Well, look at that... huh.

When I was younger, there were things I cared about acquiring which now I wouldn't seriously consider were they to stop my my house and say, "hi! I'd be a neat thing for you to have," much less having to go out and buy. 

This isn't to say they're frivolous, but rather that my tastes, and priorities, have changed. I still hold on to kind of a lot of these things. Should I get rid of them? Probably. Will I? Probably not any time soon.

I like having them, and I still value the experience of having acquired them. I like sharing them. Like I'm about to do.

A bunch of these things are comic books, holy crap. I use a service called Stash My Comics (stop by, say hi!). Over the course of this past year, I've been cataloging my holdings, and, according to my wife, rather often been saying, "well, look at that... huh." She keeps waiting for that "huh" to be follow up with, "and this one's worth eighty thousand dollars." That not going to happen.

I'm pretty sure it's not going to happen.

My holdings only come to a few long boxes and a couple of short boxes. I have about half a long box, and that will wrap up to cataloging part of the project. Here's last night's surprise issue. 

I'd have to do a review of my holdings, and I'd probably find that I'm wrong, but I think I have about seven issues of X-Men comics ranging across a variety of titles and eras. Marvel was my publisher of choice in junior high, when I used to play RPG's such as Marvel Super Heroes. But I was more of a Power Man & Iron Fist guy. And a bit more Iron Fist than Power Man. Also, Marvel had Star Trek at the time, and that was pretty cool. Mostly, though, I bought smatterings of interesting looking back issues when I had a handful of cash and could get to a flea market. I was in junior high, and this was the mid-1980's, so the ready supply of current comic books was, for me, limited to spinner racks in grocery stores. I liked the idea of subscribing to comic books in the mail, but could never quite get my act together to do it. But I never did care much about the X-Men.

So what am I doing with Days of Futures Past, in the first edition, sitting in a long box, and probably never been out of its bag since I bought it brand new and read it in about an hour? 

I do not know. 

SMC lists it as a trade paperback, but I'd call it Prestige Format, since that's what DC was calling that sort of thing at the time. And, at that time, I was a DC guy, having started buying comic books in college, when I had more ready cash, and more ability to get around. The first comic book I bought in the era of buying too many comic books was Batman: Year One, part 4. Off a spinner rack at the grocery store. Then I learned that there were stores where you could go to buy current issues, and recent back issues, and even older issues, without having to play the crap-shoot of a flea market.

So I started spending too much money on comic books, which included buying things like Days of Futures Past for (from the perspective of twenty years or more later) no clear reason.