There are plenty of comics I’ve owned over the years that could fall under this heading – although less likely from around the time I started actually buying them regularly, circa 2000-2001, as from that point my “compulsive hoarder” instinct kicked in and I basically vowed never to throw away a comic, even if it was really bad. Prior to that, though, I’d had plenty of comics as a kid that will have fallen by the wayside at some point or another – many of which I probably don’t even remember, and some of which I do (such as the London Editions reprint titles I mentioned back in the first post, or many countless editions of Roy of the Rovers). Another one of the latter, though, was an odd little thing – a four-part miniseries put out by Marvel in the early ’90s, called The Spider-Man Saga.

An odd thing about me is that I read around things about as much as – if not more than – experiencing the things themselves. As an example – I’ve never watched a George Romero film (or indeed, any horror film of any note – I can’t cope with the ick), but I’ve read plot summaries of most of them. I’ve seen far fewer full Doctor Who stories than you might expect from someone who talks about it as much as I do (although I have still seen a lot of Doctor Who stories, it must be said). And if I were being candid, I’d even admit that I occasionally wrote essays at University on books based solely on descriptions and criticism rather than the texts themselves. Basically, I like to have a pretty broad knowledge across film, TV, books, comics and the rest – but with so few hours in the day, it’s hard to actually get round to reading or watching everything there is to see.

This is where handbooks, guidebooks, Wikipedia and the rest come into their own. But it’s also worth pointing out that these things can be entertaining objects in their own right, even as they’re informing – it’s why my two-binder-based Who’s Who in the DC Universe (the 1990-92 version) is one of the prize objects in my comics collection. And it’s also a reason why I knew quite a lot of Spider-Man’s history from a relatively early age, despite having read scarce few actual Spidey comics themselves – it’s because I had The Spider-Man Saga. The miniseries basically recounted the entire history of the character – up to that point – with a mixture of comic-style panels (I remember various iconic images showing up – but can’t actually remember offhand whether it used original artwork, or simply recreated the classic panels), so although I of course knew things like the origin, a lot of other moments in history (death of Gwen, first appearance of MJ, Venom, the wedding etc.) were filled in by the Saga. It actually did a fairly decent job of being an entertaining yarn in its own right (with good reason – the long and varied story of Spider-Man’s life is, for the most part, one of the better ones in comics).

Of all the comics I’ve lost, The Spider-Man Saga is one of those ones that I’ve often thought about (for a while I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it, as nobody else ever seemed to have heard of it; hurrah for the internet proving its existence and my relative sanity) – but I’ve never gone quite so far as to actively seek out another set of issues (I’ve looked for it in back-issue boxes when at conventions and so on, but never bothered to buy it from one of the many places online that could instantly furnish me with a copy). Perhaps it’s just that it really wouldn’t seem all that necessary – it’s not like I need reminding of Spidey’s history any more, and even if I did, the internet serves that purpose nowadays – although that’s never stopped me with other nostalgia purchases, so perhaps one of these days it’s another gap I should re-fill…