First Post of 2007

The Wife and I hosted my folks over the weekend for a slightly belated Christmas and some New Year celebrations -- hence the lack of blogging for the past few days. But I'm back online now, running almost exclusively on caffeine and sugar, and ready to keep you entertained. Or at least, briefly occupied with trivialities when you should be getting some work done!

I think gift ideas are somewhat difficult for my relatives. They know me well enough to know my comic book (and other) interests, but I have, at this point, most everything that that I have an active interest in. There's no reason to get me, for example, a copy of Fantastic Four #1 because I already have it. So I try to make things a tad easier by coming up with a list of things that I don't have, and are perhaps a little farther down on my list of "wants" so that I haven't actually spent the money on them myself.

Among the gifts I received this year, for example, I was given...

Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams, volume 2. A hardcover collection of Neal Adams' Batman stories from the 1970s. (I already had volume 1.) Adams was the Batman artist as far as I was concerned back in the day, but I'm not a huge fan of Batman as a character. So it's nice to have a collection of Adams' work (including his covers) without having to wade through various back issue bins for his occassional issue of Detective Comics or Batman or what have you.

(By the way, that isn't a slight against Jim Aparo! For whatever reason(s), though, I didn't have any Aparo Batman comics as a kid.)

I also got the second Challangers of the Unknown Archives. (Again, I already have the first volume.) This is mostly a history lesson for me -- a way I can study what Jack Kirby was doing immediately prior to creating the Marvel Universe.

As you might gather, what I've found, especially in recent years, is that saving the more high-profile, hardcover collections for my wish list works a little better for me. I can focus my attentions (and money) on more obscure, hard-to-find and/or unlikely-to-be collected back issues -- like my relatively recent purchase of a run of Kirby's old 2001: A Space Odyssey -- while leaving the stuff that's easy to track down on Amazon or in some brick-and-mortar store for relatives. The DC stuff is even easier since they tend to do a much better job of stocking their warehouses. That way, even if Aunt Grace has no idea what to look for in her local Barnes and Noble, she can still hand the title to a clerk and they can order it fairly easily.

Of course, what I need to do now is create a wishlist that allows my relatives to check off what they have purchased so I can avoid duplicates! (Yes, I know about Amazon's wish list functionality, but not everything I want can be ordered through them!)

Related Items