Something I'd like to do with some regularity around here is to highlight specific issues of Amazing Spider-Man which I own and give you some background and insight about when and how I obtained them. While these posts may contain some general talking points about the issue itself, its plot, its art, its significance in the Spider-Man lexicon, let me be clear that these are not reviews. Think of these posts instead as my collection's biography (and if any of these stories happen to provide you with some biographical information about myself, so be it).
The best way to start an ongoing series of posts about issues from my past woud be with Amazing Spider-Man 63. First published in August 1968, ASM 63 is an utterly unremarkable issue in the series' history -- unless you're a big-time fan of the villain, the Vulture (hey, this issue had TWO Vultures). But for me the acquisition of #63 marked my transition from childhood fandom and adoration of Spider-Man comics to full-on "collector." Without it, I probably never would have decided to go on this crazy journey. That's pretty significant for an otherwise innocuous comic.
I purchased #63 during the days following Christmas, 1994, when I was still in junior high. I picked it up, not because I liked the Vulture or was in-love with the cover, but because it was "old" and it was Spider-Man. What other explanation did you expect from a 13-year-old?
At the time, my comic book "collection" resided in an old empty wine box in my parent's basement (where all nerdy things reside, include bloggers, I would learn from the Internet). They were not protected by bags, boards, or any other kind of preservative material: just a box of comics which I would read, trace, cut pictures out of and generally destroy. The box was filled predominantly with late 1980s/early 1990s copies of Spider-Man, but I was also prone to pick up issues of X-Men, Captain America (another early childhood favorite), Hulk, Iron Man, Superman (yes I'd even buy from the competing DC brand though I'm still a Marvel boy to the end) and who knows what else. As I've said on Chasing Amazing previously, most of my comics were purchased with my weekly $1 allowance, either following church on Saturday evenings or after school when I could convince my brother to walk to the corner store with me.
Around that time, I was an avid baseball card collector and even had a designated shoebox for cards my brother and I would refer to as "valuables" -- cards that were generally worth a few dollars and thereby needed to be preserved in a hard plastic cases so one day I could open my own baseball card shop and sell them. One of my earliest memories of that collection is my brother giving me a Daryl Strawberry 1984 Topps rookie card for my 6th or 7th birthday -- the ultimate gift for a New York Mets fan still in elementary school. I treasured that box of cards, keeping the valuables securely in their cases. The idea that comic books could potentially contain that same level of value was foreign to me.
But by the winter of 1994, comics were becoming a "thing" in my school primarily because of the explosion of artist Todd McFarlane, the comic book artist and toymaker who was all the rage because of his latest comic/pop culture creation, Spawn. To this day, I'll be damned to tell you the backstory of Spawn. He's dead or something and his superpowers are ... yeah, I got nothing.
So while everyone in school was talking about Spawn, I was going, "what about Spider-Man?" and as little kids tend to do with each other, I was answered with a "dummy, Amazing Spider-Man #300."
Amazing Spider-Man #300 ... didn't I already have that? Sorta, but I'll save you the nitty-gritty details on that for another post. However, the relevant point here was McFarlane was responsible for illustrating a run of Amazing Spider-Man, including #300, which as my classmates would reminded me, cost "like a hundred bucks." One hundred bucks for a comic book that came out just a few years ago? That was nuts. For baseball card nerds, that was the equivalent of the 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie.
That was a bit of an "A Ha" moment for me regarding the actually collectability of comics, so I immediately went out and bought a comic price guide to appraise my collection and some protective bags and boards. I found out I didn't have much of value, but in the process, I was completely floored by how much the older ASM issues were going for and realized that there was possibly more financial potential in comics than baseball cards. Little did I know that at that precise moment, the comic book industry was in the midst of an unsustainable growth pattern that led to an over-emphasis on collectability. Publishers were killing off major characters (Superman) or launching titles with multiple covers (X-Men), leading to an overproduction of comics because dealers wanted to meet surging customer demand. And as basic economics go, oversupply leads to an eventual decline in value. So, I, like the rest of the world, got into collecting comics as a way to "get rich," but the vast bulk of current issues I purchased during this period are now practically worthless because there are like two million of them out there.
