I've had a passion for collections of all sorts for as long as I can remember. My wife regularly jokes (she's not laughing) that I collect collections. I come by it honestly coming from a family of generational collectors. My Grandmother collected coins, postcards and stamps (at one point having one of the most complete collections of Scouting stamps in the world). After travelling to many shows with Grandma, Grandpa blended his passion for the Navy into starting his own Naval stamp collection. While my Mother didn't take her collections to the level of travelling to shows and joining societies she did always manage to follow the "I have to have them all" mantra with many things she liked - Hallmark ornaments, Spoons, Various household decoration nick-nacks, and of course postcards, buttons and badges from pretty much anywhere we ever travelled.

For me the bug did start with pins, buttons, badges and postcards as we did a lot of travelling and sightseeing through North America and Europe (I'm an army brat, so moved a lot and the collections came with me, building the memories of what we did). I still find it kind of hard to go someplace new and not buy a memento (but I don't). Collecting habits blurred into my toys, where I tried to acquire every new G.I. Joe figure even though plenty saw limited play time as they weren't as cool, I still had to have them. That had to have them line wreaked havoc on my wallet for a long time to come!

In conjunction with my G.I. Joe toys I started reading the comics regularly, it was a regular part of the grocery store visit as a kid, and became part of an hour long trek to the US base in England when we were stationed there. When the series came to an end, the trip to the comic shop had become so routine that I had to add something new, I'd read the odd super-hero comic occasionally but never a regular title. I started on to Avengers and have been reading it ever since. I've of course since branched out to over 20 titles monthly with some more regular than others.

I was sucked back into Hockey cards in the 90's with everyone else in the era of mass over production of sports cards. While those cards are worthless, most of the cards that carry the most interest for me these days are flashbacks to those sets. Well that and anything with a Team Canada uniform, I'm still a sucker for international hockey. I spent some time cycling between my hockey card and comic collections when I could only afford time or money for one, and then even started non-sport cards as a way to blend the 2 - that just created more of a wallet share crunch. Part of the fascination with cards was the ability to collect a player, build a checklist and try to get every single one of their cards. That dream died in the era of parallels numbered out of 10, 5 and 1.

These days, I still dabble in a number of collections, we'll get some showcases up eventually, but primarily focus on new books I want to read, completing my early Avengers run and a newfound focus on original art. I love to peruse OA at comic conventions, buying an occasional page when I can find an artist I like and a page featuring characters that I love. Predominantly though I also like to get new original commissions from artists.

More than anything else, my collecting habits have been influenced by the internet - both positively and negatively but mainly positive. I became a part of many different forums for hockey and non-sport cards as well as comics, posting pickups, sharing collections and trading and have made a number of friends around the world. Of course opening up the global marketplace also made it far easier to find those missing collection cards, now the battle wasn't to find what was missing, but to afford everything you could find. In a short period of time, that change had other impacts - local marketplaces were cannibalized by larger presences online and the "cheap low end" cards became a challenge to find. No one is paying $3 to get a 25 cent card shipped, but the local stores where you can find these are far fewer as no one was showing up in them to buy the more expensive cards. Ease of selling on E-Bay made everyone a seller, and the trading aspect (which was my favorite part) dried up.

While I obviously still spend a lot of time online, staying in touch, researching new products, buying and selling, my favorite part of the hobby remains going to a show. Whether I'm setup to sell, or just walking around, I love the atmosphere and being immersed in the hobby.