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Who am I?

I realize I had glossed over this in the first post, so I'm circling back.

So who am I?

Well my real name is Jason Smith, I say real name because as you can see I use an online moniker, Dinah L. Soar. There are a number of reasons for this and I shall get to them in due time, hopefully in this post. I have a Bachelor's in English from the College of Charleston and a MLIS from University of South Carolina. I have worked for almost 2 years in academic libraries, first at a for profit and now as a part time librarian. Yes, that means I am looking for a full time job, but that's not what this is about.

So basic info out of the way, let's dive into the other important stuff. I started reading comics in middle school and by that I mean reading actively. Before that I had picked up a copy of the Teen Titans Index #1, which had background information on all the Teen Titans and New Teen Titans, but it hadn't really inspired me to find the books or maybe I didn't really know where to find them. I don't remember. Either way, the X-Men Animated Series was my gateway into comics and as you can guess, I hit the X-Men scene hard in the early 90s. I collected as many X-men comics as I could, but weirdly looking back, I was collecting more Generation X, X-Force, and X-Factor than the main X-Men titles. Not really sure why, but that is what happened. Eventually I branched out into other comic labels, I got heavy into Chaos! comics especially Evil Ernie and Lady Death and Slave Labor Graphics which produced some of my favorite titles like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Lenore. That would be mostly what I collected with some Malibu, DC, Milestone and others I found cheap or were given to me through high school. Then I kind of fell out of comics for a little while. They became less of a focus as I switched more to Anime and Manga, which started in high school. Money being finite, I couldn't keep up with it all as much as I would have liked.

That changed in college as I literally walked right past a comic store every day from my car to school. Cheap parking was a distance from the school, but for $50 a semester, I'd walk and like I said, pass right by a comic store. I started going in and browsing and then I noticed that Northstar, who by the way is the first openly gay superhero from Marvel or DC, was joining the X-Men and I being a young gay college guy decided I had to follow it. Then something happened that changed my buying habits pretty permanently.. The Birds of Prey TV show hit The WB (which is now CW), at the same time a nice woman named Gail Simone had taken over the comic and introduced Huntress (a different one, but based on the same mold) to the team and I spotted that, picked it up on a whim and instant DC fan was born. It didn't hurt that the DC comics like Birds of Prey and Teen Titans that I was picking up were better written on every level than the X-Men comics. Also, my love for Slave Labor Graphics still stuck around and I was buying tons of indies and started a subscription. During this time I began to explore the world of DC though and it opened up a whole new world. I actively started chasing those New Teen Titans comics. I fell in love with Linda Danvers as Supergirl and I developed a life long love for Legion of Super-Heroes. It didn't hurt that this store had a good selection of back issues and everything was actually reasonably priced and the staff was amazing. So yeah die hard Marvel X-Men fan abandoned X-Men and went to the DC Side......

Flash forward a few years, that shop disappeared for various reasons and I fell out of active monthly comic collecting. Now I was still finding old comics and hunting down bargains thanks to E-Bay, but I wasn't actively following anything since I didn't have a store, I switched jobs and worked 60-80+ hours a week with crap pay and yeah.. Then a few years ago, met some people online and what not and we started talking comics, I started attending HeroesCon in Charlotte, NC regularly, the local comic shop I hated switched ownership so it was friendlier and the staff wasn't too hard to look at, so there I was. I've pretty much been following comics monthly since with a few lapses for various reasons and even when I'm not reading, I have a network of online friends where we pretty much talk about comics and characters and ideas. Twitter is great for that and you can follow and talk to creators...
So that explains that right? I think... Let me know if you want to know more.

Update: Originally I had a really long thing here that I thought was cute, but was ultimately unnecessary. I've deleted it to clean up some things and kind of rebrand a little and hopefully make things easier.

Changes are occurring as I realizing things and modifying things, so please bear with me and thank you for reading!


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