mcwafflestix's Bio
I've been collecting comics for... a long time. 45 years at least. Unfortunately, a lot of the books I had back as a child went away through a bunch of moves. Included in those were a lot of older books, such as ROM, Cloak and Dagger, Avengers, and more.
I continued to collect though, and I do still have some of the critical books from that time. My collection of graded Watchmen were purchased from retail (Holyoke Mall), and graded only in 2021. Similar goes with my Akira collection; purchased at retail (Phantom of the Attic) and I'm still in the process of getting them all graded. Same with the Miracleman books.
I collected a lot of indies in the 80s and 90s, and have a lot of Vertigo series. I drifted away from comic collecting in the late 90s though.
I got back into comics in 2021, and discovered the CGC registry. The role of CGC in providing grading services and quality encapsulation really appeals to me in the way that it resolves the question about "how to store all these comics to protect them".
With my reintroduction to comics collecting, I decided to collect old Carl Barks work. I've always loved his work; it's incredibly great art, and phenomenal writing, and Barks is one of the all-time greats.
One of the things about Barks' work is that he was incredibly prolific; he contributed to around 500 comics (by my count) in his career, most of which were Disney duck books (having previously worked in the Disney animation studios, he was experienced with the characters and art). This body of work and the ages when it was published (his work started solidly in the golden age, in the 1940s) make collecting his work incredibly challenging.
Finding some of the rare Barks books can be incredibly challenging, and getting these books graded is going to take YEARS of continuous work. I've made a start at it so far, but, to borrow a phrase, this is a marathon, not a sprint.