As a child, I read comic books incessantly. Every Monday, my local corner store would rack the new Marvel and DC Comics for the week. I’d go in, pick out those I liked best, Captain America, Thor, Batman, X- Men, and stash them on a bottom rung, behind the unenticing Richie Rich, Disney, and Archie comics (though still a kid, I felt that I was already too big, too advanced, for those titles). Then I would wait until Friday; my mom would give me a dollar, and I would ride my bike back to the shop and retrieve my buried treasure. I would read each issue cover to cover, then bag and board them. It wasn't the financial value that I was sealing up. I just wanted to keep and catalogue those issues, so that I could revisit them whenever I liked. Indeed, even as a kid, I understood that Marvel and DC were creating literary universes, and that any one story had an impact on the whole; storing back issues was just part and parcel of comic book reading.

While I lacked the formal language of literary criticism, comic books taught me the Aristotelian basics: I learned about character flaw (hamartia); I became expert in anticipating a reversal of fortune (peripeteia), in sharing with the hero a moment of tragic recognition (anagnorisis), and, in the price paid to vanquish evil, a spiritual cleansing (catharsis). Then I grew up a bit, went to college and took classes that fixated on distinct authors, or distinct genres, or eras. But, as my reading progressed, the comic book instinct took over: I began to see how some ideas and approaches were cycled and recycled, how the canon itself was interconnected. Another persistent aspect of comic book culture: I’d save up as best as I could and rove the used books stores, looking for old Shakespeare editions, biographies, criticism, or editions of plays by his contemporaries.

Now I’m 53, and I don't much look like that kid on a bike or that grad student living off canned beans and beer, but I am still a collector, regularly trolling the web for criticism, old editions, and comics alike.