Author Archive

My older brother was my first best friend. Since he’s five years older than me, he also was a bit of an authority figure for me too, especially when I was still in elementary school – the go-to babysitter and mentor who I could also spend a Saturday afternoon

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I’m always interested to look back at comic books from 40 or 50 years ago and see what has aged well versus what seems dated for the time. Amazing Spider-Man #10, the second issue in my much bally-hooed 30th birthday haul, features the first appearance of a gang of

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I’ve always taken pride in my memory. I can think back to something that happened in my life 15 or 20 years ago and recount a number of mundane details, like the expressions on people’s faces, what I had for lunch that day, or what song was on the

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If I’ve learned anything from popular culture is that a fictitious bully character has to have a back-story that generates a little bit of sympathy, or at least a better understanding of why the bully bullies. Considering there have been plenty of real-life cases of bullying where they bullies

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Apparently, if you’re a comic book collector looking to complete a run of a specific series, the two best things you can do is start a blog and have a milestone birthday. That way, all of your loved ones will conspire to get you stuff you’re essentially publicly begging

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There are numerous things about Marvel’s newly minted FF series that have made me skeptical, all of which have nothing to do with the actual writing and artwork in the comic book. For one, the premise of the FF, the Future Foundation, came after the death of the Fantastic

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My inability to negotiate is the stuff of legends. And let me tell you, that’s not something as a collector I should go about touting, but it’s true. When I was a little kid, my parents held a garage sale with our neighbors and I was told I could

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Maybe Amazing Spider-Man #664 should have the subtitle “How Eddie Brock Got His Groove Back” because this was the most I’ve been interested in Brock/Anti-Venom in years. As I said during Chasing Amazing’s “Venom Week” a few weeks back, the Venom/Brock character has undergone a number of changes over

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Considering how much pain and suffering Peter Parker has had to endure because of his secret life of Spider-Man, I’m always filled with the warm and fuzzies when something goes right for him. When Marvel transitioned to the Brand New Day story-arc a few years back, the rotating crew

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On more than one occasion, when I’ve used Chasing Amazing as a soap box and stand on to yell about some of the undesirable qualities of the comic book industry – its overuse of “special edition” issues marking new characters, deaths, variant covers, gimmick covers, etc. – I’ve had

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