The comic books really started piling up around age 11 or 12. After dinner, I’d take armloads into the living room and organize them on the carpet in front of the TV. Dad would be on the couch, and sometimes he’d tease that I really should mark them with values—the unspoken joke being that he’d sell them when I wasn’t looking. I’d roll my eyes.
One day, Dad, a computer systems analyst, wasn’t joking when he said I should track my comics in a database. This sounded fun, and after he got me started, I cataloged much of my collection. Just to be safe, I did not record values.
After college, Dad helped me move to New York. We rented a minivan. Together we stuffed 20+ insanely heavy “long boxes”—around 6,000 comics total—into my tiny Brooklyn apartment. A few years later, desperate for cash, I sold most of them, at once, for about $900 (15 cents each).
Dad died just over 10 years ago. The comics I collect now tend to be ones that remind me of him, or remind me of the part of my life that overlapped with his. They help me keep him close.
Gerry Conway (b. 1952), author Rich Buckler (1949-2017), illustrator Justice League of America #210 New York: DC Comics, January 1983
This is the first comic I remember Dad giving me. It’s funny to imagine him scanning the newsstand, seeing this cover—the anguished faces, the blood-like lettering (“When a World Dies Screaming!”)—and thinking: that one! That’s the one for my four-year-old! It was a different time. But also, it was a familiar product. He’d read Justice League as a kid. In sharing it with me, he was passing on a tradition.
Paul Lamontellerie (fl. 1978), author Philippe Cazamayou (b. 1941), illustrator “Planet of Terror,” in Heavy Metal Vol. II, No. 4 New York: HM Communications, Inc., August 1978
Heavy Metal is essentially the English language version of the French adult comics anthology magazine, Métal Hurlant. What makes it “adult”? Cursing and boobs, mostly. Few if any stories pass the Bechdel Test, but each issue has at least one breathtakingly beautiful piece. I think this one would have resonated with Dad: a man is freed from a soul-crushing “galactic zoo” (read: the corporate grind) by a magic naked lady who apparently doesn’t speak.
Ivan Velez, Jr. (b. 1961), cover artist Gay Comics #15 San Francisco: Bob Ross, Spring 1992
This comic makes me imagine—if I’d actually owned it in 1992—carefully hiding it from Dad. I was 13 then and praying every night for God to change me. The characters here are from Ivan Velez Jr.’s groundbreaking late 80s/early 90s comic for gay teens, Tales of the Closet—which will be featured in the upcoming exhibition I’m co-curating at The New York Public Library: iWepa! Puerto Ricans in the World of Comics.
