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comicswithcate2020 · 4 years

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Connor’s Collection of Comics

Imagine being seven years old, sitting in a movie theater and watching Toby McGuire on the big screen wearing the iconic blue and red suit. Imagine leaving the theater speechless and wondering what other adventures and stories Spiderman has to offer. That’s exactly when 25 year old Connor O’Keefe decided he wanted to try comic books. Connor has been collecting comic books for almost 15 years. Growing up in Medford, MA, Connor was influenced by his parents and the pop culture that surrounded him. Between the cartoons that he used to watch and growing up with comic book movies originally starting to come out, Connor became hooked. It was after the third Sam Rani Spiderman movie that Connor officially got into comics. He became a collector of all things Venom and Venom related. Although Connor's collection isn’t just limited to Marvel, as he also collects a lot of Star Wars merchandise. He specifically likes General Grievous- he recently completed a General Grievous model. To complete the model, he painted it by hand to make it look more realistic. A peek into his bedroom can show you just how much he has collected throughout the years.

His walls are adorned with quite a few posters, his shelf is filled with comics, posters and frames that have yet to be hung sitting in a pile on the floor. A lot of these frames were gathered at Comic Cons- when he got old enough, he started going to Boston Comic Con with his father and has been known to go for at least one out of the three days every year. He has autographed headshots of different characters, like Bane from Batman. Yet to be hung up is a Venom shadow box filled with different cut outs of Venom’s different art styles throughout the years. Funko Pops adorn his shelves and his TV stand, ranging with characters from The Big Bang Theory to Smuag from Lord of the Rings. Everywhere you look in his room, you can find something comic related- whether it is DC, Marvel, Star Wars, or even select video games.

Growing up in Medford, Connor would go to shop at Harrison's Comics, found in The Meadow Glen Mall. When he was 14, his family moved to Reading, MA and Connor realized he needed to find a new store. He happened upon Comically Speaking and has been going there ever since.

Q: How were you introduced to comic books?

A: They were just there. I was born in 95’ so I had my adolescence and early adulthood molded by the comic book movies. As we know them today, they started really in 1998 with Blade. That's kind of when they started taking off, because then they had the Sam Raimi SpiderMan movies, the original X-Men trilogy, and so on. I grew up watching these movies and watching the cartoons and eventually, I think it was after SpiderMan 3 came out, I was in fifth grade, I thought, ‘yeah, I want to read the material that inspired these movies that I liked so much.’ I was living in Medford at the time, so there was a comic book store, Harrison’s, that was in the Meadow Glen Mall, which is no longer a thing in Medford. But I went there and I picked up a couple of back issues of comics and I have been reading comics consistently since then. It's a month to month thing, but the movies basically got me into it. Well, the movies and the cartoons.

Q: Who is your favorite character and why?

A: My favorite character is Venom, specifically Eddie Brock as Venom. There have been a couple of different characters that have had that title. Eddie is my favorite character because first of all, his visual design is very good. It's very crisp- you immediately know when you're looking at when you see him. He’s super edgy and I really like that kind of thing. I like Eddie because he's had a very long transformation over the course of the 30 years he's been around. At first he was just trying to kill SpiderMan and then he had an arc where he realizes that Spiderman isn't such a bad guy. And then he was sick with cancer and he realized, ‘Hey, I have kind of been doing some terrible stuff’ and he gets better from the cancer and he decides he's going to take this new lease on life and become a better person and be a hero. When I first started reading comics, they were in the middle of the cancer arc. So while I've been reading comics, I only know Eddie Brock as a hero. So in my mind, Venom is a superhero because that's what he's been for 20 of the 30 years he's existed.

Q: What type(s) of comic related things do you collect?

A: I do collect back issues, starting when I was in fifth grade, so I am 25 now. I take great pride in the fact that I have amassed, I don't want to say all of them cause I'm sure there's an odd issue here or there that I might've missed. But every single issue that Eddie Brock has appeared in, with the exception of his first and second appearances, which are like massively expensive, $200-300 issues. Those are the great white whales. But I have just about every single issue of comic book that he's ever appeared in over the course of 30 years. I kind of take some pride in that. That's taken a while to amass. Obviously that's ever expanding because he has a current ongoing book. In terms of other things I collect, I am trying to build a physical collection of the movies. Personally I enjoy streaming content but at the same time I realize that I don't want to be left without a particular film, if a company decides that they want to pull an individual move from a service. A little while ago they almost pulled Friends from Netflix and people started freaking out, everyone was losing their minds about it. And I'm like, ‘Hey, buy the physical copy, no one's taken that away from you.’ So I collect the movies. I think out of the 20 Marvel Studios movies, I have about 17 of them in some capacity or another. I don't necessarily collect games, there haven't been too many comic book games lately. But I do play them when they come out.

Q: Which is your most treasured comic?

A: My most treasured comic is the first mini series of comics I ever got. It's a series of six issues that came out in 94’, called Venom: Lethal Protector. It was Eddie Brock's first standalone story where he was trying to prove his worth as a hero and they were kind of hard to track down. I had to track them down over the course of two years. I started collecting them when I was in fifth grade. It was before the internet really took off, and before online ordering was a thing. So I was tracking 20 year old comics down at brick and mortar stores, which is kind of a tall order. Especially when you're 10 years old and you can't get anywhere yourself. So I have all six of those. They're in packages, they're propped up and they're preserved. I don't read them, I have different means of reading the story if I ever want to revisit it. But those are probably my most treasured thing in my comic collection.

Q: Which comic book related movie is your favorite and least favorite?

A: I'm going to sound like a bit of a broken record, but the Venom movie that came out, the other year has a very special place in my heart even though it's not necessarily one-to-one with the character. That movie was in production, since SpiderMan 3 came out in 2007. It's been in production a very long time and people have been trying to get it off the ground for many, many years and I was following it day by day. When that finally came out, I had this big party, I basically went through my contacts and got a bunch of people that I knew over the course of that 10 year span. And I'm like, ‘Hey, you remember that Venom movie I always talked about? Uh, it's finally coming out. You guys want to go see it?’ It was this big thing. I have pictures from that day. We all went to Dick's Last Resort in Boston, we went out to dinner beforehand and we all just had a great time with it. That movie, even though it's not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination, it holds a very special place in my heart.

Q: Are there any movies that you think goes against a character completely?

A: This is a slightly controversial opinion. I don't think Marvel Spiderman, like the current Spiderman, Tom Holland is good. I enjoy the movies and I think Tom Holland's great. But Spiderman- he's supposed to be his own man. In the new Marvel movies that come out, he's presented as Iron Man's sidekick. He has not had a solo movie where he's dealing with one of his own villains. Every villain that Spiderman has so far is somebody who's pissed off at Iron Man. So Spiderman has to spend his solo movies, cleaning up Iron Man's messes. I think that it's really unfortunate that they used Iron Man as Spiderman's jumping off point because Spiderman has, out of all the characters, some of the richest individual stories he can tell. Every character has their big stories, but Spiderman has the most. He is that company's flagship character and has been for so many years before Iron Man blew up. It's especially unfortunate that Iron Man has taken the place of Uncle Ben in the current Spiderman movies. Uncle Ben is the reason Spiderman does what he does in every single medium across the board. So, slightly controversial take on that one. But yeah, Tom Holland Spiderman, while enjoyable to watch is definitely not the Spiderman I would have liked to have seen on the big screen. I still think Toby Maguire is probably the most accurate Spiderman.

Q: Can you touch upon the movie script that you wrote for Venom when you were younger?

A: I was 10 or 11 years old and I had written a script for the Venom movie that was 20 pages long because I had no concept of how that would translate to the screen. I still have it by the way, it's up in my room on my desk. It's terrible and it's cringy and it's everything you would expect a 10 year old to write. But I got to say, I wrote a fight scene in that movie and that fight scene is a banger. I would love to see that translate to the big screen. 10 year old Connor could choreograph fights. All this crazy stuff was going to happen, they're really beating the life out of each other. Lampposts were flying, it was great. I want somebody, if you're reading this, give me a call. We can work something out.

Q: How did you find out about Comically Speaking?

A: A couple of years after I started getting into comics, my family moved from Medford to Reading. Granted this was not the thing that really drove me to Comically Speaking. The thing that drove me to Comically Speaking was Harrison's shuttered their doors like a year or so before we made the move. So when we ended up in Reading, I knew I needed to find a new place to do comics stuff . So I just Googled places for comics near me and Comically Speaking came up and I went there and I've been going there pretty consistently since we moved to Reading about 11 years ago.

Q: What were your first impressions of the store?

A: My first impression of the store was that I felt a little overwhelmed. They have a lot more than Harrison's did, in terms of their selection of books. You got to remember also at the time, I was like 13 and they like to think that they know everything and when they are presented with something that they do not know, they refuse to admit that they do not know it. So I spent about 40 minutes in that store just wandering around like a dumb ass, searchng for what I was looking for. Eventually I figured it out, It was the preteen equivalent to when they change stuff around at the grocery store and you get angry that you can't find it. But yes, I was very overwhelmed and I was too full of myself to accept anyone's help.

Q: You’ve been to other stores that sell comics, chain stores and whatnot, how does Comically Speaking compare?

A: I’m struggling to remember what the Harrison's in Medford was like because that was a lifetime and a half ago. There’s one in Salem, it’s pretty easy to navigate. They have stuff like manga, the Japanese comics. Harrison's is all right, I prefer Comically Speaking myself,it's my home store. Newbury Comics they're less of a comic store, you'll go into Newbury Comics and you can get a lot of stuff there, but you walk in there like, ‘Hey, I'm looking for comics’ and they have this tiny itty bitty rack in the corner with like only like 10 of the most recent comics of the most from the most popular books. And it's just like, 50% of your name is complete bullshit Newbury Comics. You're selling like 10 comics in this store. Comically Speaking, for me, is where I want to go and get some books. I'm gonna get some books and with the downstairs area I can go down there and get collectibles now. I only go to Harrison's or Newbury if I'm completely out of the area, those were my go to while I was at school in Beverley. But if I'm here and I have the time and money, I'm definitely going to be in Comically Speaking at least once a month, picking up the books that I read.

Q: What do you think about Comically Speaking as a whole?

A: It's my store. There's a lot of concern right now, I don't know how familiar you are with the actual comics industry, but one of their big shipping companies, Diamond, shut their doors for the minute because of the coronavirus. So DC and Marvel can't get their books out if Diamond isn't actually moving them. The Corona virus is going to be hitting the comics industry a lot harder than most industries. I am a little concerned about it because the locally owned stores are going to be the ones hit by it. I'm hoping that everything works out once this wears off and things are stable again. I'll definitely be going in there and helping out, spending some time. I like the store, it’s a good homey environment. That's the other thing about Newbury, I walk into Newbury Comics and I get the trendy geek vibe. When you go into Comically Speaking, I never get that vibe. It's just very down to earth and it doesn't feel pretentious. It's always like these people like what they're doing, they like comics. If I walked into a Newbury Comics and I asked them what they thought of a particular artist, they wouldn't know. I don’t know, there's more genuineness there to the people and the environment. Everything about Comically Speaking, I feel like I'm with my people there.

Q: What do comics mean to you?

A: They entertain me. I like reading the stories. I think most of the characters are pretty good. There are more characters you can count with comics. I could sit here for hours and I probably wouldn't even scratch the surface. They’re really good to convey things about who we are as a people and what we hold dear. If you exist on this earth, if you have a pulse, there's a comic book character that you can connect with in some way. Or you can look at this character and say, ‘Hey, I understand what that person is going through. I want to read more about that person and I want to see what kind of adventures they go on’. You can connect with that and I think that's what gives any type of medium; comics, movies, TV shows. That's what gives mediums their strength. When you can look at characters and see characters who you are inside, or you know someone like that. I think that's what gives a story their legs. Comics for me are filled with characters like that.

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