So good ol' Tom gave another great article about the best crossovers which you can check out here. But for me it stirred something up I thought I had long gotten over. I hadn't.
I was reading through the article when I saw her. There she was. It's been years, what do I say? Lord, it's been years but it's still too soon. I still remember her name.
JLA/Avengers.
JLA/Avengers is a particularly sore point for me. As the UK contingent of CV will probably know, we have this strange parallel publisher called Panini Comics which has the rights to reprint Marvel and DC comics, usually a few months after the original but it would contain three issues for a bargain price of two pounds forty! (So in Panini's Wolverine and Gambit you would usually get an issue of Wolverine, an issue of Gambit and a 'classic' at the end, usually bronze age to 90's stuff)
Anyway, an advantage was that most corner shops or magazine shops would stock these, even if it was just one or two. To be honest I'm not sure the city I grew up in even had a comic book shop at the time. At that point, Panini was only printing Marvel, i.e. Wolverine and Gambit, Astonishing X-Men, Amazing Spider-man and The Avengers. So when the 'Coming up next month!' showed Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and (at this stage in my comic book knowledge) some weird green guy with a big brow and a cool looking red guy (I mean, he had a Lightning Bolt on his chest) standing beside Marvel's guys...
My eyes lit up. My jaw dropped. My heart pumped. My body popped.
That month was a long wait but finally the day came. I adored the first couple of months seeing these epic battles between these titans. Then it happened. That amazing cover with seemingly hundreds of heroes jumping out at you. It was what superheroes were all about. I mean even if you don't read comics, you could appreciate the beauty, the power. In the truest sense to my little eyes, it was awesome.
And that was the problem.
So great was this cover that even if you didn't read comics, you'd want to read this. I searched high and low, going shop to shop, dissapointed at every turn (raining heavily, of course) I remember walking roughly a 5 mile round journey around my city with a heavy heart, truely dissapointed. I remember getting home, soaking, my mum asking where I had been and I just gave back a little murmer of "Nowhere. The shop." She wouldn't have understood. To this day, the closest I got to owning that cover lies in my Comic Vine profile, as a neat background and a little reminder. I still don't even know what happen in that third part.
Thus ends my spiel and thus begins my tears.
But what about you? There's bound to be people out there who's experienced this pain, unique to us Viners. What should we call it? Comic Envy? Obsessive Comic Disorder? Cape syndrome?
Has somthing similar ever happened to you? Ever waited in the rain for an issue only to have it leave with someone else? A favourite issue lost / stolen / ruined? When has your comic book fan heart been ripped out?
Let it out, let it all out. Remember, this is a safe place. Today, the Vine will be your rock.
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