![\"It's](\"\/blog\/images\/uxmn_137.jpg\")
Things sort of exploded onwards from there. I got blown away by Claremont\/Byrne’s Dark Phoenix saga, and though the series went downhill from there (at least until the Paul Smith art days), it was still something I read avidly.<\/p>\nSo, there I was in college, comic books readily available, a check book, and only a long bike ride keeping me from going there every day to buy more.<\/p>\n
Well, the checkbook wasn’t that <\/i>full …<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I had my boxes of comics in my room — cardboard booze boxes, cut in half. I was quite popular among my geeky friends, though I really tried to keep from loaning the things out. I knew I’d never see them again …<\/p>\n
Things sort of exploded onwards from there. I got blown away by Claremont\/Byrne’s Dark Phoenix saga, and though the series went downhill from there (at least until the Paul Smith art days), it was still something I read avidly.<\/p>\n
(A tip of the hat to Jay Shayer<\/a>, btw, for a fine site that has lots of X-Men and Thor info on it.)<\/p>\n I continued to go to the Upland comics store for a couple of years, then it closed. This was to become a recurring theme in my comic-buying life. There was another shop down at the Pomona Mall that I went to for the rest of college, and a few years thereafter. Eventually (this is down the road a few years), I found a place in San Dimas that would actually do comic pulls from the Diamond list. What a concept — pre-ordering comics, <\/i>rather than hoping I spotted everything I wanted to buy! Amazing!<\/p>\n So, anyway, I started buying comics. And, eventually, bags and comic boxes. <\/p>\n And I went to the San Diego Comic Con a few times. It was a lot easier when I was in California, natch. But it was wild, seeing the comic companies, the panels, the actual Writers of Stuff (not to mention artists). Boxes of back issues. Books. Videos. <\/p>\n It was all so cool, I volunteered for a number of years. Which gave me a chance to meet folks like Jack Kirby and Rob Paulsen (Pinkie). And Joe Straczynski, of course. It also netted me some faboo t-shirts, taught me valuable lessons on crowd control and how not to set up lines, and showed me first-hand the mania that was Image Comics (bleah). (On the other hand, that was also the era that I began my first novel, which is still unfinished. So not all the skills got all that honed.)<\/p>\n Comics collecting proceeded apace. When I moved into the Phillips Ranch condo. one of the first tasks was building a set of mongo shelves in the downstairs closet onto which to stack the boxes. <\/p>\n My 3-month “business trip” up to Martinez caused no end of collecting difficulty. Margie, bless her then-only-girlfriend heart, still stopped by my comic store to pick up things (even as she went and took care of my condo and cat). But I was still missing things.<\/p>\n Fortunately, I found a nice little comic store in Walnut Creek, near my hotel. And I discovered the wonders of trade paperbacks. And I had plenty of disposable income, and absolutely nothing to do in my evenings. It wasn’t just cases of Napa wine in the back of the car that weighted it down on the trip back south when the assignment ended.<\/p>\n When we moved to Colorado, the comics sat in storage (mercifully) for some time, though of course I had a year to gather up new ones in the interim before we got the house. I discovered Mile High Comics <\/a>locally, and found there was a store right in downtown Denver that I could visit on my lunch hour. (They’re not downtown any more, alas — but, then, neither am I.)<\/p>\n But the joy of working with Mile High was that, when I moved my account to another store, my pull list went with it. And I could (after a while) maintain my pull list online, which was handy.<\/p>\n![\"Simonson](\"\/blog\/images\/thor_350.jpg\")
On the other hand, there was plenty else to read. One series that particularly stands out from the era was Walt Simonson’s work on Thor. <\/i>Incredible. He brought back the majesty of the Kirby days, but leavened it with plenty of actual Nordic sorts of stuff. Best Thor ever. His Ragnarok was the best of all, and that shadowy figure hammering out DOOM among distant stars was jaw-droppingly fabulous. (Some, but not all, of the Simonson Thor work has been collected in a couple <\/a>of volumes <\/a>by Marvel. They are worth the investment.)<\/p>\n![\"Required](\"\/blog\/images\/blogathon_mug.jpg\")
[We pause for a moment, as Kitten has made her way downstairs and made a bee-line for the bags of M&Ms. So it’s time to get her set up, and get me some coffee in my cool Blogathon cup<\/a>.]<\/p>\n
\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/uxmn_170.jpg\")
One comics-related side note was that in ’83 or so, I kept my pal Dave Sutherland up-to-date on various comics while he was in the wilds of Costa Rica on a semester abroad, by transcribing various issues of X-Men<\/i> and Thor<\/i>. I wish I still had some of those transcriptions, because it was a lot of fun, and did some goodly honing of my writing skills. <\/p>\n