Sunday, December 22, 2013

Metropolis - Chapter 38 AND Crossovers Killed my Childhood Love of Comics

Hiya

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The Sad tale of one of the reasons I stopped collecting comics as a kid.

I used to collect comics in the 80's.  Comics were pretty big back then (in numbers if not in dollars).  I didn't have a lot of money as a kid but I scraped enough to get two titles a month.  The first was G.I. Joe by Marvel Comics.  The second title was the "The New Mutants".



New Mutants 27 - Bill SienkiewiczIn retrospect, it was very weird for a kid who collected G.I. Joe to start collecting a comic like "The New Mutants".  Especially considering the style of art that it had.  The artist was Bill Sienkiewicz.    It was... weird.  Check out a few of his covers here (#17 to 31).  I have nothing but fondness for his issues of "The New Mutants".  I look at comic books today and I wonder where have all the Bill Sienkiewiczes gone?

Uncanny X-Men 196 - Wolverine - Shadow - John Romita, Terry AustinAt any rate...  Reading "The New Mutants" introduced me to "The Uncanny X-Men".  I really wanted to collect it, but my young mind couldn't rationalize collecting something if I couldn't get back issues.  I was hung up on completion.  I didn't know too much about comics, but I knew that trying to get all issues of a comic that was up to #196 was going to be hard and very, very expensive.

My first X-Men Issue was #196, a crossover from Secret Wars II which was a limited series I decided to collect.  I continued to collect "The Uncanny X-Men" until #258; an "Acts of Vengeance" crossover.  

Sigh.

The crossover killed my love of comics.  It seemed like everything was a crossover.  If I didn't want to feel like I was missing something then I had to buy a seemingly endless list of crossover titles.  Add to that the numerous related titles that suddenly sprang up: X-Factor, Excalibur, Wolverine!  Three more titles to the three that I was already collecting.

It all became too much.  Too much time.  Too much money.  Too many titles.  I hung in for a while but my comic book buying fizzled out completely by early 1990s.

I missed it terribly.  I didn't buy a comic again for almost 20 years.