The early nineties saw a period in comic-book history where the industry almost comitted suicide through greed, arrogance and stupidity. I was a lifetime comics buyer at that point. Moving from Spider-Man to the X-Men, to the Tick and beyond.

Then the speculators came. And like the sports card market before it, comic-books went to hell. People were buying the books not because they loved them, but because they thought they could make a profit reselling them. This encouraged the industry to pump out gimicks.

First issues were more collectable? Start more titles -- or better yet, cancel a title that has been running since the '60s then restart it the next month at #1. People were buying more than one copy? Release six "variant" covers of every issue. Kill Superman. Cripple Batman. Give Spider-Man an evil clone. Holograms. Foil embossing. Die-cut covers. Every dirty trick in the book was tried to make consumers buy comics they didn't love and didn't need (except improving quality.) And it worked.

For a while.

I first stumbled across noun's story in the forums at Quarter to Three, a videogame site. Like myself, noun was a comic-book affectionado during the early nineties. On top of getting sucked up in the speculator hype as a consumer, noun also started dealing a little on the side.

The seductuve lure of the speculator bubble eventually lead to ruin and damnation for hundreds of dealers and almost all of the small publishing companies folded.

So read along as noun gives you the play by play from his courtside seats at the comic-book apocalypse.