When is a pile of crap considered a collection?
As long as I can remember, I’ve liked gathering things together to surround my life. Most of these things have come and gone. Smooth, round stones from various streams, rivers, and beaches. A shoebox-sized plywood box filled with bits and pieces of a broken transistor radio; marbles, foreign coins, stripped phone wires, bottle caps—pretty much anything that seemed useful for building, fixing, or inventing … something.
I saved both a can and a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke that I bought in the weeks before the release of “New Coke” … to wait for the day I’d find the buyer for a taste of history. An old, broken CB radio that shorted out when the power adapter got plugged into the wrong jack. Every sketchbook I owned since grade school (most only half-filled) in case someone might need them for a comprehensive biography about me. A binder clip of a couple hundred Bazooka Joe comics because … well, they seemed to be worth points that someday might get me something I really wanted.
These were all parts of my childhood “collections” for years and years. Somewhere in my imagination they sparked a little glimmer, seeming to offer the potential for some bigger project or reward. And so as I encountered these odds and ends, I’d add them to my piles. These collections formed gradually, almost subconsciously. Just as subtly, they gradually faded away to make room for other concerns and interests. To this day, rummaging around my old room, I rediscover things—little piles of my history which are now inscrutable to me (a random collection of Outside and Winning magazines from the ’80s; a denim “purse” filled with fifty-cent and dollar coins).
An exception to this process of gradual disappearance has been my collection of black-and-white paperback Japanese comic books. Called “manga”—or more accurately, tanko-bon (a collection of manga episodes gathered into a single bound volume)—each edition contains a collection of about ten consecutive episodes from a monthly (or weekly) comic.
My grandparents got me hooked. As my young parents struggled to negotiate parenthood and a new life in New York City, my grandparents did what they could from their small city in Japan. Every month or two, I’d receive a package from them. Inside was a brand-new, recent issue of a monthly magazine for kids. The majority of the inside pages were printed one-color (black ink) on cheap, uncoated paper stock. The cover and a few of the front pages were tantalizingly printed in shiny, glossy, full color. Aside from brief language and math lessons of which I have no conscious recollection, these thick, perfect-bound magazines were full of episodes of several comics (to be continued the following month).
