All right, Gene, ya got me.

To put that into context, about two years ago, I met Gene in person for the first time at the Baltimore Comic-Con.  As we spent time comparing notes on who we met, who we talked to, and what we bought, he handed me this pile of Quasar comic books.  Because spreading the word of Quasar like a comic book Jehovah’s Witness is what Gene does on the regular and I was just the latest recipient of the Word.

Well, the comics got taken home and filed among the “To Read” Marvel books, and that’s where they sat until I was looking for the next set of books to read as part of this project and grabbed them.  It was a character I knew of only because I had been a comics reader in the Nineties but not a character I knew anything about, because if the Marvel character isn’t in an X-book, I know very little about them.  To be fair, I’ve never made fun of Quasar, although I always did get the impression from the Wizard-fueled crowd back in the day that he wasn’t exactly the coolest character to be seen reading.  He was just never on my radar.

If Gene’s giving me several issues over the course of the series was just coincidence because he was trying to get rid of doubles, then it was a good coincidence; if he purposely gave me a sample of the entire series arc, the man is a diabolical genius.  I’m not going to get too into the weeds on specific stories except to say that I was reminded a lot of what I’ve read from the Will Payton Starman series, which is that he seems to be an ordinary guy who suddenly has great cosmic powers and is spending a lot of time figuring out not only how to manage them and use them but also how to manage his life with them.  It’s not a new concept–in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s a very Marvel concept–but the issues I read were well-written and fun, and not only that, as I got to some of the later books in the stack, they referred to incidents or issues from some of the earlier books in the stack.  Like I said, diabolical genius.

So, I think I’m going to seek this one out, either digitally or in the bins.  It runs for 60 issues plus three specials and the crossover known as “Operation Galactic Storm” (which I had completely dismissed as lame when I was collecting because it wasn’t cool Jim Lee X-Men Awesomeness).  I figure that between the bins at my LCS and this year’s Baltimore Comic-Con, I should be able to amass much of the run.

So a delay on an actual review, as I’m going to collect this, read it, and decide what to do from there, but I wanted to acknowledge how I got sucked into something and how I’m actually not upset about this because what happened was truly a moment of “finding your joy.”

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Keep (and continue to collect)