The internet is my playground.

Back in my teens and when I was utterly dependent on my parents for allowance, I had given up on collecting comic books. Though it was something that I had gotten into since third grade, by college freshman year I had realized the futility of wanting to be a ‘completist’. Sure there were the financial constraints that could be naturally expected of a teenager embarking on such a prohibitive goal, but more than that (and even if I had the money to back up my agenda) there was one major stumbling block – I simply didn’t know where to get the comics I needed for my collection. To my mind, I had exhausted the local market.

Thus was comic book collecting relegated to the recesses of my childhood. I drifted into the unremarkable demands of adulthood, wanting to be a self-made man (whatever that meant).

‘Til I heard about torrent… and eBay…

It started with the rarest back issues being downloadable. Never mind that my internet connection wasn’t too fast and that I risked burning my PC down from being turned on for days on end as I downloaded gigabytes upon gigabytes, all that mattered was that I stood to complete (at least in digital copies) the collection I had long given up on.

Then there was eBay… eBay.PH. By then I had stored up some savings in my couple of years as a junior executive in a bank. Capacity was thus combined with availability; and the rest is just economics.

But at some point even the local market was not enough. It was in December of 2007 that I first made an online purchase from an American seller. I went ahead even as, at the back of my mind, thoughts swirled of getting swindled, or of my credit card information being accessed, or of the purchased items simply being lost in transit. But… lo and behold… it worked!

After having credit limits stretched and customs duties paid, I now find myself with 3000+ pieces in my collection. As I write this, I await the arrival of a package from Spain, and I’m listing the items I’ll include in my next purchase.

Remember that metaphor about being like a kid left in a candy store? Well, the internet does all that, and more, to me. Now if only I could find a way around those darn customs duties…