Mark van den Anker
Web development, content manager comic database
Comic Books, Movies and CDs
I got pretty cool comic book, DVD and CD collections. Not really huge collections - just some awesome items. It's not an obsession for me, it's just cool and I'm proud of what I own.I started reading comic books when I was really young. When I was younger it was all about European 'cartoony' albums. I started reading (translated) Marvel comic books when I was like 12 years old. It all started with the X-Men animated television series. I loved these X characters. Eventually I started reading loads of X comics: X-Men, Uncanny, X-Force, Generation X, Wolverine, etc. Now I'm familiar with all main Marvel characters, all super-heroes and villains. I got some really good DC and indie comic book stuff as well, but Marvel is really my thing.
I like western movies a lot, so of course I own The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and Once Upon A Time In The West (Sergio Leone is the man!). I also really like mafia movies, so I own the Godfather movies and Goodfellas. I like Tarantino, Kubrick, Coppola and Scorsese, so of course I own Pulp Fiction, the Kill Bill flicks, Inglourious Basterds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Departed, etc. Other classic movies in my collection are American Beauty, Crash, the Back To The Future flicks, Mystic River, and, well... A lot more! Check out my movie collection at Connect.
I really like hiphop music. I started listening to American hiphop when I was like 15 years old. I got a great Wu-Tang Clan CD collection (including almost all solo and Wu affiliate stuff) and besides that I own CDs from a lot more hiphop artists, mostly from New York: Mobb Deep, Nas, etc... I'm also really into Dutch hiphop. Specially Opgezwolle and The Opposites. Too bad at the Collectorz.com office everybody hates hiphop :-)
At Collectorz.com
When I almost finished my Media and Information Bachelor study I started working at Collectorz.com. My sister told me about an ad in a magazine of a company that was looking for somebody who could manage a comic database. So, a few comic geeks and I replied to the Collectorz.com ad. And since I'm the most 'normal' comic dude in the universe I was the one who had to do the job: create a online comic db for our existing and new Comic Collector users! A few die-hard Comic Collector users submitted their personal databases and it was my job to merge these databases into one single database: the basic version of the online db. It took three months to merge and clean up all comic data and finally (I think it was July 2006) the online comic db was born. And nowadays I'm still updating the online comic db along with a bunch of other comic admins. We got over 200,000 comic books in our online database and I'm proud of this impressive db I managed from scratch.In the meantime I finished my study and became a so-called Bachelor of Arts. I decided to stick with Collectorz.com since I really like working over here. I asked Alwin (the boss a/k/a the man in charge) if it was possible to do something extra for Collectorz.com and this resulted in web development. Working on webpage lay-outs, editing HTML and CSS codes, creating screenshots for the site, etc. I'm doing stuff like setting up these 'about' pages, setting up Collectorz.nl, helping creating templates for all the Collectorz.com products, testing the newest Collectorz.com applications for both Windows and Mac, etc.
In 2009 I decided to start studying again; Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. I'm already a Bachelor of Arts, now I'm trying to become a Bachelor of Science first, and later a Master of Science. So, at the moment I'm working part-time at Collectorz.com.