Afterthoughts on My Comic Book Journey

    Last week was the last leg of this blog series about every place where I could remember seeing and/or buying comic books.  That was a lot of places, especially when one considers all of the secondary places where I couldn't confirm if there were comics there or not.  Funnily enough, the initial idea for this series was to document every place where I saw deer on my way from home to work.  I soon realized that I would have to either be extremely vague about each location or be super exact to the point where anyone could find out where I lived.  I definitely didn't want that second option.  So, I chose to do comic books instead.  As I mentioned in the introductory post, I sometimes went over such locations as a means to help me fall asleep.  Now, I could have chosen many other options to go over, such as clothes.  However, I had found comics at many more places than I have clothes, at least seriously searching for them.  If you thought mentioning a dozen Walmarts was repetitive, clothes would have been much worse.  I mean, I would be mentioning about ten different Dawahares, including the rare one at the Huntington Mall that was one of the first to close before the store went out of business.  In fact, I could only come up with about ten different stores that only had a single location or that I have only been to one outlet in a chain, including Lad and Lassie of Prestonsburg where I got clothes when I was just a toddler and is still open to this day, albeit with new owners and a much more accessible location.   I had about two dozen separate spots for comics.  I could have also gone with such things as magazines, books, RPGs, or toys.  I wound up mentioning most of those places too, just as a secondary objective.  In fact, you may have noticed that I frequently mentioned magazines.  I did that for two main reasons.  First, many newsstands used to get their comic books from the same distributor as their magazines. Things changed in the early 2000s when comic book publishers started making exclusive deals.  Most newsstands and bookstores decided to stop carrying comic instead of going through multiple distributors just to get all of the most popular titles.  Nowadays, one is lucky to see an "Archie" digest in anyplace outside of a comic shop.  Secondly, back in the 90s, when the comic industry blew up, publishers started to send out preview issues to the many comic book magazines that sprung up.  Other pop culture themed mags, such as those for video games, sometimes got into the act.  These previews would be inserted into the polybag with other freebies. I can't remember exactly which preview I got with which mag, as well as where I bought each one.  However, by mentioning most of the places where I got mags, this source of comics would be covered. I planned out my itinerary well in advance to make sure I knew where everything would be mentioned.  As such, I frequently went back and added details before posting.  Osborne Elementary and the Floyd County Public Library were the last main entries I added, with the Morehead Walmart and the UK bookstore being the last secondary entries.  However, sometimes I forgot to include a detail or piece of trivia I wanted to add, or I remembered a location after I had already posted about its leg.  I also made some mistakes.  That's why I will be including an errata section next week.  It was supposed to cap off today's entry for the final post, but I started late today, and there were way too many things I needed to add.  So, tune in for one final week about my comic book journey.  I just can't keep away from this.