Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (15) - Every Part of the Buffalo

As should be glaringly obvious, once I started acquiring comic book collector supplies, like longboxes and mylar sleeves and whatnot, I wholeheartedly committed myself to the idea of having not just a personal comics collection but a large and diverse, deep and wide comics collection. The fact that this was happening in the fall of ‘91/spring of ‘92 was advantageous for a couple of reasons. My family moved across town around that time, which put us much closer (within walking distance) to my hometown Friendly Local Comics Shop. My high school girlfriend also went off to her freshman year of college at that time, which meant I had way more free time to fill with comics, and few other ways to spend whatever money I had.

But most of all, Marvel was putting out a lot of comics which hit me in just the right way. A lot of people have bemoaned comics companies’ modern tendency to make everything a crossover which means you have to pick up multiple titles, some of which you weren’t regularly following, in order to get the whole story. This is crass and bottom-line-oriented, I admit, but in 1991-92 I was a sucker for it. Infinity Gauntlet was just one example. A few months after that, the Avengers started another outerspace adventure called Operation: Galactic Storm (ah, memories of when the USA’s military flexing in the Middle East was nothing short of a miraculous source of jingoistic pride) and this crossover was NINETEEN PARTS LONG including not just Avengers but also West Coast Avengers and the solo titles Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Wonder Man and Quasar. And boy did I pick up a lot of those, and dutifully bag and file them alphabetically in my growing back catalog. Even Quasar!

(Quasar is, superficially, a Marvel riff on Green Lantern, in that he has a gizmo - quantum wristbands rather than a ring - which allows him to do the make-any-construct schtick. Which means I was predisposed to like Quasar from the get-go. Here I will note I was regularly collecting Green Lantern during this period as well, along with other random DC issues here and there, from Batman to The Demon. My version of deep and wide didn’t really extend as far as the proliferation of lower-tier publishers in the 90’s like Dark Horse or Valiant or Malibu, but it did encompass both of the Big Two. This will become extra relevant next post.)

Additionally, Marvel still managed to launch new titles pretty regularly, and by fully embracing the concept of collecting I didn’t just want to have a bunch of old comics, I wanted to consider my collection an investment with certain high-value items, including those #1 issues that would become more and more sought-after over time (or so the theory went at the time). The Infinity Gauntlet mini-series begat an ongoing Warlock and the Infinity Watch series, and I purchased #1. I had never been a Punisher fan, but I knew he was crazy popular and so when he got his third(!!!) ongoing title, I mindfully picked up Punisher War Zone #1.

Meanwhile over on the oddly self-contained mutant side of things, over the span of summer ‘91 Marvel brought out X-Force #1 (replacing the cancelled New Mutants title) to much fanfare and a second X-Men title (the long-runninng decades-old title was Uncanny X-Men, the new one was simply X-Men) to even greater fanfare, such that at the time and for a long while afterwards (maybe to this day?) X-Men #1 was the highest-selling comic book. Of. All. Time. With five variant covers! And reader, I admit, I bought all five.

All of the above are examples which stand out in my mind but really the main point is that the floodgates had opened and I just went to the FLCS at least once a week and almost never left empty-handed. As fate would have it even though my parents moved across town at the end of my junior year of high school, as mentioned, they moved again (because Dad had gotten a job transfer) towards the middle of the summer after I graduated high school, and for the few weeks I spent in that new town before departing for college, I knew no one except my little bro and had nothing to do except go the new FLCS and buy whatever they had (or so it felt). And then came college … to be continued ...