Hi, I'm Bob Bretall. That's me with Stan Lee in 2004!
I'm your host here at ComicSpectrum. I’ve been collecting and reading comics since I picked up Amazing Spider-Man #88 in 1970. Here's my copy of that comic autographed by both Stan Lee and "Jazzy" John Romita.
It was all about Marvel for the first several years, I'd buy anything with a Marvel logo. After a few years, I expanded my horizons and never looked back. There was too much great stuff out there to restrict my reading to just one company. I discovered "Indie" comics for the first time in 1975 with the short-lived Atlas-Seaboard line of comics. I picked up almost every comic they produced in the 10 months they published monthly comics. In 1980 I moved beyond super-heroes when I discovered Elfquest and Cerebus. That was it for me, from that point on I actively sought out comics of all kinds, loving the diverse genres and stories I was finding.
Reading comics for so long & so voraciously means I’ve accumulated quite a collection. I’ve got somewhere north of 105,000 different unique comic books, and I've read pretty much all of them! I also bought them all individually for myself over the years, there was never a big influx of several thousand comics all at once by buying a collection from someone else. I'm a fan. I buy them primarily to read, but them I save/collect them all.
I am the current Guinness World Record holder for Largest Comic Book Collection. As a result, my collection has gotten a bit of media attention which I've tried to keep track of on the ComicSpectrum site. My official Guinness count of unique comics is now 101,822, verified by Guinness in August 2015. But that was years ago! I have over 105,000 at this point.
I've been buying new comics every month since that first Spider-Man comic in 1970. I still buy and read at least 100 newly published comics every month, in addition to various back issues I buy to fill in gaps in my collection. I also have 100s of comics-themed statues and mini-busts, 100s of pages of original comic art & sketches, 1000s of movies & TV shows on DVD & Blu-Ray, and a host of other pop culture collectibles. You can see a lot of this stuff in pictures of my comic book room on my web-page.
As a result of my many years in and around the hobby, I have a lot of knowledge that I hope is interesting and definitely should be informative. I've also served on the Nomination Committee for the Inkwell Awards since 2012. I created ComicSpectrum as a means of sharing my love and experience about comics & pop culture with others. I'll try to share some of that here on my steemIt Blog. I also love to help people out when I can, you can reach me via e-mail at bob@comicspectrum.com
I look forward to sharing more comics-y goodness with everyone, please share this around to anyone you think might be interested.
PS: I'd like to give a shout out to Douglas Pasckiewicz of @arseniclullaby for the caricature of me & my comics used in the profile pic and the right-hand side of my Blog logo!