My early memories of comics come from my uncle giving my family two long boxes of comics. I'm not sure what prompted the giving, but I got in to them big time. There were Uncanny X-men comics, some Batman comics including Dark Knight Returns issue #3, Wally West Flash books, and Akira comics. I still have a small amount of those comics still in my possession. I'm not sure 100% about what happened to the rest, but I did keep the X-men books since I was big in to them at the time.
Funny, I always wondered if I would ever find out what happens to Batman after issue #3 of the Dark Knight Returns series. It wouldn't be long before I had the trade, and can now even watch the animated movie that was adapted from the book.
I remember walking to a card shop called Holy Cow in Fairview Heights. It was in a shopping center that was next to a laundromat that and a book store called Polly's Paperback Exchange. In that laundromat, I remember playing on some old school arcade machines. I also remember a guy and a woman having a conversation about the hole the guy had in his neck. It apparently came from smoking, and they joked about putting things down the hole. It was long enough ago and they were old enough that I can assume that they are now dead, which is a weird feeling in and of itself. There are random people who are burned in to my memory as a child that are now dead. So weird.
At the card shop that acted as a comic shop as well, they had baseball cards in the front of the store. I would go there to get ball cards, and remember buying a lot of Archie cards as well when I was in to that series. In the back room, almost like a closet, were the comics. I remember seeing X-men comics that would be worth a fortune back there. They were high on the wall towards the ceiling. There was a TV in the corner, I think, that was never on. It was as if comics were a half thought from the people running the shop. I visited the shop years later and it wasn't there anymore. I imagine that the business probably closed after the baseball card market and comic book market collapsed in the 90s.
There was a comic shop that I visited in Belleville that was a small walk up the road from where we lived. Fantasy Books. It was there that I saw Magic cards for the first time, and got to witness the beginning of the 2099 books from Marvel. Batman was going through Knightfall, and a new Transformers comic was coming out with a gatefold cover. I read the book at the local Walgreens that had a comic rack next to the magazines. I would walk there to get some things for my mom and then would read the comics for a while.
I remember having an allowance or earning some money and would start to buy my own comics each month. I'm not sure where the funds came from, but to the comic shop is where it would be spent.
Fast forward to moving to BloNo, and there were two comic shops across the street from each other that I would visit. Acme Comics was the first place, and Metropolis comics was the second. I made Metropolis my regular shop until I went to college and the guy at Acme, Jim, convinced me to just go to his shop. I would visit the two anyway, and it was my big decision that I switch comic shops without telling the other one. I found out years later that I had a huge stack of comics waiting for me at the other one until they gave up and just shelved them knowing I wouldn't go back.
Acme was my comic shop for years. When I moved to Chicago for a short time, I stopped collecting comics because I didn't have the funds to buy them. It was almost a year before I had the job and funds to start collecting again. I went back to Acme, and it was my shop for a while longer.
I haven't bought a single issue of a comic since I moved here to Austin. Acme was my store, and it needed my help to survive as a small business. I wouldn't trade my time going in to that shop for anything. It was...wonderful. But as I got older, my need for comics in a monthly kind of style drifted away. I miss Acme, and I miss going in to the shop every Wednesday on my lunch break to collect the week's new books. That was the habit for a different me. The me now is busy trying to sell all his books on Ebay. The comic experience for me now comes in the ability to buy collections at a time that can be put on a bookshelf. the idea of lugging around long boxes everywhere just doesn't fill me with excitement anymore. I do have a small stack of comics that I am saving for myself to have, but it is a short box holding about 100 books. Some of those books are the same X-men comics from years ago that my uncle gave to me.
I'm down to four long boxes left, out of the 10 or 11 I moved down here with. The books left in the long boxes include Batman, Detective Comics, and a complete run of Wally West Flash books. These are the books I held on to until the end because they mean the most to me. My two big superheroes are the Flash and Batman, and that comes from the comics my uncle gave me all those years ago. I started collecting them after I started college and scoured the discount bins for many of the issues. I didn't even complete the Flash comics until a year or two ago. There was something about the hunt for them that was entertaining, and re-reading the Flash books about 3 years ago with the few issues missing was something I enjoyed immensely.
I could get digital copies of just about all the comics I have left to sell for something around $2 an issue. If I win the lottery, that is what I plan on doing. For now, I'm selling them to be able to have some cash saved for whatever happens next in Austin. I've enjoyed the books and the hunts for the books so much. Some day I'll have a giant library, and I'll have all the comics on bookshelves that go from floor to ceiling. That are all organized in a way that makes sense to me. But for now it is time for someone else to enjoy them. It is time to pass them along so that someone else can get the same joy that I had from them as a kid, and that joy continues long in to their adulthood.
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