Frank Santoro once described me as a guy with a complete run of Heavy Metal. 

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The American comics culture has always had a collector’s aspect to it and Heavy Metal is a great example of how that aspect has been aggressively monetized. From issue two, every issue had a page that indicated what back issues (all of them collector’s items) could be purchased direct from the magazine. Heavy Metal also sold back issues on eBay, for a very affordable price.

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My dad was a collector of various odd and sundry things, but he was justifiably proudest of the his complete collection of the early run (all of the white binders, themselves a collector’s item). 

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In the summer of 2011, I decided to borrow his collection and start reading through it. I’d read the whole thing when I was 16 years old, but my memories of that first reading are patchy and inconsistent. This time, I would be bringing a more in-depth knowledge of the artists and the general context of the market to the task.

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At some point, I figured out that I could get daily content out of the process if I posted a handful of pages from each issue as I read through them. The first page was posted on October 24, 2011 and ran continuously until November 28, 2023. It started on Tumblr and had to migrate to WordPress when the censors showed up, but a feed from the WordPress site eventually posted back to the original Tumblr  – with only occasional automatic censorship from the Tumblr overlords.

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In the summer of 2026, as I was wrapping up the book, I migrated the blog archives to this site and began the long process of adding tags to the 4000+ posts. These tags include the year of publication, creator names, ads, movie ads, house ads, Dossier sections, editorials, galleries, interviews, tables of content, Chain Mail, Strip Tease, and ephemera. They also note which pages had been used in the book, which posts highlighted the history of the magazine, and identify where I made additions to posts to capture information I had uncovered during the process of writing the book. And the personal posts are also tagged.