Comic Reader Résumé #1: Entry Level Position (1982)

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ré·su·mé [rez-oo-mey, rez-oo-mey]
noun
1. a summing up; summary.
2. a brief written account of personal, educational, and professional qualifications and experience, as that prepared by an applicant for a job.

In Comic Reader Résumé, I use Mike’s Amazing World of Comics to travel back through time via his virtual newsstand to the genesis point of my lifelong collecting of comics. From there, I can offer a “work history” of my fandom through my active purchasing of (relatively) new comic books beginning in January of 1982, when my interest in the medium went from sporadic and unformed to routine on through compulsive accumulation. To streamline the narrative and keep the subjects at least remotely contemporaneous, I will not generally be discussing what we call back issues, books bought long after their publication date. Sometimes, I will cover a book published on a given month that I picked up within a year or so that date, and I give myself an especially wide berth on this aspect in the first couple of “origins” episodes. We’ll get more rigidly on point as my memories crystallize and my “hobby” spirals out of control into the defining characteristic of my life (eventually outpacing squalor and competing neurosis.) It’s part personal biography, part industry history, and admittedly a total wank on my part.

The first episode of the podcast version of my old short-lived 2011 blog series re-purposes and re-edits the audio from the even shorter-lived 2013 YouTube (barely) video adaptations of same, along with supplemental material I recorded over a year ago that got shelved when I realized that doing this wouldn’t be the effortless space-filling regurgitation I’d hoped for as a stopgap while sweating over doing other podcasts. The episode covers my earliest off the rack purchases in January-February of 1982, as well as discussing a bunch of the comics that had passed through my hands before this youthful indiscretion became a full on addiction.