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Sure, comic book characters are all the rage now, but when I was a kid, we used to read about them, not watch them. Few things made me happier as a kid than getting my allowance for a job well done (whatever "job" that happened to be that week), racing down to the corner store, and flipping through comics for hours at a time until the clerk told me to buy something or get out. So, with a whole dollar to my name, I'd stack up on seven or eight DC and Marvel titles, but really, they were all great. We had a lot to choose from back then, be they the gritty war stories of "Sgt. Rock," the colorfully cheesy, post-Adam West tales of "Batman," or the real world angst of every teenage boy's favorite, "Spider-Man." photo: dc.wikia.com They were an escape, and at the time, I had no idea they'd one day be worth a fortune. For me, they just felt right rolled up and sticking out of my back pocket, or hidden inside my World History textbook during study hall. Mind you, this was a ritual that went on for years, so by the time college arrived, I had amassed well over a thousand comics, including a few rare ones that would later help me put a down payment on my first house. Unlike many in my generation, mom never threw out my collection: She saw how much I cherished them, and had this crazy idea that I'd one day pass them on to my own children. In a way, I did...only instead of reading to my kids about The Incredible Hulk, I painted that same character onto my son's bedroom wall. I kept up with comics for decades to come, and even used to attend the old conventions when they were still called "trade shows." photo: kotaku.com Comics have pretty much overtaken mainstream Hollywood in the last 15 years, and with that saturation has come a little bit of longing for the simpler times, when a boy could escape into his tree house at midnight and run away to a world with characters that felt like old friends. Hard to get that same feeling from a CGI flick with a $200 million budget, but hey, with great exposure comes great responsibility...or something like that. - For a look at the evolution of comic books.