Originally Posted by
MatchstickJohnny
Hey There! Hi There! Ho There!
Quick Intro: MatchstickJohnny is my screen name. The funny thing is my name is not even Johhny. Kind of a rip off aint it? I actually sort of randomly selected it years ago after reading Claremont and Larroca's Fantastic Four Alternate Negative Zone story (issue 17-18). I have always been a Marvel Comics reader but have enough DC knowledge to survive. Without telling my age, my Marvel Comics history began with Marvel Tales Spider-Man and when I decided to start collecting comics he seemed to be the obvious choice to collect. I started around the time Secret Wars was ending and Secret Wars II was beginning. I missed the introduction and the ending of the black suit (ASM 252-258) but was able to buy them as back issues from this incredible wonderland of a comic store that sold back issues! It was 1984 and a whole new world had just opened up for me. I began building my back issue collection but also picked up new releases as well. And the rest is history…..
Ok, so I have been giving some serious thought about going totally collected editions. I am no stranger to collected editions. I own some that are penciled by my favorite artists but don’t really collect the collected editions. With these I already own the “floppy” edition. Lately, I have been getting TPBs of titles I have not read mostly because I did not like the artist. As you can guess, I missed out on a lot of good titles and stories because I was collecting by artist at the time. I feel like I have matured a bit ( a bit) and have become more of a reader these days. There is so much out there and like my early days of comic collecting there are volumes of collected back issues. My collector side has to chill and be OK with not owning it in its first printing comic format.
So far so good with comics I missed. This past spring I scooped up the TPBs of Hickman’s new Avengers/Avengers run and recently got his Fantastic Four/FF volumes in TPB. One thing I learned with collecting the collected editions is they (Marvel) will most likely combine the five or six issue arc TPB into a much larger collected format. Waiting pays off. For example, I was going to pick up Secret Warriors Volumes 1-6 but saw they were coming out with them all in two volumes.
I am not interested in the Omnibus format at this point. I mostly read my comics lying down and feel that an Omnibus would be too awkward to read that way. I respect the Omnibus with its larger page count and larger format. I am just not ready to go that way right now.
As far as going totally collected, meaning not buying new comics on a weekly basis but instead waiting for the collected format, I have been giving it some serious thought. I want to continue reading titles and artists I like but they will all be collected at some point so why not wait for the collected? I have already done the “research” and mapped out the perfect jumping off point. Extraordinary X-Men will be collected 1-5 and released sometime in May (according to B&N). I already got issues 1-5 (issue 6 just dropped this past week) so it seems like a good point to stop getting Extraordinary X-Men on a monthly basis right? There are about ten other titles I have been getting on a monthly basis. I think I can do this. I am actually a little excited about it. If it doesn’t work out I can always get the back issue floppies like I did during my early collecting days.
Thanks for listening.