Jose Alaniz spent about a week sorting and packing each comic book — carefully, lovingly. There were 12 boxes of them, comics he’d collected since his mother bought him his first one at age 6.

He took time to look through them all. The Defenders. The Incredible Hulk. The Mighty Thor. Spider-Man. Each of them, even the bad ones, meant something to him.

And now here he was, preparing to let them go to the special collections at the University of Washington libraries.

Alaniz knows some would consider it silly that a 42-year-old man should be so attached to bits of paper and ink, books never really meant to last that long. A professor at the university, he sounds a bit apologetic for what he can only describe as his own sappiness (not an easy thing for a serious, somewhat nerdy academic to embrace).

Still, though he would soften the blow by keeping 10 of his most prized comic books, it would not be easy to let go.

Those he kept were “mostly stuff from deep in my childhood, which, in ways that still surprise me, remain part of my DNA and probably always will,” he wrote in a post on his blog. “Uh, can I get buried with some of these?”

He knows that he is not alone. There are others out there — collectors, pack rats, fellow closet sentimentalists — who will understand.

Roots of collection

One of the 10 comic books Alaniz is holding on to is the one that started his obsession in rural south Texas in 1974: “Marvel Two-in-One Presents The Thing and The Guardians of the Galaxy.”

He’s not really sure why his mom bought it for him. Maybe it was because his older brother had comic books.

“For him, they were kind of a diversion,” Alaniz says. “For me, they became much more than that.”

Many nights, he would lay in his bedroom, alone, devouring each issue his mother bought for him. She only spoke Spanish, couldn’t read them herself. But they kept her younger son out of trouble, he says, and she liked that.

Even if she didn’t realize it, she also was introducing him to a whole new world, one that would teach him English and how to read. The comic books even helped instill an understanding of right and wrong, he says, a “moral code” he carries with him to this day.

They also helped him make sense of his brother, whom he looked up to but whose bursts of anger and run-ins with the law confused him. Was it any wonder, Alaniz now says, that the Hulk, who exhibited both reason and rage, was the character who most fascinated him?

“I realized there was something very special going on here,” says Alaniz. “This was not something to just read and throw away.”

Sal Buscema, a longtime artist for Marvel Comics who worked on the Hulk series, always knew there were kids out there who were devouring his work and that of other comic artists and writers.

Those kids wrote fan letters, some that were published in the comics. But Buscema could not have predicted that some of them would help propel his work into special collections, as Alaniz and others have done. That still amazes the 74-year-old artist, who lives outside Washington, D.C., and still works for Marvel.

In the early days, “If you were a serious artist, you certainly didn’t go into comic books,” Buscema says. “That changed over the years to a point now where we are extremely respected, something I never dreamed would happen when I got into the industry in 1968.”