I operated on my own brain!

It took so many years to find the comics I wanted more than naything else in the world, that I have mental scar tissue from remembering the exact numbers I was looking for. Even if I filled those gaps years and years ago, I still know what numbers I needed and it's genuinely disconcerting to think how much brain space has been devoted to the idea of missing comics.

I still know that it was MiracleMan #6 that I was after for 20 years until I found it at the Jim Hanley store near the empire state Building, and that I was after Sandman #51 for 15 years before I found in a 50p bin in central London.

I completed a massive collection of all the 2000ads last year, but can tell you without looking it up that 463 was so fucking hard to find because it didn't show up in my town in 1986. It wasn't until the 21st century that I got to go to Wellington and in one of the mad old junk shops they used to have down the bottom of Cuba Street, finding old thrillpower stacked behind dusty glass lamps.

Comics can be so bloody hard to find around here, and collecting them required patience, and a ridiculous amount of brain space. The holes in the collection, the inevitable missing issues, they fucking gnawed at me, man. There were thousands and thousands of holes to fill, and I had to write them down, but even then, I knew exactly what the lost issue was.

It hasn't gone away. I don't need to look anything up to know which of the Bendis Legion of Superhero comics that I'm missing because of bastard speculators, and which one Stray Bullets comic I need to have them all (it's easier to remember - if not to find - when it's the last one). 

Maybe I could have been somebody, might even have been a contender, if my brainpower went to a better use. All this useless trivia, and it is even worse than the usual pop culture bullshit, because it means absolutely nothing to everybody else in the head.

I could have used my brain to learn a musical instrument, or how to climb mountains, or solve complex mathematical formulas. But no, I had to use a permanent part of my brain space to always remember which issue of Justice league International I needed in 1992.

Oh well. At least the JLI was rad.