When Thor broke the need for everything

And for a while there, I am literally buying every new Marvel and DC comic I can get my hands on. It's the early 90s, I've started working and getting a weekly pay, and my obsession with comics has never been higher. I want to buy all the comics I can.

Unfortunately, I live hundreds of kilometers away from any kind of comic store, so when it comes to new comics, I have to rely on what shows up in the local bookstores and corner dairies. I have no control on what appears on those shelves and the pickings are slim, and irregular. 

It's fairly easy to keep up with the X-Men, because they're way more available, although you would always miss at least an issue a year, and sometimes you wouldn't see the New Mutants anywhere for months at a time (I miss the first Liefeld issues because of this). But I might get one of the four Superman titles (which was a bitch during the triangle era where it was all one long story) or the random issue of Star Trek or Deathlok that shows up.

Some things are there every month, more or less. I end up with things like as significant amount of the Tom DeFalco/Paul Ryan Fantastic Four, all the Dan Jurgens run on Justice League and a disturbing amount of What The-?! 

But I'm just buying everything I can. I've got disposable income for the first time in my life, and my driver's licence, so I'm getting a couple of dozen comics every month.

And then, when I buy a Thor comic for $3.95 (in 1992 money) from an Ashburton bookstore, it's deeply, deeply average, and something surprisingly tiny and delicate breaks inside of me, and I realise I don't have to get everything.

More than anything else, this one issue broke some habits that were getting out of hand. I saw the next Thor issue on the shelves and I am amazed by how easy it is to leave it there. And maybe I don't have to grab everything I can get my hands on.

Then I started going further afield and going to an actual comic store where I obviously can't just buy everything, so I focus on dropping a couple of hundred bucks on Alpha Flight and Hellblazer comics instead of just grabbing what I could.

I still had a completist mentality when it comes to certain creators for a lot longer. It took me another decade before I realised I didn't need every single Alan Moore comic (I can thank the Spawn/WildCATS crossover for that particular tiny revelation), but I stopped getting everything a long, long time ago.

And all it took was a mediocre thunder god adventure to realise that.