Another Comic Book Post

Been a while, eh true believers? I haven’t been keeping up with my reading/purchases, much less my (rare) comic blogging, but I’m closing in on finishing my back issue collection and thought it bore announcing.

As some of you may know, I’m a Spider-Man enthusiast. I started reading Amazing Spider-Man in 1992 thanks to a door-to-door magazine subscription salesperson — some student raising money for their school. We took pity on him, and so I started reading comic books. I got serious a few years later and proceeded to buy up all the core titles (Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, and the short-lived Sensational Spider-Man) as well as a host of limited series. I stopped reading in 1999, when the powers that be at Marvel Comics decided to reboot all the titles, starting back at issue #1 for everything. The renumbering didn’t last long, but it seemed like a good time to get out — most of my favorite artists and writers, the ones who had carried the books through the brilliant mid-’90s pre-“Clone Saga” run and onward through the Ben Reilly years — had long since left the books.

So, when I got serious about comics for a second time in college, the first thing I did was start buying up missing issues of Spidey books. My mom threw out a few over the years and I hadn’t always been on top of everything the way I am now, and so there was a lot to pick up. But now, I’m down to my final run: seven assorted Spider-Man annuals and one issue of Web of Spider-Man, and then I’ll have every single core Spidey comic book printed between 1993 and 1999. I have a fair amount of the mini-series as well, according to the very helpful Spiderfan.org, though apparently there were like another eight or so that I had no idea existed. I’m considering going back a year and buying up the 1992 runs of Spectacular, Web of and just-plain Spider-Man to sync up with my Amazing run, but if I don’t, I’m literally inches away here.

Basically, dudes, this is really fucking exciting. I’m going to sit down in a few weeks and read seven straight years of Spider-Man continuity without a single gap. It’s going to be awesome.

(I also am just about finished with my runs of Thunderbolts and New Warriors. I’m a nerd.)