Foreign
Is Smoking
by Stephane Poitras
H
i, I would like to introduce myself. My name
is Stephane Poitras and I’ve been a collector
since the 70s. I live in a small town in the province
of Quebec, Canada.
When I was young, I was living in a very small
rural village where I didn’t have access to comic
books. During that time, comics from Les Editions
Héritage were very popular here but none were
available in the general store in my village. I must
have been 7 or 8 year old when a friend of mine
showed me a copy of l’Incroyable Hulk #4 (with
the cover of Incredible Hulk #108) and I was automatically hooked. I just discovered the wonderful
existence of super-heroes. I knew that I had to
pick up everything I could find from EH and asked
my dear mother if she could get a subscription for
me to some of the EH series. I remember how fun
it was to get comics in the mail from time to time.
Then during the 80s, I started discovering that
there was more in life than just comics (you known
what I mean), and almost at the same time, EH
stop publishing comics after 19 years.
But the fever of collecting came back when I
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arrived in Quebec City. That was the time I discovered comic book shops, and all the varieties of
American comics. I was a kid all over again.
It was also at that time that I traded my whole
EH collection to another collector for Vampirella
magazine (Warren), from #1 to #54 (minus #3) and
Annual 1972. At the time, I was thinking that I had
made the deal of the century, since EH comics
were seen as just cheap reprints, and a lot of collectors were giving them away if not simply throwing them in the garbage.
But those Vampirella were so fantastic. Incredible covers by legendary artists, wonderful interiors
by Pepe Gonzalez, I knew that I had to put together the whole series. This task was completed to
95% before the presence of the internet.
One year, when reading the Overstreet annual
price guide (don’t remember the #), I saw an article
about variant Canadian cover prices. I went back
to my Vampirella collection and found out I already
had 21 of them. That was the starting point.
Some years ago I decided to pick up French copies of Vampirella that were printed in France in the
70s. Being a condition freak, Continued on page 4