What a pretty fantastic year for comics. Between DC’s New 52 and Marvel’s most recent re-launch/creator mix-up, I’m knee deep in comics and in the middle of leasing out a second living space for me and my family. (I refuse to let the kids sleep on my comic boxes any longer) All kidding aside, I’ve never found myself buying more comics per month than I have been doing for the last year. Between DC’s Zero month, Marvel NOW! launch and all the Comixology digital sales, I’m been ingesting a record amount of ad-hoc comic books, as well as monthly titles. It has been fucking awesome! So as a last post for the year, I’d like to re-cap my pull-list for 2012 and list out my Top 10 titles of 2012.

I’ve been collecting comics for over 22 years and for the first half of my comic collecting career, I was an avid X-book reader. (DFu can attest to that) X-books and Bat-books dominate my collection and I can’t say with any certainty which I have more of, but let be known that I haven’t read an X-book, outside of Deadpool, in over 10 years. I left the X-Men prior to Claremont taking them to the X-Treme and Morrison bringing in the New. As you can see I’ve been out of the game for awhile. Of all the Marvel NOW! titles, I was the most reluctant to grab up any of the X-books. In my mind I was done with the mutant soap opera. I didn’t care anymore about who was in love with who, who was a villain or hero this time around and I was sure as hell was done with all the damn X-book crossovers. But thanks to Adam and DFu’s persistence and positive spouting about Wolverine & the X-Men, I gave in to my fickle comic geek loyalties and scooped up the Marvel NOW! X-books and came to fall in love with my old favs all over again.

“These should have boards in ’em. Bloody Savages!”

My first exposure to comic books was in the early 80s when my older sister, Sarah, and I would watch Super-friends on TV.  Around that time we both got into Superman coloring books and eventually comics.  While both of us couldn’t read yet, they were still entertaining and the stories were still fun.  It was around this time that my dad would bring down a box of comics from the attic and we’d spend the whole day looking through these fragile yellow books.  A few years passed and I was reading comics on my own.

When I old enough to take care of my books my dad brought down the box and gave them to me, and they’ve been in my collection since.  Books like Daredevil #10–25, Amazing Spider-Man #30–51, Journey into Mystery #120-136, Strange Tales #138-152, Tales to Astonish 71-88, and X-Men #17–34. And when I moved out I took these books with me.

This year at Thanksgiving when leaving my mother’s house, she was cleaning out her attic and told me to take a couple boxes with me.  One of the boxes was apparently my father’s SECOND box of comics.

Marvel NOW! has finally kicked off, and I’m putting my best foot forward and checking my biases at the door. I’m jumping in head first for the opportunity of finding some diamonds in the Marvel rough. The truth is I’ve been dying to get back into my Marvel characters, and it is my hope that with the success of DC‘s New 52 that Marvel will step up to the plate and deliver some relaunches and creator shake-ups worthy of the competition. This is my High/Low of the Marvel NOW! Asgardian Tales… Don’t forget your drinking horn… you’re going to need it.