Okay, so March more or less got away from me. I’m keeping track and will make it up, starting with this– the launch of my first foray into a proper blog post-series, which I am dubbing “The Comic Book Chronicles” (subtitle “the serial musings of a comic book fan”). It even lets me number them like their namesake.

Time was kids used to walk into a supermarket to find a spinner rack full of the adventures of Superman, Batman, and countless other super-heroes.  For $1 or less, parents would toss them into the basket and, voila, you had a thrilling adventure to read on the ride home.  Somewhere along the way, the supermarkets stopped stocking spinner racks and they became an artifact of yesteryear more than anything else.  The industry belongs to the direct market of comic book stores, of which there are far too few and why the monthlies are in such trouble.

This series provides me with the opportunity to talk a bit about titles I’m currently collecting and it’ll also branch out into critiques of the industry as a whole and throw in some tangential material to boot, such as Grant Morrison’s consideration of comic history and significance in the book Supergods.  All that later, though.

In true issue #0 fashion, this post is the pre-origin story.  I waded into comic book collecting with (what else?) cartoon tie-ins. G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were probably my tent pole series, but they were supplemented with the occasional Archie and Disney offering.  Even buying those series regularly, though, it wasn’t until I started seriously venturing into the big two– Marvel and DC– that I truly became a “collector,” polybags, backing boards, long boxes, and all.  It was the Death of Superman that drew me in and opened up that wider world of continuity and, shall we say, seriousness– because if Superman was going down, I wanted to see how. They’ve had me ever since.

Before ending this post, one disclaimer.  The CBC is not going to be a scheduled series, wherein it’ll have a post once a week or month or anything like that.  I’m not going to define it so minutely this early.  Maybe one day.  No, it is a series that exists for those moments I want to write about comics and… that’s it. I can say issue #1 will be soon, though, so at least there’s that.  And surely the fun banner image makes up for missing most of March?