Direct Current 2.0
Week of July 17, 2013
Where the new guy introduces himself and Bewares’ the Batman!
Welcome one and all to the first of what I hope to be many weekly columns focusing on the DC Universe. My thanks go to Sean and Jim for letting me use a little corner of the internet to ruminate on DC Comics, its past, it’s present and what I hope will be its future. Before we start that however let me fill you in a little about who I am and how I got here.
My name, like the great Sensi is also Jim. I am 49 this year and live in Maine with my great wife Clarissa, two wonderful children and two grandchildren, along with 2 semi psychotic dogs.
I started collecting comics back in the early seventies and had a pretty good collection going by the time I went to college back in 1981. Then like many collectors I know, disaster struck, and my collection was destroyed by a huge force of nature, my mother. I am sure many of you can relate to the fact that parents have more destructive power when it comes to collections then the Joker and Lex Luthor combined! A small part of the collection survived and I built that back up until I had over 30,000 individual issues at the beginning of this year. But that’s another story, one that I hope to get into in the next few weeks as I want to discuss take the rise of digital comics and the comparative disaster that is the back issue market place.
During the 90’s and up until 2009 I was a frequent customer at numerous comic shops in New England and began to discover that I was a fairly unique comic fan. While I did collect comics from other companies (Marvel, Dynamite, Charton, First, to name a few) I was a DC Fan. Marvel fans then, as well as now, were a huge part of comics fandom, DC fans were not as prevalent.
I took it upon myself to evangelize for DC Comics. In the early part of the 21st century I was given the opportunity to work for the website Toonzone (http://www.toonzone.com) as a forum administrator in their comics’ forum. I began to review comics, or perhaps over review them! In some instances my reviews went to almost 17 pages. That was a lot of work, but I loved it. Every single review I did was of a DC Comic. I started talking about DC Direct as well.
After 2 years at Toonezone I moved over to a new site, Comics News International, which no longer exists as far as I can tell. I was there for the launch as the General Editor and Chief reporter. I lasted there about 6 months when I realized that I was spending more time working with them, and less with my family. Continue reading Direct Currents 2.0 Week of July 17th, 2013 →
