I’m not a collector, although I have a nearly 800-book collection of graphic novels. The completist gene just isn’t hard-wired into me. I guess it’s easy to assume everyone involved in comics is a rabid collector with one or more want lists always within easy reach, but what stays on my bookshelves has always been a fluid proposition, both because of my tendency to try to keep my library pared down to the bare essentials, and because of the occasional purge, performed either to make space or generate revenue, or both.

I especially am not a collector of old comics. I love old comic book stories, let’s be clear — my Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko contains over a thousand pages of half-century old comics that I love reading. My modest collection of EC Archives hardcovers contains stories a decade older than that. But generally I don’t collect floppy comics as such.

I hate how the ink fades over time on the ones printed on shitty paper, which of course is 99 percent of those published before 1980. I hate the cat-pee smell many old, moldering comics seem to generate after a while. I am not a comic book collector, although I have probably 2000 or so single issues at the current time. I am always trying to whittle away at that number, because I hate the stacks of white shortboxes that I try to camouflage under a table in my bedroom. I hate that the word “shortboxes,” which isn’t even a word, is a part of my lexicon.

Despite all that, I do have a few old comics that, for one reason or another, I have come to possess and enjoy having. There’s an issue of Piracy that I got for twenty bucks at a comic book show a few years ago, the cover by genius artist Bernard Krigstein is one of the finest in the history of the comics medium, and its oppressive solitude resonates with me unlike any other piece of comic art I have ever encountered. That twenty dollars is the most I think I have paid for a single, floppy comic book in my entire adult life. I just love that cover and had to possess it. It’s in a black plastic comic book holder that rests on the wall above my bed. I wish I had a better place for it, and a more attractive frame, but spending 75 or 100 dollars for conservation framing right now isn’t in the family budget.

A digression: A few years ago, when I was making the highest salary I likely ever will in my life, working for an NPR-affiliated radio station in Albany, New York, it seemed like I was buying up original comic art and getting it framed with conservation framing techniques (to preserve the condition of the art and prevent fading) on a near-weekly basis. The guy at the frame shop loved that the morning news guy for his favourite radio station was one of his regular clients, and he routinely commented on how cool the artwork was that I had him encase in protective glass and metal frames. An Eddie Campbell page from From Hell, bought from Top Shelf Productions during their legendary fire sale in the early part of the previous decade. A full-page headshot of The Midnighter by Bryan Hitch, one of the pages from the 12 issues of The Authority by Warren Ellis, Hitch, Paul Neary and Laura Martin that I hold in such high regard. Both those pages are long gone now, sold off when money was tight and I needed groceries and rent more than I needed beautiful and significant pages of comic book artwork hanging in attractive frames on the walls of my home. I’m not a collector, not of comic books, anyway, but the memory of giving up those pages hurts like a toothache all these years later.

But we were talking about the old comics in my “comic book collection.” I have a copy of X-Men #53, the very first Marvel Comics work by artist Barry Windsor-Smith. It’s a beautiful, Very Fine copy, and he personally signed it for me a few years ago, very likely destroying its value as a collectible to anyone other than me, to whom it is absolutely priceless. I recently traded for copies of Conan #1 and #9 drawn by BWS as well, and that Conan #1 felt like a real Holy Grail moment, given how much Barry’s art means to me, and how important a comic book that it is. I’ve made it kind of a back-burner goal for the rest of my comics-buying life to try to acquire the entire BWS run of Conan, because the Dark Horse reprints have just about the worst reproduction imaginable, and in fact are an abomination to the work of one of the artform’s greatest living artists.

I have the four issues of Batman that comprise the Year One storyline by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli. I forget the issue numbers, that’s how weak my Nerd-Fu is (oh, all right, I think they’re #404-407, do I win something?), but I do love those four issues and the sublime meeting of Frank Miller’s soon-to-fade writing prowess and David Mazzucchelli’s growth as a comic book artist. Frankly, in the wake of the somewhat disappointing Asterios Polyp, I wonder if the period from Year One to the short stories in Rubber Blanket weren’t Mazzucchelli’s peak as an artist? I hope I’m wrong, but at least, if this is so, his fall from grace is nowhere as embarrassing as Frank Miller’s decline into creative senility.

I have an issue of Cannon by Wally Wood that I think is dated 1969? It was clearly created for comic book readers in the military, and is one of the strangest comics I have ever owned. It’s an anthology, including a hard-boiled soft-porn Cannon story and some other short stories obviously meant to spin off into marketable properties all their own. I got it from a back issue box for five bucks, and having all those pages of Wood artwork in such an odd package is a nice little object to possess.

Writing this, of course, has made me realize just how much I do cherish the few comic books that I own that really are important to me. I’m much more a comic book reader than a “fan,” (a word I despise), but maybe, just maybe, there’s a little recessive collector gene in me after all.

— Alan David Doane

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