Meet the Geeks

Steve Ditko. Despite his most famous co-creator credit, the creation of Spider-Man, Ditko never really seemed to really get his due. At Marvel, there was Stan Lee, almost single-handedly writing most of their books, and there was Jack Kirby who was drawing most of the titles. Ditko had always been “the other guy”. When I started reading comics, Spider-Man had already gone through Romita Sr, and Andru on the art chores, and Stan Lee wasn’t even writing the book anymore. I was introduced to John Byrne and Chris Claremont’s run on the team-up Spider-Man book called Marvel Team-Up. Sure I had read Spider-Man’s first appearance a bunch of times in various re-prints, but I had largely been unaware of Ditko or his influence. I was aware of Stan Lee and his larger than life writing ability, as it was often talked about reverently by everyone in the industry. Because I had been groomed on John Byrne’s Spider-Man, I was very receptive to John Buscema and John Romita Sr’s version of the hero. An...

How things have changed. When I started collecting comics as a very young wee lad, part of the joy of it was re-reading my collection. There was this glee to searching through the long boxes and pulling out an entire series and diving back into it. After a while, as the collection grew larger and larger, finding a particular run became more difficult. I started cataloging my collection, keeping like-minded series in the same longbox until that series grew too large and I would need to rejig the storage of what series was kept where. I have a complex coding system to finding my comics, estimating their value and keeping track of my collection. Trades changed that. As sales of trades (collected editions of story arc in paperbook or hardcover format) grew, so did the number of them being put out. At a certain point, most of my favorite runs I had collected were being represented in tradebook format. And here is where collecting comics changed for me. In the old days, I wo...