This week, I bought issue #150 of Ultimate Spider-Man – a justifiably celebratory issue of what is, for my money, one of the best comics of the last decade. While the main-universe Spider-Man comics have endured an inconsistent (at best) ten years, Ultimate has never failed to impress, and has charted the compelling saga of a young hero – and a superbly-developed cast of characters around him – growing up.

And it’s one that I’m pleased to say I’ve been onboard with right since the very beginning – or thereabouts. The year the series began, 2000, coincided with my just starting to get into buying monthly comics for the first time. A combination of the discovery of internet comics discussion and buying issues of Wizard (yeah… I know) on trips to Liverpool city centre’s Forbidden Planet meant that I was starting to become aware of what was going on in “current” comics instead of relying on reprints, TPBs or single-issues filtering through long after their initial publication. And when I heard about Ultimate Spider-Man, it sounded an interesting enough prospect – despite knowing next to nothing about this Bendis bloke – that I was keen to read it.

I missed the first three issues on their initial publication, but in December of that year I happened to be in Oxford, interviewing for a place at the university. After an interview at the college I’d actually applied to – one of the big, well-known ones in the centre of the town – I got sent for a “second chance” interview at a much smaller one, further out of town (spoilers: this was the one I ended up getting into). Were it not for that second interview… well, many aspects of my life would have turned out differently, but I imagine it would have taken me a lot longer to discover Oxford’s one comic shop (as was then), Comic Showcase, which I spotted on my way. I resolved to pop in after the interview (I wasn’t so easily distracted by comics as to risk being late by going in first), and when I did, one thing in particular jumped out at me to buy – a reprint edition that collected issues #1-3 of Ultimate Spider-Man. Great stuff.

Although I was able to get issue #4 the next month, and establish myself as a regular buyer from then on (it therefore becoming my first regular monthly purchase – Amazing would follow when Straczynski took over in 2001), for some reason I ended up missing out on issues #5 and #8 – and in those days, when the book was selling like hot cakes, it was really hard to catch up on an issue if you didn’t get it the week or month it came out. I wasn’t unduly bothered at the time, though – I’d managed to read the missing issues anyway, not through any sort of nefarious piracy, but because of the bizarre “dotComics” scheme on the Marvel website at the time, on which issues of the Ultimate titles were appearing for free surprisingly soon after their print publication. As such, although there were gaps in my run, I didn’t exactly have a “collection” to speak of, so I wasn’t too concerned.

But as time went on, I kept buying the series. And the further I got, the more irritating it became that I’d missed out on that early pair of issues. Fast-forward to the present day, and of those 150 issues that have now been published, I’m missing surprisingly few. Assorted circumstances (whether missing buying them at the time, or somehow losing them since) mean that of the block between #51 and #133 (the end of the volume one numbering), I’m only missing eight issues (all of which I should eventually get round to filling in). But more impressively (yeah, I’m boasting), of the first fifty issues, the only one I’m missing (if you count the reprint as my “owning” issues #1-3) is #5. This is because on the earlier-mentioned trip to LA last year, I managed to find a copy of #8 for Surprisingly Cheaps, plugging a long-standing gap – but #5 has remained maddeningly difficult to track down due to its small print run and popularity at the time (to give you an idea, it’s the earliest original-print issue that Incognito Comics have, and they’re selling it for FORTY QUID).

Ultimate Spider-Man is undoubtedly one of the highlights of my comics collection – both for its quality and for the fact that it’s by far the longest-running series I’ve managed to collect anything near a complete run of. But if only I’d had the foresight to make sure I got #5 at the time it was published, it would be even better.