Treasure in the Trash

I’ve been accused of being a hoarder at times in my life.

You could say it runs in the family: my great aunt had tall stacks of newspapers dominating one room of her house late in life, and I remember navigating the maze of archives from the prior 80 years with a mixture of dread and wonder. It was like the world’s most disorganized museum, and my great aunt was far from the only one who did this in my family.

I wrote a little about this phenomenon arising from a scarcity mindset in my own life, culminating in me collecting things since I was a kid. Used items people would otherwise throw away had some value to a collector, and I was there to rescue them from their unfortunate future in landfills (recycling paper in the 80s wasn’t a thing where I grew up).

A lot of the things I collected had some real artistic value, too. I look back today at some of the great comic book artists during the 70s and 80s like Bernie Wrightson, John Byrne, and eventually Todd McFarlane as fine artists in …