They took my lab coat as "evidence"

And thus Kyle makes his first foray into the dating world. It is a dreadfully scary place where I am glad I do not have to tread. Kyle is a braver man than I.

My big project finished at work today so my brain officially packed up and headed to Cozumel. I was thrashing about trying to find something to talk about when Kris suggested I discuss my criteria for pulling comics. If you haven’t already noticed from tracking our What’s on your pull list? segment, I pull significantly less comics then Kris. There are definitely some titles that I pull that Kris does not, usually of the independent persuasion, but there are several comics that we both pull. If I already read everything that Kris pulls, why not save my money and not get duplicates? For those that I do pull duplicates, what’s the point? Why aren’t I pulling more if I’m supposed to be such a big comic guy too?

First off, I will unequivocally state that Kris is the bigger “comic guy” between the two of us. I don’t mean that to belittle my collection and interest nor as commentary on him - it’s just a fact. The flippant answer for why I pull less then he does is that he doesn’t have a wife to tell him no or that my “technology hobby” uses more of my disposable income then his does, or that he’s got nothing else to spend his money on. While we joke about any of those reasons, I think in reality if we were both given the same chunk of money to spend on comics without any restrictions, he’d probably still end up buying more then I do because we choose the comics we buy for different reasons.

Kris approaches buying comics as a larger “world building” exercise, whereas when I buy a comic it’s usually specifically tied to a particular character. For example, Kris really likes Hal Jordan and Hal’s adventures as Green Lantern. Hal spends a lot of time interacting with other members of the Green Lantern Corps, so to make his understanding of those experiences richer, Kris started pulling Green Lantern Corps as well. When Kris got back into comics[^1], Blackest Night was gearing up. Blackest Night was tied into the War of the Light that really got started with the Sinestro Corps Wars. To better understand Blackest Night, he went back and collected the SCW, but to better understand how the SCW came about, he needed to go further back into Green Lantern history all the way to when Hal Jordan came back from the dead.

Blackest Night had a big impact on almost every major hero in the DC Universe. If Kris was going to fully appreciate Blackest Night, he needed to understand what life was like for those superheroes BEFORE Blackest Night started and then follow up to see how the events in Blackest Night changed their outlook after the fact. To understand how some groups, like the JSA, were affected he’d need to look at not only the Justice Society of America book but JSA: All-Stars as well and possible even the solo books of JSA characters like Power Girl or Magog.

The outcome of this is that Kris ends up with a fairly extensive collection of comics that pulls from every part of the DC Universe. At the same time, Kris has a pretty deep understanding of the universe as a whole and how one character’s actions in one book will end up having a major influence on another character several books later.

On the other hand, I tend to latch onto a particular character and pick up anything of major significance with that character. For example, when the new Batgirl series started, I picked it up on a whim to see what it was like. I quickly fell in love with Stephanie Brown and wanted to understand what makes her tick better. To do that, I had to peruse back through stories of Stephanie as Spoiler, which meant I picked up things like Batman: War Games. Stephanie and Tim Drake had a very close relationship in the early days and while reading some of those older Steph/Tim stories, I realized how cool Tim Drake really was. Thus, I started collecting Tim Drake stories.

Now, Tim Drake and Connor Kent are close friends. Where Kris would be interested more in the relationship between the two and how their individual stories shape their friendship, I think Connor is an interesting character but I really only need to know that Connor and Tim are friends. Thus, while Kris would pull not only Tim Drake stories but Connor stories as well, I’m perfectly happy to let Connor go about on his merry way. I’ll see him again whenever he crosses Tim’s path. On the other hand, if a character I’m interested in appears in something that I don’t normally pull, I’ll pull it just for things with that character and then move on again. I don’t have to fully understand how the arch with my favorite character links into the universe as a whole, just that it does.

If I had to be specific, amongst all the vast characters of the DCU, the only ones I care enough about to pull a related comic is Stephanie Brown, Tim Drake, Barbara Gordon, Cassandra Cain, Selina Kyle, Tommy Elliot, and the Secret Six (I can’t really pick one, all of them really). You’ll notice that list is primarily female, but what can I say? I like strong women.

I enjoy reading the rest of Kris’s collection so that I have the same full universe understanding that Kris has, but it’s not necessary for me to read it to then read about my favorite characters. Thus, I end up pulling significantly less then Kris does. Does this make me any less of a comic fan? I don’t think so, and even if it does, I don’t care.

[^1]: We can blame the Gnome for Kris getting back into comics for picking him up a copy of Blackest Night #0. He had other comics before then, but that was what made him seriously start collecting again. Without that, he wouldn’t have started to collect, I wouldn’t be collecting and you wouldn’t be sitting here because we never would have started this comic. Thanks, babe.