Watching my little cousin go from trade pile kid to back issue hunter in 4 years

My cousin Kyle was 9 in 2021 when I first took him to a con in Pittsburgh. He only wanted whatever had the coolest foil cover on the shelf, you know, the flashy stuff. This past weekend I drove us to a shop in the Strip District and he spent 45 minutes digging through dollar bins for mid-80s Spectre runs. His reasoning was all about the writing and the paper quality, which blew my mind. Has anyone else seen a young fan make that shift from shiny to substance, or is Kyle just weird like the rest of us?

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baker.phoenix6d ago

Hold on, maybe I'm reading this different, but I see that shift less as him getting smarter and more as him just getting older. 9 year olds are all about shiny stuff, that's not a phase, that's just being a kid. My nephew did the exact same thing, he was all about foil covers and action figures, now he's 14 and only reads Saga and anything by Brubaker. But I still catch him grabbing a random ugly variant sometimes just because it looks cool. So yeah, Kyle figured out what he likes, but I wouldn't call it a straight line from bad taste to good taste. It's more like his taste just got more specific, not necessarily better.