Here comes Comics! The Blog Without Fear!

Howdy! Welcome back. I had wanted to get this up earlier today, but we were out last night for dinner with family and blah blah blah, I didn't get to it.

But here it is now. So enjoy!
So, for my latest installment of comic blogs, I wanted to focus on the comic that probably changed the way I thought of comics...for good or ill.
This particular comic fell into my hands back when my great aunt had to be moved into a nursing home. She was living alone in the home that her husband built with his own two hands. I never met him, and I only knew Aunt Joan as the very warm and generous woman that lived in a crazy house. She was a severe pack rat and had TONS of crap lying around, so much that you could barely walk and well, there was really no ability to clean, especially given her age and health, so the house was fairly filthy. My sister and I recognized this, but weren't really too bothered by it probably because we enjoyed visiting. Aunt Joan was an excellent gift giver :)
Eventually she couldn't continue to live there so for a number of weekends we would go and clean. I'm not sure to this day what happened to most of the stuff but we packed all the things that she needed and the rest was left to us to divvy up or get rid of. Among the things I came away with were quite a lot of art supplies (Aunt Joan fancied herself an artist, and she wasn't bad when she was a younger woman) and a handful of comics that we found shoved into a book case.
There weren't many comics but the few that there were turned out to be pretty nice. I'll show you one or two of them as we go along. But the comic that was my favorite then and still holds a place in my heart now is...


I didn't think too much about the comics when I got em, I was happy to have some "new" books to read and I stuck them into "The Father Collection" for safe keeping. This one particular book I read over and over again. I even carried it around with me to school a few times.
[Commencing embarrassing story...now]....and attempted to get the other kids to nickname me Daredevil just like they did to Mat Murdock. Of course Mat's nickname was in irony and meant as a taunt, I was just asking people to call me Daredevil. So yeah, that didn't work out so well and I dropped it pretty quickly.

If you don't know much about Daredevil, he was struck blind as a teenager in the process of saving an old man from an oncoming truck. The truck was transporting some kind of toxic waste, which was apparently not secured very well because when the truck swerved to avoid the old man it lost a drum which smashed and splashed right into Mat's face.
He lost his eyesight, but came to realize that all his other senses were heightened to superhuman levels. He also developed a radar sense, which allows him to "see" 360 degrees around himself. When his father, a washed up boxer just trying to scrape out a living and raise his son with all the opportunities he never had, is killed Mat puts on a costume and brings the thugs to justice. There's a bit more to the story than that, but that's his origin in a nutshell. It's a damn good origin story and while I don't read Daredevil much anymore I'll always have a soft spot for him.

I eventually realized that the book was a #1 and therefore must be worth something. I started to look at the comics I had differently. Around this time I was starting to pop into my local shop more and more often, often enough that I started to see the shop as kind of crummy. Luckily I had also met another friend that got me to go with him to NEC in Harvard Sq. and the next thing I knew I had the fever and was there every Wednesday.
I eventually decided that if I'm going to be serious about this thing, then I should treat my dad's comics a little better and get them their own bags and boards. Since they weren't in mint condition I wrote them off as mostly worthless but sentimental. As I mentioned in my first comic post it wasn't until recently that I really saw what I had.

This book in particular I knew was something I would normally never be able to add to my collection, so I am pretty proud to have it. I stopped looking at comics as an investment, now I look at them as art suitable for framing as well as reading, instead of things that are kept in a dark box away from the light.