I started reading Wolverine comic somewhere during the winter of 1993, right after the cartoon started playing on television. I remember it all pretty well. I lived in Boston, me and my friends would shovel people houses out when it snowed for money. Then we would take our hard earned money and jump on the No 35 bus to West Roxbury to spend it all on comics. I remember the issues in mid 60’s and I remember being blown away by Issue 75 later on that year. I was always on hunt for the back issues to try and get a complete run, but the earliest issue I was able to get my hands on was #8 and it holds a special place in my collection. Summer of 1997 I moved from Boston out to the suburbs and that was about the end of my comic reading days… for then. It was only about 4 years but they were a great 4 years.

Fast forward to 2004, I just finished college and moved down to Virginia for a job and more school at night. I didn’t know anyone so I had a lot of time on my hands and I did a lot of reading, mostly books. One day I came across the Essential Wolverine TPBs, cheap, black and white and complete runs. So I decided to pick up them up. I never had a full run before so the story line was always broken up and this was perfect. I wasn’t long that I decided to splurge on my next prized possession, Wolverine #1 (1988). At this point I didn’t know the difference between raw and slabbed (I didn’t even know slabs existed). I had no idea how to grade a book, but looking back it was probably a 7.0 on a good day. By the time I was on Essential Wolverine Vol 4 I started to get bored of the black and white images, the paper, and the book size. So off to EBay I went to hunt down 189 issues (still just raw).

To minimize the dreaded “wall of text” I’ll give cliff notes version of the next few years. I got my 189 issues and all that time on EBay I started to notice more and more of these CGC slabs. So next came Wolverine #1 CGC 9.8, then #10, then why not get 1 thru 10, then why not go to 20. About that time I found the CGC Registry and then the forums. This is when I found out that I was just a little guppy a sea of whales. I realized that I knew nothing about comic collecting so would lurk on the forums for hours a night absorbing as much as I could.  I registered my small collection in October of 2008 and the real fun started. At this point nobody had a full run, there were no #35’s graded in 9.8 and a good amount of the books had very low census numbers. So the hunt was on. I would check EBay daily for slabs or 9.8 candidates raw. I shortly learned that NM/M on EBay seller’s descriptions and NM/M from CGC were two different animals. So the weekends I was in my car driving around to find my 9.8’s. Somewhere in there I moved back to Boston where life was ready to take some more interesting turns.

Around 2009 I had the opportunity to buy some old dealer stock of wolverine comics. There we a lot of very nice Wolverine #1 (Mini Series) in there and I convinced myself that I could flip them and a few others and pretty much be even and then have 20 or so wonderful long boxes of wolverine back issue where I could pull the rest of CGC 9.8 collection from. But it didn’t last long. Bringing 20-25 long boxes into my small apartment and trying to sort through them all was a task that I had neither the time nor space to handle. It wasn’t long until my then fiancé wanted the boxes out of there. So off they went to my parents’ house in my old bedroom until we had a house of our own. That was my next big stop, When I left I think I had a little over 50 slabs and it was ranked #7 in the registry.

Fast forward again… Marriage, built a house, 3 kids, started a company… August 2017.  

My family has always informed me that I am impossible to buy presents for. Over the years, I have ended up a closet full of unworn sweaters, a pile of unopened gismos and stack of unused gift cards.  In my mind, I’m just a simple man who doesn’t really want/need much but to my family I guess I’m a constant pain. They have tried to buy me comics but it never ends up very well and they always paying way more than they should for things.  This year is different. I had an idea. I proposed to my wife that I would buy comics I needed throughout the year and hand them over to her on arrival. Then when people came asking what to buy me she would just “sell” them a book from her inventory. The whole extended family loved the idea. They never had to worry about me again.

So I’m back and I’m going to do my best to keep the “inventory” stocked. Some might say that it takes away the spirit of gift giving but I really think that it will add a whole new level of meaning to my collecting. I could never sell a book my son gets me for father’s day or my wife get me for my anniversary. There will still be an element of surprise because I won’t know who is giving me what and nobody says they have to give me a comic in the first place.

My first stop was to the boards to see what’s been going on for the last 8 years… and it was a lot. There were new names on top of the leaderboards, #35’s have been found, new books were added (what’s Doombringer?) and people were getting a lot signed.  I also had to reach out to see if I could start sourcing some of these books.  I’m going to be honest, I got a little ahead of myself and my first purchase was for 50 slabs. I got those home and decided that I would just hide them among my other comic boxes and start again with filling the inventory.

The last piece of the puzzle I mentioned a little earlier. The massive amounts of back issues I had horded and stored at my parents’ house. Well, I have them now at my new house and I’m starting to go through them. I’ll be bagging and boarding every night until they are all sorted, categorized, and filed away.

This journal is to track my progress on my Wolverine 1988 run and working my way through my horde.

Current Status: 102/229