Hi, I'm Bob Bretall. That's me with Stan Lee in 2004!
I'm your host here at ComicSpectrum. I’ve been collecting and reading comics since I picked up Amazing Spider-Man #88 in 1970. Here's my copy of that comic autographed by both Stan Lee and "Jazzy" John Romita.
It was all about Marvel for the first several years, I'd buy anything with a Marvel logo. After a few years, I expanded my horizons and never looked back. There was too much great stuff out there to restrict my reading to just one company. I discovered "Indie" comics for the first time in 1975 with the short-lived Atlas-Seaboard line of comics. I picked up almost every comic they produced in the 10 months they published monthly comics. In 1980 I moved beyond super-heroes when I discovered Elfquest and Cerebus. That was it for me, from that point on I actively sought out comics of all kinds, loving the diverse genres and stories I was finding.
Reading comics for so long & so voraciously means I’ve accumulated quite a collection. I’ve got somewhere north of 105,000 different unique comic books, and I've read pretty much all of them! I also bought them all individually for myself over the years, there was never a big influx of several thousand comics all at once by buying a collection from someone else. I'm a fan. I buy them primarily to read, but them I save/collect them all.
I am the current Guinness World Record holder for Largest Comic Book Collection. As a result, my collection has gotten a bit of media attention which I've tried to keep track of on the ComicSpectrum site. My official Guinness count of unique comics is now 101,822, verified by Guinness in August 2015. But that was years ago! I have over 105,000 at this point.
I've been buying new comics every month since that first Spider-Man comic in 1970. I still buy and read at least 100 newly published comics every month, in addition to various back issues I buy to fill in gaps in my collection. I also have 100s of comics-themed statues and mini-busts, 100s of pages of original comic art & sketches, 1000s of movies & TV shows on DVD & Blu-Ray, and a host of other pop culture collectibles. You can see a lot of this stuff in pictures of my comic book room on my web-page.
As a result of my many years in and around the hobby, I have a lot of knowledge that I hope is interesting and definitely should be informative. I've also served on the Nomination Committee for the Inkwell Awards since 2012. I created ComicSpectrum as a means of sharing my love and experience about comics & pop culture with others. I'll try to share some of that here on my steemIt Blog. I also love to help people out when I can, you can reach me via e-mail at [email protected]
I look forward to sharing more comics-y goodness with everyone, please share this around to anyone you think might be interested.
PS: I'd like to give a shout out to Douglas Pasckiewicz of @arseniclullaby for the caricature of me & my comics used in the profile pic and the right-hand side of my Blog logo!
Welcome to the steem blockchain! Hope you manage to find your place here and share with us a bit of your comic knowledge. I can't even imagine collecting that many comics myself. I only have maybe a few thousand. But I mostly stopped collecting as a kid. Occasionally I try to flesh out some of the missing groups in my collection, but it can get pretty expensive.
Hello @comicspectrum! Welcome to Steemit and good luck!
Welcome Bob! Honor to have you here, a comic book record holder that is so damn cool!
Thanks!
#comics
My pleasure Bob! and welcome aboard!...wow...10,5000?! What is that, like 200 long boxes? I'd love to see a picture of what that looks like. #comics
I'm filling long box 370 right now....!
Here's a pic...not of everything, but it gives a feel of the bulk storage in the insulated garage.
Garage.JPG
Far be it from me to tell anyone else what to blog about (since I'm usually put off by that) BUT...I'd love to see you review some really obscure gems in your collection. No doubt you have comics in there that some of us never so much as heard of but are worth knowing about either for quality or strangeness
hoe-leee cow! a third of you collection would fill my entire apartment from top to bottom! #comics
I'll see what I can do.
I'll try to pull out some back issues for review that have some significance (at least to me) or perhaps even some significance to comics, and talk about them.
It's something I'll have to give some thought to,.
welcome to steemit! add @cryptlectibles he has daily comic reviews
oops...no "t" in @cryplectibles ;-) They posted too!
#comics
That’s awesome!
That's a truly impressive collection, thanks for the write up. I am slightly disturbed by the fact that Stan Lee does not appear to have aged since the first photo was taken with you. This requires further investigation. I'll let you know what I turn up. Lol
Welcome to Steemit. Glad another great appreciator of comics is here.
Thanks!
#comics
I was confused why your name sounded familiar and then I remembered this video:
Welcome to Steemit.
Good memory, @angry0historian
An apt name, for sure! #comics
Welcome to Steemit, I can see you creating great content, that was a great first time write up. Looking forward to reading more.
Wow, that's amazing. I marvel (!) that you get through 100 comics each month. I wonder how many record holders we have on Steemit. I've been following @arseniclullaby for a while and it's great that he's introducing more people to Steemit. I look forward to seeing more from you
@steevc I get asked a form of this all the time: "How do you read 100 comics per month?"
It takes me 10-15 minutes to read a comic. Let's go on the high end and say it's always 15 minutes, that's 4 comics per hour, which means (for the sake of easy math) it would take me 30 hours to read 120 comics.
Let's break the month into just 4 weeks (again, for easy math): that 7.5 hours per week for reading comics, or just a hair over an hour a day.
Nobody asks someone who watches an hour of TV a day how in the world they find the time to do it. People who watch sports (something I don't do) can easily spend 7.5 hours watching games just on the weekend.
Putting it into this context, hopefully it's easier to understand how reading the comics really isn't that hard to do!
#comics
I guess they are not that long. I don't get as much reading time as I'd like, but then I spend too much time on-line with things like Steemit. We each have our ways to pass the time and yours looks like fun.
It is certainly easy to eat up a LOT of time in online social media rabbit holes
Wow, Stan Lee!!!! It's fantastic! I'm so happy to see a great comic book collector here! Welcome!
This is really cool. Glad to have you. Would love to see a tour of your place one day.
@ruwan you can start here on my web page:
http://www.comicspectrum.com/bob-s-comic-room.html
or look at some of the videos links here:
http://www.comicspectrum.com/media-mentions.html
Cool collection!
Nice to have another comic fan here. Be patient with the platform, it can take awhile to get traction :)
Welcome, enjoy your steemit adventure.
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