In Space...

There was a little comic book convention on my birthday. Which was nice. And I went. I had 4 potential goals in mind. I needed to find TMNT #4, Grendel #2, Daredevil #131, or Daredevil #168. But only in VF/NM or better. I've been mildly cannibalizing my complete Daredevil run lately... pulling out the low grade mess and replacing them with prettier books, and that's mostly what I'm working on. No one ever has the Grendel or TMNT anyway. Lots of 131's, but nothing in grade. And lots of 168's too... many of them close, but all of them had that ugly printer's mark or whatever across the lightning bolt. Except for one. I passed on a slabbed 9.2 (with the mark) for the exact same price; I was afraid for a bit that I'd made a mistake, but I'm not a big fan of buying CGC except in rare cases, so to hell with that. I don't think it's the 9.4 the dealer claimed, but it's still a very pretty book for the exact price I had planned to pay. Very cool. :) So now I'd like to find the Grendel prior to HeroesCon since Matt Wagner will be there, and then the only thing I'll be looking for is a DD1. I need to start saving. Right now it's looking pretty grim. Donations are accepted.
Back in the early 90's when, unbeknownst to me, the comic book industry was shooting itself in the face, I was finding a new outlet for escape and imagination, and it all seemed amazing. In 1992, my imagination got a little push when Will and his dad took me to see Alien 3 in Asheville. Being a wide-eyed 14 year-old who had yet been exposed to the earlier Scott & Cameron masterpieces (screw you, Titanic!), I thought Alien 3 was the coolest damn thing I had ever seen. And, at the time, it likely was the coolest thing I had seen. Somehow I convinced my mom to give me the trilogy on VHS for Christmas, and I decided that the Alien would be one of my favorite things. Now I knew that there had been some Alien comics published by some non-Marvel comic company called Dark Horse. But there was no way I was going to afford a comic that costs multiples of $5! So I waited... And then there were rumors of some crazy book about Aliens fighting the Predator creature. But, living in shitetown, we didn't actually have a comic store, so that book came and went, and the price soon put it out of my grasp as well. So it was with no small amount of elation that I (again with Will) walked in the now-defunct Super Giant Comics in Asheville and saw Aliens Vs. Predator #1 sitting on top of a stack of WildC.A.T.s for $5. I remember talking to the owner about how cool it was going to be and how, despite his protestations, I was "pulling for" the Aliens. So I snatched it up along with a copy of the super-shiny WildC.A.T.s #2 and headed home. Honestly, I don't recall actually reading the thing, but I do remember feeling pretty let down once I finished the book. Much to my chagrin, #1 was, in fact, #1 OF FOUR. But, dammit, I read #1 10 or 15 times, passed it around school, and it even hung on the wall in my room for a short time. Before too terribly long, I managed to find a copy of #3, and I subjected it to the equal brutality of a teenager trying to be cool. Whatever that means. I read it a lot. Quite some time later, I was at the creepy comic store in Boone called, I think, "The Dragon's Den." In the back, you could pull out long boxes full of comics stored in crappy bags with dirty tape on them as a statue of Vampirella or something made sure you didn't have sticky fingers. I couldn't believe it when I stumbled upon a vein of all Aliens comics...
	I remember finding the complete series for Aliens: Hive and Aliens: Genocide all while finding myself in awe at the sheer number of Aliens comics in existence. The last thing I picked up was a copy of Alien: Earth War #1. The John Bolton art on the cover is still gorgeous to me today. Not only did I find this amazing stash of new stuff, but I also picked up Aliens Vs. Predator #'s 0 (?!?!) and 2. That had to have been one of the coolest trips to a comic store I had ever made! While the two new stories I picked up were a lot of fun in their own right, they still weren't Aliens Vs. Predator. And I STILL didn't know how the story ended. And then I just got sucked in by the Bolton art on the cover of Earth War. The interiors (by a (barely) post-Sandman Sam Kieth) actually left a little to be desired vis-à-vis the cover art, and the story was a little difficult to follow. But I didn't care; I wanted to like it so much I wrote a hundred different stories in my head to go along with the cover art. But I never did find the endings to these stories; my loose issues languished in my comic boxes for years... Not long thereafter, the owner of Super Giant got me reading The Sandman and The Spectre (I can only assume it was b/c I dressed funny), and my torrid love affair with brain eating bugs from space slowly faded away. I always kept my eyes open tho. The last panel from issue #3 with the Predator stranded above the Alien horde below facing a certain doom has been burned into my brain for over a decade. This past weekend I finally finished the story. 15 years later, and I can stop worrying about that poor Predator being left to the wolves. And I can stop wondering what happens when the Aliens are unleashed on Earth. Really, Earth War wasn't that great, IMHO. Except, right... the covers. And occasionally, Kieth did some really great stuff with the pencil. But Aliens Vs. Predator was perfect. I put my 14 year-old brain back in, and all the pieces fit, and it was... well... 1994 again.
It would be remiss of me to neglect to mention that I never would have even thought to look for these books this past weekend. Brooke and Allison required that I buy comics with the unnecessary birthday present(s) they gave me. I found a really nice copy of TMNT #8 that I needed, but that didn't really take care of my budget, so I just kept digging through rows and rows of long boxes. I think I spent longer at this show than I ever have looking for things that I actually wanted instead of things that struck my fancy at the moment. I had nowhere to be and nothing else I had to do. It was strange. And quite rather nice. So I had the time and the motivation(????) to find and do what I wanted for a little while and not feel bad about it. Whatever that means. I think this was supposed to be about comics. But thanks Allison, and thanks Brooke. Then, after the show, we went to the Bobcats game, and they actually won. Gerald Wallace is such a badass.