yeah, well, the way i collect, its quite easy. every 2 years i get my 3-day ticket for 30 dollars or something, and then i use these days to either get sketches or signatures for free, or to buy comic books that get me a place in line to get drawings/sketches, or to buy expensive stuff. when i dont have money, i go there and its amazing what you can get for free. when i do have money, i buy stuff. its crazy what they have for sale, original pages of Lucky Luke or Tintin, even original vintage walt disney comic strips. with original i mean: 4 times larger than usual, uncolored, signed pages, done by the artist, delivered to the publisher who scanned and colored it and sold a gazillion copys of it. all of them are one-of-a-kind unique. but i dont have the money for that, these easily cost 4 to 5 digits a piece.

but even with my limited funds, i always go for stuff that is unique. if there is only one of it on the planet, then i want it. if its printed then i dont care for it, unless i want to read it. signed and numbered art prints are also interesting, if the price is reasonable and they are limited to less than 1000.

basically for me its like collecting art. it has to be unique, or at least signed, numbered, and limited. and i like watching the stars drawing something for me. its incredible how fast and accurate they are. like that guy working for disney, i showed him a cover image featuring darkwing duck on a mountaintop, leaning and looking into the distance. a cover he produced. he reproduced it for me in just a few minutes, using only a graphite pencil (walt disney employees are banned from using anything else when they draw outside the company, they get fired and fined when they draw with ink or a sharpie or any color outside of the company). but the result is astonishing and precise, he did it without any hesitation or corrections. of course he signed and dated it, also adding the name of the event and the location. i got it for free. at disneyland Anaheim, California, if they have an artist present, if i remember correctly, that would be somewhere around 200-500 dollars for a live drawing of a piece of this quality. also limited to pencil. but they dont have the artist who does the covers.

you get hooked easily. when you get something like, lets say, wolverine, done by the lead cover artist at MARVEL, it rapidly turns into an addiction.