I am a big fan of will eisner and have some of his original sunday sections and some quality comic books. i am 49 and i am from pittsburgh. i hope to get to download soon. thanks for the site. also a big fan of plastic man. jack cole was born an hour north of where i live. he is buried there in new castle, pa.
I too am a huge Eisner fan and I have a wonderful memory about how I became a huge fan. When I was a kid, I worked, for store credit only, at a comic shop. This was before I was even a teenager, I was paid strictly in store credit, and I was perfectly happy with the situation at the time. In fact, after I'd moved away from that town, and then returned to go to college, I discovered that I still had several hundred dollars left in my credit account at the store.
One day, I bought a small stack of Spirit re-prints from the store, and I must have stayed up all-night reading them. Suffice to say, I was hooked. I came into work the next day and told the owner how much I loved the Spirit now and he smiled, nodded, and walked out of the store for a moment. When he returned, he had a trapper keeper in his hand that was nearly bursting at the seams. He told me, 'you can borrow this, but I want back, in the same condition that I gave it to you'. He handed me this trapper keeper, I was confused, until I opened it. It was comprised of a ton of original Spirit inserts collected in this notebook, with carefully measured paper-punch holes to place it in the trapper keeper, it turns out that the shop owner was collecting these inserts through-out his childhood, and had no idea how valuable they would become.
Nice eh? One of the coolest memories I can think of...
By the way, yes, I was tempted to keep the notebook, not show up again for work, and forget that I'd ever met the owner of the shop. But, I decided that it was probably not a good idea, and he was such a nice guy that I realized I could never pull such a stunt against him, so, I didn't do it, and things actually worked out even better than they could have if I'd pulled off such an ugly stunt. But, that's another story, and it's kind of a long one.