In late 2009 we introduced a new recurring feature in Scoop: ORIGIN ISSUE. The question is straightforward, but it’s one with many different answers: Why do you collect?

The subject this time is Mike McKenzie, owner of Alternate Worlds in Cockeysville, Maryland.

I hear that almost everyone who didn’t grow up in the 1960s is sick of hearing that it was such a great decade, but you know, it really was! There was something about the sixties that was different. It wasn’t just comics, but the culture itself. For me the decade introduced me to the three things I really enjoy, comic books, The Beatles and Doc Savage.

To this day I still collect all three. One of my favorites is the collection of Doc Savage Bantam titles that I just completed last week. Finding each copy in unread mint condition was a fifteen year effort!

I can’t recall when comics weren’t a part of my life. One of my earliest memories of them is reading Sad Sack and Casper in the doctor’s office. It wasn’t long after that when one of my older brothers came back from the Navy and brought home a big chest of comics with him. Most of what he brought back was early DCs. They were the very early sixties issues. There were issues of Action, Detective, Adventure and all the rest from the DC stable at the time. Some memorable ones for me were when Batman met the modern Clayface for the first time, and Hal Jordan becoming Green Lantern at the behest of a dying Abin Sur. I was only a reader then, but it laid the foundation for my future collecting bug.

Around 1965 I discovered the Marvel titles. As I got older, the Marvels were a bit more hip and I loved Stan Lee’s tongue-in-cheek humor. What Lee did to ingratiate fans to the new comics was just right for the times. You felt as if you were part of some exclusive club. This love of comics, so firmly ingrained in my life, led to me becoming a comic shop owner.

Right out of high school I had started selling at local comic shows. In the late 1970s, Gary Groth (Fantagraphics) and Mike Catron were running the comic book club at the University of Maryland in College Park, and they would sponsor the occasional comic book convention. This started me onto comics dealing, but it took a while for me to make a living at it.

After college I was doing inventory and purchasing for a local furniture chain, but I was also selling comics at early Creation and Seuling shows in NYC. Those trade shows and meeting all the people, the hours, the sales, the trades with other collectors; it was like a college. On a communication level it was the internet of the day, you could learn anything and find almost anything, providing you were willing to listen and look. Of course with the internet you don’t have to drive for six hours to deal with things!

Because of this incredible exchange of information and the experience, I was able to keep on top of what the market was doing. The only reference that we had was the annual edition of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, there were no monthly or quarterly updates, or anything like that at the time; so a lot of what we did was also guided by instinct and experience.

Because the medium was so much fun, and I was doing very well at it, we decided to go into business for ourselves and open a store. At the time, it was a great asset to be out there at conventions in order to run your store. The experience you gained in one year on the road was as good as five years behind the counter.

With that in mind, we opened the doors to Alternate Worlds on January 1, 1980 and are still going strong today, some 32 years later.

At first I opened the store as a way to a way to buy old comics for my convention business. I love comics and always collected them, but the cons and customers were more important. Knowing how important comics were to each individual, I just got more of a rush helping a customer find the exact book they had been looking for than I did looking for my own stuff. We were that busy. So during this time period, I wasn’t exactly focused on my personal collection. As a collector I was laying back. Anything serious that I found I put back into the marketplace.

Within a few years, the store became a very big part of my life. This is right at the start of the direct market. There was a ton of great stuff. It was the birth of the independent movement. They exploded and it was also a good period for both Marvel and DC.

At first I was buying books from Phil Sueling. At the time you had to buy your book in bundles. Living in Maryland it just became more convenient for me to go through another local guy named Steve Geppi, who I had heard was going to start reselling comics from the publishers. He was distributing books from the back room of his small retail store about fifteen miles away.

This was a very busy and intense time. No one had an extra minute to spare.

One story stands out for me. We always set up at the big three day NY convention at Thanksgiving, so one year I was hoping to get the new comics on Thanksgiving eve in order to take them up there with me. Back then Steve got the books in on a tractor trailer and would unload, unpack and then pull each title (one title at a time) for all of the accounts. Since we wanted to take our order up to NYC that same evening, Steve allowed me to come over, meet the trailer, and help unload it. He then circumvented the process and dug into the piles to personally pull all of our books first so we could be on our way to New York. I always appreciated that, and all of the other stuff he did to make it easier for us to do business. At the time, I remember he had a sofa next to his desk which was out on the warehouse floor (no office mind you), and I would bet you he often slept there when he had to. The industry was just on fire at the time. I was doing the road, mail order and running a store, collecting went on the back burner.

The 1980s just flew by and we continued to do conventions until around the mid-nineties, often supplementing comics to become full fledged Star Trek and Doctor Who dealers. It was just getting too much to haul books around. It was getting a bit too political for me with some of the show promoters. Thanks to the massive exposure provided by Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the comic companies themselves, the industry was a lot bigger than it had been when I started back in the mid-seventies. After over twenty years we were bone tired. Getting up at 3AM and driving to Chicago (and this was after we had packed the van until midnight!); everything about life on the road was getting too much.

For the first time I began to think about what I liked and what I wanted to collect. As the decade progressed I began to build the Doc Savage collection that was mentioned earlier. This is not just limited to the Bantam books; I also have some rare early Doc statues, Golden Age comics and the scarce final edition of the pulp run. I have also been able to build a good collection of Classics Illustrated comics as well as acquire a good portion of the leather bound Eastern Press library. I also love the deluxe editions of the comics such as Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives and the early signed collections published by Kitchen Sink and Graphitti Designs, and I make sure to get one of everything adapted from the works of Robert E. Howard.

In comics I still have a few choice books, but as I got older I found that I really began to appreciate the physical representation of our hobby’s mythical characters. So I began to build as wide a collection of statues and busts as space and budget would allow. There are over 250 busts and 50 statues in my collection, so I think I am about filled up in that department..

I also collect items related to the Beatles and James Bond (another ‘60s icon). One of my best pieces is a limited edition litho of the string score as created by George Martin for the song Yesterday. It is hand signed by both him and Paul McCartney.

The story behind the print is an interesting one. George Martin had a studio in the Caribbean on Montserrat. When a volcano had devastated the island, he got together with Paul and together they published the litho as a benefit to help rebuild the island.

Today my collection comforts me. It is part of the physical representation of how I have spent the majority of my life. Those first twenty years on the road were really worth it. I met a ton of interesting people, and learned a lot about dealing with others in business. My store has customers that have been shopping there since our first year. Every once in a while I wish that I had kept some of the more valuable books that passed through my hands. Not for the money, but to have the book itself, but I know that they are in good hands wherever they are. In my case, as a collector, it was better to put things back into the marketplace. Everything in my collection means something to me and it has been a joy to track down those illusive items, as that is certainly half the fun.

If you’d like to share your origin issue, drop us a line with "Origin Issue” in the subject line. We’re looking for about 200 words addressing why you collect (and it doesn’t have to be comic books).