Hi, I'm Lee and I'm a Comicaholic.

I love comics. Over the last few years I have spent literally thousands of pounds (£1:$2) on graphic novels and comics. I've been a fan of comic heroes since I was a young lad, but a comic reader...collector, over the last few years.

I grew up watching the utter epic X-Men and Spiderman animated series during the early '90s. Series with continuity, including multiple episode storylines, action, drama with stories taken from the comics with no dumbing down. I was mesmerised, nothing else gave me such a range of different characters with so much depth and maturity.

I needed more. I needed the comics, but being in England, despite the few growing Forbidden Planet stores dotted around the country, finding a comic book store was like finding life from Krypton, pretty hopeless even if you know where to look.

So my fascination with comic heroes went on a back burner, every now and then I'd see an issue of X-Men, Spiderman or Wolverine and I'd snap it up, I'd watch old re-runs of the cartoons as well as others I'd missed from the '90s such as Incredbile Hulk, Iron man and the Fantastic Four. I watched and raved about the Blade films and couldn't wait to see Spiderman in the cinema as the years flashed forward.

2005. By now I finally had money that wasn't going to the car, girlfriend, rent or pub. Not only that, but I'd been on the internet a few years and found the Forbidden Planet website. Here was a calvacade of geeky dreams which I had never seen before and me with some spare change. Let's go shopping.

I needed to find an adequate comic jumping on point, I thought I'd stick with what I know...either X-Men or Spiderman, Spidey I'd just have a friend attempt to explain the clone saga to me and I developed a 1000 yard stare any 'nam vet would be proud of. So I opted for X-Men.

The site had a section for Marvel graphic novels and a subsection dedicted to the X-titles. I had no idea how many there were. I looked for characters I recognised, I saw storylines I recognised, but I wanted something that was issue 1. I picked up Grant Morrisons New X-Men 1 - 5.

Boy can I pick 'em. I loved it. There were characters I didn't recognise and plot points I didn't, but I was able to cope and what I didn't know just made me want to learn more as I picked up more X-books, books like the Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past as well as some Wolverine titles.

I started looking around on the internet for new things to read and where to go next and decided my next port of call would be on a whole new continent. DC comics. I knew Batman, Superman, The Flash and they had a bunch of weird colour coded characters. Green Lantern? Red Tornado? Blue Beetle? How imaginative. Apparently, thank you internet, the book of the moment was Identity Crisis. I loved Identity Crisis. All these new characters taking center stage especially one of those weird colour coded characters, Green Arrow.

I loved this witty, intelligent, yet hot headed character and had to find out more and to my amazement he has a few new books out written by Kevin Smith! I know him! I was sold and they actually turned out to be pretty good and so my foray into DC was under way, next stop Batman and then the lead up to Infinite Crisis.

Trying to find out more about comics and the top comics people have read and what I should be reading, one name constantly came up on lists, Watchmen. Who was I to argue? I ordered a copy. I opened it up excited and flicked through. It was...well...pink. Where were the bright vibrant colours I'd become rapidly attached to? I put off reading it and buried my head back into my brightly coloured, brash world of heroes until my to read pile ran dry. I took it to work with me and started reading, it was slow and still pink and I was waiting for the fight scenes. I kept reading. The characters developed, the mysteries unfolded, the plots unravelled, my mind exploded. This was it, this was my hit too far, I was now a comic junkie.

After that came the spending. I read as much as I can afford and when my to read pile runs low I'm more than happy to reread some of the epic storylines holding up my bookcase. So thank you New X-Men, Identity Crisis and Watchmen. The three hits that created an addict.