So just the other day I was cleaning my room, and I found a box under my bed, and in it - among other things - were a few issues of The Comics Journal I'd collected back then, featuring interviews with such greats as Charles Vess, Linda Medley, Kurt Busiek, Jeff Smith, Megan Kelso, John Severin and Chris Ware. I gravitated first towards #216, cover dated January 1999, because it had the Kurt Busiek interview, and it's always a joy to re-read it. Bear in mind that these interviews are often in-depth looks into an author's career, and they'll discuss everything from their influences (past and present), how they broke into the field, what they hope to achieve with the medium, how can they improve it, etc.
Reading the Busiek interview, I can't help but find some parallels there between what influenced him the most and what had the same effect on me, especially that '66 to maybe early '80s era of comics, which was the bulk of what I read growing up. Long before I even discovered that the actual comics were pencilled, written, inked, produced originally in America, I eagerly sought to collect and hoard as many of the brazilian editions I saw on newsstands, and it was in those sometimes heavily edited pages, often published without much continuity cohesiveness, that I would fall in love with the comics medium. And while I'm not sure those books were the first thing I actually collected (though I think they might have been), it's probably what sparked an interest in collecting in me. I'm taking a walk down memory lane here, and I remember being very, very young and collecting stickers (mainly football and cartoons), action figures, and sci-fi books (especially the E-A pocket collection), but there's a specific thing to my collecting that definitely began with comics : the gimmick. And the gimmick - it can be a number of any different things - that first got to me was when in 1985 the brazilian publisher Abril started giving out keychains with some of its comics - see them here - and to my 8 year old mind there was nothing that could ever top that. I couldn't ever collect them all, I think some books weren't published here at all, but those I had I absolutely loved to death. Soon after, they offered mini posters, temporary tattoos, screen printed transfers that could be ironed into a t-shirt and all that helped fuel my love for the gimmick.
When I started buying american comics, for a good while all I knew were standard editions of those books, their covers plain, just like any other comic out there, until the '90s hit and gimmick covers became a de facto thing. They could be foil, variant, die-cut, hologram, embossed, glow in the dark, scratch and sniff, interlocking, acetate, poly-bagged, fluorescent, prismatic, thermal-recative and my personal favourites - the chromium covers. I'm sure that beyond these there were even more gimmicks I thankfully don't remember anymore. But I loved all these gimmicky covers and I bought as many of these as I could, even going so far as paying multiple times the cover price just to have it in my collection. And these gimmicks didn't limit themselves just to my comics collecting. Maybe around '93 or so I started getting serious about my CD collecting, and with time I'd be adding digipack editions, limited editions, japanese imports, tour editions, whatever, to my collection. Sometimes I'd have 4 or 5 different editions of the same record and very likely some of them spent most of their tenure in my collection unopened and unplayed. And now we're getting to where I wanted to, which is my preferred gimmick when it comes to my vinyl collecting. Nowadays I'd say that coloured, splatter, marbled, transparent, or striped records appeal to me quite a lot - and I'd rather get one of those rather than a standard black edition.
But way before that... my first gimmick in my vinyl collecting was a little something called shape vinyl - records that are cut to a specific shape, often resulting in eye-catching results. The very first I remember seeing was in some record store (can't remember which) that had a copy of Survivor's 'Burning heart' for sale, shaped like a boxing glove, but no amount of pleading with my parents got them to buy it. The first I owned was actually Ray Parker Jr's 'Ghostbusters', shaped like the iconic Ghostbusters logo, which I very sadly managed to break somehow, and that got me in trouble with my parents because hey, once clumsy, always clumsy. And I can be very clumsy indeed. Some time in the mid '90s I started getting into vinyl again - it took a huge backseat to my CD collection, and it wouldn't be until some special record fairs began popping up that I started to devote some of my income to it. I wouldn't immediately be buying a lot of records, nor was I exactly prone to making impulse buys. But whenever I saw a shape vinyl, I'd get it, if it wasn't too pricey. Some that I can recall owning were a bunch of Iron Maiden ones that now fetch hefty prices, a few Queensryche (pictured above, though these are recent purchases) and others I can't even recall anymore. I loved having these records, holding them, tracing their shape with my fingers, though at the time I didn't in fact have a record player to listen to them.
As with any other previous form of my collecting, I sort of always had a grail - in terms of brazilian comics it was Super Powers #2, in terms of american comics it was Grendel's first appearance in Comico Primer #2, I'm sure I might have had some sort of grail regarding my CD collection, but there was a particular shape vinyl that I desperately lusted after and there was a single store I knew of that had it - but not for sale, not for any price. God knows I tried, but the guy wouldn't budge. Rather than selling it, he had it on display in his store - a place that I quite detest, but to where I've been to far too many times. You can see it pictured right here to the right, and believe me - my teenage self wanted this almost as much as I wanted sex. Back then we didn't have things like Discogs, internet was still a ways away from being what it'd become, and even in my first forays into London record shops I never managed to see one of these in the wild. And, if I'm honest, I've barely thought about it these many years, though now and again when I went to that particular store it would always catch my eye, but I never really entertained the notion of buying it again. When I decided to begin collecting again, one of the things I knew for a fact was that I didn't really want to get all of the records I used to have - I had a load of records that I wouldn't want to have now. But I did know one thing... some records I did have, I wanted to buy again. What I didn't know was that some of those records now go for premium prices, so until someone decides to reissue those, I sure as hell will not pay the hundreds of euros or dollars they now go for. Still, in that previous collection there were a few that I could still get at a fair price. One of those - not only because I like the band quite a lot, but also because it's one of my favourite shape records - was none other than Yeah Yeah Yeah's single 'Cheated Hearts', one of the highlights from their sophomore effort 'Show your bones'. I leave you with the Peaches remix below.
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