THE GENESIS

On April 18th 2011, my Uncle Larry passed away. It was just six days before Easter Sunday. The timing was sudden, but his health had been declining for years so the whole event was not a total surprise. My immediate family dropped everything and traveled out to Arkansas to support my grandparents who were living just down the street from my uncle (their son). As a christian, a funeral is a far less depressing thing than many people experience. We believe-from Uncle Larry's profession of faith in the saving grace of Jesus-that he is experiencing the fullness of love, joy, and peace of God in heaven.

But a lifetime of as a bachelor meant that Uncle Larry had left behind a lot of possessions with no wife or children to stake a claim. As such, most items were intended for sale or donation. However, as a family we took a look through a house crammed with items to see if there was anything we would like to keep. Due to my interesting in drawing, my grandparents immediately directed my attention to three long boxes filled with old comics. Without hesitation, I pulled out the 1999 reprint of Superman #1 to read on my airplane ride home and gladly accepted the collection as my own. Just as the long boxes had found their way into a closet in my uncle's house, they found a similar fortress of solitude in mine.

One year later...

My fiancée and I were cleaning out my house the month before our wedding so that she could easily move in the day we returned from our honeymoon. And when I say cleaning out, I mean a reduction to bare bones like piranhas on a fattened calf. I have a habit of collecting anything and everything and this was a necessary purge. We have a standard conversation that happens when my now-wife explains the situation to other people: She always points to the top kitchen cabinet and says "He used to keep all his old video game system and cables and various electronics in this KITCHEN cabinet." To which I would always reply, "That is not true! The video game were in this cabinet down here. That cabinet held half of the 23-volume set of encyclopedias from the 1990s. It had everything you wanted to know about the U.S.S.R." And that is all you need to know about that.

In this great hording purification anything that hadn't been utilized in the past month was donated to Goodwill or thrown out. Many difficult decisions were made. More than a handful of my personal collections were painstakingly relinquished. And before I knew it Uncle Larry's collection of comic books was on the chopping block. Although I hadn't done anything with them since they first were shipped to my house, I couldn't help but feel some kind of connection with them as an inheritance. I needed to do more with them than donate them to an all-purpose thrift store.

And thus began my quest...

Clark Kent, the original Bear Grylls

Panel from page 9 of Superman (Vol 2) Issue # 118