My Comics Timeline

1987 - My older brother found the 2nd collection of Elfquest at a garage sale. I read it about 1,000 times but he still refused to give it to me.

1987-1989 - I sneak into my brother's room whenever he's at a friend's house, or on a boyscouts camping trip, or whatever, and read as many of his DC and Marvel comics as I can. I read through all the SpiderMan comics I could find, and followed them up with SpiderHam comics, for a different perspective. Those comic-book protector bags were the bane of my existence--I was trying to keep my brother from finding out i was reading his comics and the sticky thing on the bags would sometimes stick to the front of a comic while i was taking it out and rip a patch of color off...oops. In this timeframe, I also discovered a small stash of naked lady pictures my brother had. I found them frightening.

1990-1995 - Obsession with Elfquest continued. I was still reading a few of my brother's comics, but my interest in straight superhero stuff was waning, probably because of the lack of female characters that I could identify with. I remember kind of liking Spawn.

1996 - Discovery of anime and manga. Mostly Ranma 1/2. I usually had to find someone to drive an hour with me to get to the closest store that sold manga or anime videos. On one of these trips, I randomly chose "A, A' " by Moto Hagio. My first gay-themed manga.

1997-2000 - No time for reading comics because I was too busy being a gay college student.

2001 - Find a comic-book store downtown that didn't make me feel intimidated. There was even a gay comics section. Most of it looked really crappy to me at the time. I only liked Allison Bechdel. My first Banana Fish book was bought at this time. When I went back in to ask the store clerk if he could order more of them, he says, "Banana Fish...I looked at that one and it just wasn't any good." Yeah, whatever, just put in the damn order!

2002-2005 Frequent manga purchases online or at the Golden Apple in L.A. Infrequent glancing at independent comics.

2006 - For some reason, I inspired my girlfriend to read comics. She found some interesing non-manga titles at her local comic store, and I became interested in non-Japanese comics again. We read through everything by Los Bros Hernandez that we could get our sweaty meat-hooks on.

2007- Started a blog about comics.