WARREN STRICKLAND's Bio
I was born January 11th, 1953 in Brattleboro Vermont. So if you do the math I just had my sixtieth birthday. When I was 11 the family moved to San Fernando Valley in Southern California. I was thirteen when I bought my first comics from the local stores in 1966, and can clearly remember buying Fantastic Four # 53, along with all the other marvel titles that were available. And so it started, my first collection, a life long love of comics, superhero's, villains, and Stan Lee saying "NUFF SAID" at the end of a book. My first collection spanned approx. eight years, amassing somewhere around 3,000 books. My favorite book store at the time was on Hollywood Blvd just a couple of blocks off of Vine. It was the classic imagine of a comic book in the sixties and seventies. You would enter from a street level door that opened onto a staircase to a second story. The store itself was packed with boxes of comics under tables, on tables and along walls. Glass cases showing the oldest and key issues, with every inch of wall space covered in comics. It was paradise for a young teenage collector. At the age of twenty one I sold that first collection just prior to getting married thinking that the money would help a little in establishing the household. It would be about six years before I would start buying comics again and start my second collection.
I was twenty seven when I started collecting the second time, with a much more serious intent of obtaining complete sets of all my favorite titles. In six years I'd amassed close to 10,000 books. Following a job opportunity I moved to Western Tennessee in 1986, and found a store in Nashville that offered a selection of Golden Age Comics. I got hooked quickly, and for the first time added Three Golden Age titles to my collection (The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, and Captain America). Three years later in 1989, life turned upside down financially, and I sold all my comics for the second time in my life.
It was seventeen years later in 2006 that I started to collect comics for the third time. I initially started with my four favorite titles as a teenager; The Amazing Spiderman, The UnCanny X-Men, Thor, and the Fantastic Four. I had not realized that CGC had come into existence as an independent comic book grading company. More to follow---