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Anyway.

Before the school year started, though, we stayed in an apartment complex a few towns over from where our house was being built, and from where my sister and I would be going to school. So we didn’t have a chance to meet anybody we’d be going to school with, and there weren’t really any kids in the apartment complex besides us. My sister and I got along pretty well, but there wasn’t a whole lot of things we could do. We got bored pretty quickly. Down at the end of the street, though, was an old-fashioned general store. A rickety old ramshackle house, with the front part of it expanded to an all purpose supply store. Quaint and pretty much as bucolic as you’re proba bly imagining. Picture a Saturday Evening Pos t cover starring Vermont hip pies, and you’ll be on the right track. Whenever we got bored with trying to spot minnows swimming by in the small stream or tired of biking around the woods or flying kites or looking for a good place to build a tree house, we would end up down at the gen eral store and buy some maple sugar candy which was nearly the most exotic thing we had ever tasted. We could buy 45s for our turntable… I still have the AM radio versions of “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Uneasy Rider” that I bought there… Now, I’d already been a big fan of World’s Finest and Adventure Comics and Captain America, but I also liked those Charlton hot-rod comics and Gold Key Westerns. I’d read anything, really. I could take comics or leave ‘em. Even as a kid, I knew the difference between real and make-believe, and these four-color adventures were cool, and all, but obviously made-up. I mean, Spidey swinging through New York City may well have been King Arthur riding to Camelot for as much as it meant to me . They were just sto ries. Then, one day, we rolled into the General Store to get some comics, and one had been separated from all the rest at the spinner rack, and had been set up in a pile next to the cash register. A little sign said that the story in that comic took place in Rutland, the town just up the road. …or we’d load up on comic books.

I remember thinking, “Whaaaaat?” There was no way that a made-up story could take place right up the street.

So, I bought the comic. It was Avengers #119, and the Collector had come

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