Some people collect stamps. Others collect trading cards. But Dr. Patrick Hamilton? He’s spent decades collecting every single issue of The Avengers comic series, starting all the way back in the 1980s. And that is not all he has–everything from Star Wars Lego sets to figurines of every superhero you can think of (and some you
likely can’t), it’s in Hamilton’s house. The origin of this 40-plus year fascination? A shrink-wrapped original copy of Avengers #164 that Hamilton got his hands on as a kid. He considers it his first ever comic book.
1987 was a year that changed everything when his mom mentioned a comic book store a short walk from his future high school. Intrigued, he stepped inside and found the next month’s issues already on the shelves—and he was hooked. From that day, he never missed an Avengers comic. Decades later, that first discovery still fuels his passion, a reminder that sometimes the smallest detours can spark a lifelong obsession.
For Hamilton, one arrow-wielding hero holds a special place in his heart–Hawkeye.
“He was much more sarcastic, much more of a disruptive force within the team a lot of the time. And I just kind of enjoyed, you know, kind of his sarcastic personality,” Hamilton said.
Hawkeye was different; he chafed at authority, and that was a breath of fresh air, Hamilton thought. As for Hawkeye’s weapon of choice, Hamilton has always been interested in archers, probably stemming from a childhood allure he had for Robinhood. As a kid, Hamilton gravitated towards Hawkeye, naturally collecting every issue and special the character was involved in, including every single original issue of his limited series as they came out.
But Hamilton does not have that level of adoration for every super hero. One example is the Red Hulk.
“I hate the Red Hulk. I absolutely despise the Red Hulk. There is no need for a Red Hulk. It’s a stupid concept. And I hate everything about it,” Hamilton said.
The Red Hulk is a version of the regular Hulk that has become contaminated with radiation, giving him unique abilities such as heat radiation. According to Hamilton, the Red Hulk will never happen, no matter how much the makers push it.
Hamilton’s comic book collecting habit morphed into his practice of collecting everything possible related to his interests. Whether it be figurines, posters, Legos, Funko pops, or any other tchotchke dust collector (more on that later), Hamilton has it.
While freely describes his habit as “hoarding aspect of his life,” it appears much more thoughtful, well-considered and organized than that. Yes, everything has a place, and everything is in its place, but to put in a visually illuminating way: mixing franchises is out of the question.
In the room in his home that he has fully dedicated to his beloved superheroes, DC is on one side, and Marvel is on the opposite, each figurine staring at another as if ready for battle. His is. His books are meticulously organized in bookshelves, to which he assigned themes. Hamilton reads four or five books per month, each from a different shelf.
“I’ve got [a bookshelf] in my room that’s [full of] my favorite authors. I’ve got one downstairs as the sci-fi shelf. I’ve got my general shelf in another room and right now I’m making myself rotate between reading a book from each in turn,” Hamilton said.
The books, arranged flawlessly on the shelves are in perfect condition, just like his superheroes–and his Lego collection. Hamilton has considered the dust his objects collect—and early on he took action, particularly when it comes to the Legos. He said ornately designed sets, such as the Lord of the Ring sets, are a colossal pain due to how easy they gather grime between their tiny crevices.
“I’ve literally got one shelf of all of them. And I have dusted them. It takes an entire day to do that on one shelf,” he said.
This may be the reason they have only been properly cleaned once in the nine years he has lived in his house. So, he is replacing open air shelves with ones with that keep out the dust. But hose shelves take up space, and Hamilton said he’s reorganizing things very cleverly. Smooth edged sets, such as his giant bust of Black
Panther, which are easy to clean with a Swiffer, rest on the open-air shelves, while sets such as the Lord of the Rings rest behind doors.
His sister has even gotten him a very thoughtful gift: a mini vacuum by the company ‘Clean My Bricks,’ which was made specifically to effectively clean Lego sets. When it came to moving from his small apartment into his current house, he had to figureout how to transport the over one hundred Lego sets he built.
“I took them all apart in reverse order and put them back into numbered bags to follow the instructions so, I could rebuild them, which most people thought I was insane to do,” he said. While the move was a painstaking and time-consuming operation, it allowed him to clean some bricks dated all the way back to 1998 and 1999, which had collected a considerable amount of dust and grime.
Hamilton keeps a spreadsheet of every single comic he owns after 40 years of collecting. He is more discriminating about the items he now adds to it. He decided he doesn’t need another version of a set he already has: Maybe six Millennium Falcon Lego sets is enough.
Some may call collecting “toys” as an adult childish, but that’s not how sees it. As a kid, you can take these toys and play with them and use your imagination. But as an adult, you’re able to enjoy them as a physical representation of your interests. Most important for this academic: You can enjoy the complex themes of series you didn’t understand as a kid.
“Everyone has their interests. You know, there are people who are just as obsessed about their football teams and collect just as much of that. You know they’ll have an entire ‘man-cave’ dedicated to that. I’m just going to do what makes me happy, like, it doesn’t matter to me what other people think,” he said.
Superheroes are more than just something Dr. Hamilton is interested in, but also something to which he has dedicated years of research and writing. Hamilton, alongside colleague, history professor Dr. Allan Austin, has done extensive research in the topic of superheroes and their representation of race.
“We spent several years writing a book called ‘All new, All different: A History of Race in the American Superhero’ that was just looking at superheroes from basically World War II to the present, and kind of looking at how we sort of described as their vexed efforts to represent race, that there was a lot of well-intentioned efforts to represent race, but they often fell afoul like to stereotypes and things like that,” Hamilton said.
Race was a topic that he felt naturally meshed with the topic of superheroes. He was introduced to the concepts during his years of education at the University of Arkansas. One of the first classes he took there in 1998 was American Literary Fictions, which looked at contemporary literature significantly through the lens of race.
He still uses books from this class in those he teaches today.
“I’ve always been a pop culture fan and comic book fan and as I was sort of coming up through, particularly through my PhD program, and then my first few years here, the study of comics became taken more seriously within the academy. And so, it just seemed a natural outgrowth of what I was doing. I was like, if I can do research on comics, which I love anyway, I might as well do that, and there’s a lot out there to talk about in terms of race and comics,” Hamilton said.
He doesn’t see his research topic changing. Likewise, he can’t imagine a day when he’s not collecting comics, buying every new Lego set, hopefully, he says, at least not until he retires. Some may call Dr. Hamilton’s interests “hyper-fixations,” but he believes looking at superheroes now is more important than ever–specifically in popular culture. For the past 15 years or so, he said, superhero media has dominated the theater and created a massive influence.
“Superheroes are, if we’re generous, they’re an ambivalent figure in a lot of ways. They’re meant to be sort of heroic figures and figures that inspire us, but in a lot of cases, they can be slaves to the status quo and to systems and institutions that have existed for a long time and are not particularly equitable in their effects. They can be hyper violent, you know, they vary often as Dr. Austin and I talk about a lot.”
He explained that superheroes often seem like individual solutions to larger societal problems, and that presents problems in terms of thinking about collective efforts and how they might actually accomplish things.
Hamilton believes that there are a lot of problematic ideologies that follow superheroes today versus when he was a kid. This is a large part of why he does so much research on them. He said it’s important to be thinking about the cultural work that superheroes do, both positively and negatively.
“We all have our obsessions. These are just the things I have chosen to be obsessed about. There are less productive things to focus on, he believes.
And not nearly as interesting.