Comics

Rain.  ... and being cooped up at home ...

That's what made me do this... Let's start.

When I started working and started to have (a little) bit of

disposable income ... I started collecting comics. That should give

you an idea of how little my disposable income was back in 1993.

One comic book was 80PHP and I could only buy

 1 comic book  a month. Due to this predicament I thought

to myself that the comic that I started collecting should be different.

I don't want any of these Supermans, Batmans, X-Men comics which

had very convulted plots such that each plot had it's own comic book

... and we are not counting the crossovers yet!

One day I was browsing at BookSale (a second hand bookstore

in Manila) and found a comic book that was unlike any other comic book

that I have seen. For one, the characters are drawn in a funny way.

If DC and Marvel are the comic book equivalent of Disney movies

in the way the artwork is presented. This comic book that I had in my hands

is the equivalent of season 1 of the Simpsons or season 1 of SouthPark.

The drawings are very crude. The hero did not even conform to

the usual mould of superheroes like Batman, Captain America, Superman, etc.

I think that comic book that I was looking at was from

Dark Horse Comics. There were only four issues for that storyline

and I eventually bought the complete series.

It was the first time I got introduced to the concept of an anti-hero.

Finally! I found the comic book that I wanted to collect! Something

different! The comic's title from the anti-hero's name : Lobo.

Hehehe and much later on, I found out this guy Lobo was a bit like me.

He wanted to be different. However, I only wanted to be different

in my comic book collection. He, on the otherhand, caused his

home planet to explode so that he could be unique. Nice chap huh?!

Eventually, DC acquired Lobo and below is the first issue

of Lobo with DC. The belt buckle is embossed and silver foil.

Nice!

Issue #1 of Lobo from DC ... those days, this is not actually
'issue #1' as there is an Issue #0 (yup, I got that too).

Long before ION was there at Orchard MRT, that place was

dark ... and the biggest occupant was Popular Bookstore.

If you enter Orchard MRT from Orchard Boulevard and enter

Popular Bookstore, the first thing that you'll encounter on the

left corner is a Comic Book Store.

That Comic Book Store had figures, shirts, manga ... and lastly

they had cool stuff like DeathDealer, Satanika, Igrat, DevilMan, etc.

It starts with a 'Conan the Barbarian' kind of guy getting
into a deserted castle and finding a mysterious helmet
guarded by a saber-toothed tiger. He dispatches the tiger but
the helmet sticks to his head, sucks his brain juice, and took control
of his body.

The unwanted daughter of the demon Dalkiel.
She goes about generally being a pest to his father.

I got my issues of DeathDealer and Satanika from them...

What makes me scratch my head up to now though is how

i bought these comics from them....

These are just my observations, ok?

It's like buying dope! They never sell these to 'newbies' and

whenever I or other 'serious' comic collectors buy these from them,

we had to whisper (hehehe) and of course these comics are not

included in their displays :-)  Ahhhh the good old days...