Fathom #2 page 15

We all have a comic from our youth where every time you see it, it invokes a memory of a particular moment in your life. While this moment or comic wasn't life changing for me, but seeing this page brought me back to my teenage years when my father would take me on the weekly tour of comic stores so I could get all my new releases. I can't remember exactly when it was, probably fall of 1992, there was a line out the door at the store because it was hosting Neil Gaiman and Jill Thompson for the Sandman Brief Lives tour. I knew about Sandman but I had never read it, but I instantly associated Jill with Elementals. So I made my father drive me home so I could grab all the issues I had with her art and then back to the store.

When I finally got through the line it was almost surreal. All these people having Neil sign their Sandman hardcovers of Season of Mists or having both of them autograph recent Sandman issues and then there's me; the person that only wants Jill to autograph Elementals and Fathom issues. I'm not sure if Neil was put off, but I recall Jill was surprised to see her old work and flipped through some issues, pointing out that her first professional job was in issue 13.

Fast forward to summer of 1995 where I did a deal with a store owner I knew that dealt in a lot of autographed comics. He was pissed about the Marvel/Heroes World deal so he was going to stop carrying Marvel entirely and wanted to unload something like 34 short boxes of comics. He wanted all of my non-Marvel autographed comics including all the books from that day. I should have kept the Elementals #13, but at the time I wasn't that sentimental about the event.

Fast forward to March 21st 2024, Michael McIsaac posts this page for sale and I think I saw the notification email less than five minutes later. At which point I nearly chocked on my water. It's such a nothing page and the story is just ok. But the memories that resurfaced told me that I had to have this page!