Now I've been a fan of comics since I was a wee lad. I'm not sure if I can clearly recall what my first comic was, it was either Sonic the Hedgehog or Deadpool. Yeah, doesn't that just explain a lot.

I wasn't very good at collecting them. I'd read them and they'd inevitably get torn up in a pile of trash I'd have in my room. I wasn't very good at organizing for most of my life. I learned later on that I very much do enjoy organizing, but never had what felt like the right storage for most everything I liked to collect.

I tried to start a modest Superman collection when I was in elementary school. The Death and Return of Superman had just wrapped up and I was super excited for the series, but my Dad didn't like buying them for me when they'd inevitably get torn up when I had nowhere to put them.

Also, I think he disapproved of how dark and edgy comics had become. He had a pretty great collection of comics back in the 60s that his mother threw out the moment he moved out, and from the sounds of it probably would have resolved all our financial problems a few times over.

But I don't collect things as an investment. I just like having them, and reading them. I don't read them as much as I would like to, but the sunny day indoors reading comics comes around now and again.

In high school, I got really into collecting Sonic the Hedgehog. I had read a few issues when I was younger, and got into it since it was the cheapest comic at Al's Comics and I was really into Sonic Adventure 2 at the time. It was the relative tail end of Ken Pender's run, which has a shall we say mixed reception among the fans (and leave it at that). I did very much enjoy it, though many of his later decisions have me shaking my head in hindsight. I have most of the early series in storage and I hope to see it again someday, and I currently possess a big chunk of Ian Flynn's run before the cosmic retcon (and you know how I feel about those, though I understand the pragmatic and stupid reality behind the decision).

Since back in those days I've built quite a collection. A couple times. I got really into comics in Arizona, starting collecting in earnest right at what I consider the beginning of the end of the dark age of comics. Countdown to Final Crisis had just come out (and I skipped it 'cause I was just beginning my foray into feminism too) and One More Day was just around the corner.

Charlie's Comic Books was just around the corner from me and the proprietor (hope you guessed his name) was extremely knowledgeable and read a copy of every single comic to come through his shop. He mentioned one time he'd spent some time in prison and something about killing a guy but he was one of the nicest, friendliest, most helpful shop owners I'd ever met. When my bike was stolen, he volunteered his own for me.

When I left Arizona, I gave about half my collection to various friends around me, keeping only my absolute favorites. It ended up being a huge sack of hundreds of comics, many from the dollar and quarter bins around town. I've since rebuilt to well above what I had before.

I'd like to talk about a few of my favorites.

So when I started seriously collecting comics in the mid 2000's, the Justice League cartoon show was just wrapping up. I loved it, and like most fans, I became enamored with a character voiced by Jeffrey Combs (of Re-Animator fame) called the Question.

The Question is originally a Steve Ditko character made for Charlton Comics who were later acquired by DC. Steve Ditko is most famous as the artist who created Spider-Man (and a whole lot of others), but became a recluse after being screwed by every comics manager in the business (especially Stan Lee). Incidentally, Steve Ditko was a bit of a crackpot, being really really into Randian Objectivism, and creating the Question (and the personally owned Mr. A, who is a walking talking Randian tract). You can probably guess I'm not a fan of Ayn Rand, but I'll save that ramble for another day.

In the 80's, DC launched the Question series headed by writer Denny O'Neil (himself a great comics veteran by that time, but really became a legend with this series). Denny O'Neil reimagined the character on a spiritual quest of sorts to expand beyond his conservative thinking, and it drew on many zen texts among other spiritual and philosophical resources.

In the newsletter at the end of every issue, he would talk a little about the book that inspired a bit of that month's writing, and they were always good reads.

The series itself is extremely gritty. It wasn't afraid to dive into dark themes, and featured stories that often left me pensive and sometimes even straight up depressed, but always with constructive thoughts. But man oh man is it bloody, and often graphic.

I have a complete set of the entire run, including the handful of issues from the sequel series with the same writer, Question Quarterly. It's definitely my "good taste" showoff collection.

So you know I love Star Wars. I love everything else nerdy, so it can't be a surprise. When I got into comics, Dark Horse had just started putting out a whole new line of Star Wars comics after concluding their previous series. I collected two of them: Knights of the Old Republic and Legacy.

So I never had a chance to play Knights of the Old Republic. I felt the fomo very very hard during high school not being able to play it, and it only worsened when the computer I got right after couldn't run it. The comics are not an adaptation of the games, instead focusing on a new character, Zayne, a Jedi Apprentice who ends up in deep shit.

It was written by John Jackson Miller, who cut his teeth on this series, and was a really fun adventure that kept me hooked the whole way through.

The other was Star Wars: Legacy, which was a big deal when it premiered. At the time, the Star Wars Expanded Universe decided to push its timeline forward with Legacy. Keep in mind that this was before the Disney buyout, and there were no forthcoming movies or shows. The Clone Wars series was the only thing in the mainstream. So fans were watching the whole enterprise carefully.

It was a two-pronged project. There was a book series launched as a part of it that detailed the doings of the Star Wars cast after the long running New Jedi Order book series, taking place about 40 years after Episode IV. The other part of Legacy was the comics series set about one hundred years after that. Together they formed the Legacy Era. No potential for confusion at all.

I was never into the novels very much despite multiple tries, but it's important to remember that the bookreaders formed the bulk of the fandom at the time. Let me tell you, this comic was so popular. Everyone was so curious what they would do with it, with Dark Horse teasing new characters and new concepts (alien stormtroopers, a separate non-sith empire, a whole army of sith, just for starters) for months. It featured a Skywalker descendent who walked a dark lonely path as a pirate, smuggler, and drug addict, to really go with that whole darker and edgier theming.

It was written by John Ostrander (creator of the Suicide Squad) and Jan Duursema (herself a Star Wars comics veteran and creator of Aayla Secura and Quinlan Vos, who have both made it into video mediums since). It leaned very dark, starting with a new Jedi purge, and an imperial civil war.

All the characters were sexy and morally grey. It is an excellent example of the peak of the dark age. Lots of violence (non-graphic), lots of darkness. It was a ton of fun all the way through.

I have all the issues of both series, but only have the cap-off miniseries for Legacy. Knights of the Old Republic: War, is something I did not enjoy, while Legacy: War was the best ending they could give us at the time. There was a sequel series, Star Wars Legacy vol. 2, following Han Solo's descendent, but it ended only a few issues in when Disney bought the rights to Star Wars and threw the entire EU out. Something I felt was harsh but necessary at the time, but now feel was really stupid when they clearly had no plan and are now helping themselves to the old EU to keep the franchise afloat (ffs they ripped off Dark Empire of all things; they were that desperate).

It ran for a few years, but feels like a single warm summer memory.

This is the jewel of my collection. I'm only missing about a dozen issues out of roughly 140. The Warlord was launched in 1975 created by Mike Grell (a legend from Green Lantern and Green Arrow) and is an epic sword and sorcery series; DC's answer to Marvel's Conan the Barbarian.

Earlier I mentioned watching the Justice League cartoon in the mid 2000's. One episode near the end of the series featured the world of Skartaris and characters from the Warlord. I was very curious, and the first issue of the Warlord was surprisingly common in dollar bins around Tucson, so one day I decided to give it a shot. It really appealed to the person I was at the time.

The premise concerns Air Force pilot Travis Morgan who crashes through a portal to another world and winds up in a hollow earth sort of situation where the people live in sweltering jungles under a constant sun. It is a world ruled by magic and the sword, but Morgan has grit and tenacity and something his enemies don't: a .44 AutoMag pistol.

One of the great things about the series was its early adoption of action girls and strong minorities in the cast. Since it's barbarian fiction, nobody is wearing clothes, and so it comes off at times as a male power fantasy, it is one of the more innocent ones that sought to empower its characters of marginalized identities with mixed results by today's standards.

The series ran for over a decade, switching writers but always coming back to Mike Grell. DC tried to reboot the series in 2006 with a new creative team but it failed miserably. In the 2010s, Mike Grell was tapped to do a sequel series that closed out the story of Travis Morgan.

I haven't collected any issues of the new series yet, and I am very close to finishing the classic series, something I've been slow going about it for almost two decades now. One of the great challenges is how many issues there are, most of them aren't that expensive, but keeping track of what I have is a nightmare. More than a couple times did I discover that I already had an issue that I found in some dusty bin somewhere. Having the League Of Comic Geeks app on my phone pretty much resolved that issue, so now whenever I find an old box of comics out in rural Ohio, I whip it out and usually find a couple issues I still need. They aren't quite as common in dollar bins as they used to be, but aren't exactly hard to find if you want to look for them.

I've read a lot of it, but not all of what I have. Too many times while reading it would I end up on a cliffhanger without its storyline being resolved because of the random nature of the issues I would find. I'm waiting until I have the entire series, then will take a few days off from work, pop a weed gummy and just read it all the way through. It's an old comic, so there's going to be a lot more word bubbles than you find these days, but I look forward to it. Depending on how this summer goes, I might just order all the missing issues.

So yeah, comics are one of my favorite mediums. I sometimes practice drawing with the hopes of drawing some crude webcomics someday. Just to be a part of the experience.

In any case, this is just a fraction of my collection, doesn't even touch on the pile of graphic novels I have. It's definitely a very precious part of my vaulted treasure horde.