collecting

So I was looking through the “Marvel Comics Guide to Collecting Comics,” a pull-out insert distributed within Amazing Spider-Man #234 (1982):

…and within, I found this little chart of then currently investible comic books:

According to the footnote:

…and unfortunately I don’t have a 1981/1982 price guide in front of me to compare prices, but let’s see what Marvel was pushing as “collectible” and how things compare to the modern marketplace.

While the collector’s guide is at least somewhat evenhanded in its dealing with other comic companies (it at least mentions they exist, even if it sort of downplays their importance in comparison to Marvel’s), it’s probably not surprising that only one DC title makes it to the chart. In fairness, there probably wasn’t a lot to choose from at the time that was still relatively obtainable and at least partially in demand. I mean, Metamorpho #1 was probably not too pricey at the time, but probably wasn’t burning up the back issue bins in the early ’80s. House of Secrets #92, perhaps, as a Swamp Thing movie was on the way and surely the huge success of that film would jumpstart demand for this decade-old book. On the other hand, New Teen Titans #1 was likely only listed because they could hardly ignore it, being one of the real hot books of the period. They probably would have happily used that spot for, I don’t know, Dazzler or something.

Anyway, #1 – Daredevli #158: Frank Miller begins his run on the title, and currently guides at $160 in NM. Still an in-demand item…all the Miller Daredevils still move very well for me. A good investment pick, Marvel Comics Guide to Collecting Comics writer!

#2 – Peter Parker [The Spectacular Spider-Man #27: haven’t had one of these in a while, but I remember it being a good seller at the old shop, though the guide price did seem to outstrip demand. This is another result of the “Frank Miller on Daredevil” mania that was going on at the time, as this issue featured Miller’s first work on ol’ Hornhead. $85 in NM now, though I wonder if it has the same level of demand as Miller’s owrk in DD.

#3 – [Incredible] Hulk #181: nope, can’t say I’ve heard of it.

…

Okay, fine, the first full-length story (and over appearance) of our favorite Canucklehead, Wolverine, which tends to go for bonkers prices. $4200 in NM, $4199.95 if it’s missing the Marvel Value Stamp. I could be a bit off on that second price. Anyway, that’s just the guide price…it’s all over the map online, and by “all over the map” I mean “still more money than most of us reading this would be willing to spend.” I’ve sold trashed copies of this for hundreds of dollars. Demand is over the top for it still.

#4 – X-Men #129: took me a second to remember what’s special about this specific issue of X-Men, aside from being in the middle of the classic run by Chris Claremont and John Byrne…a run still in heavy demand today. A quick check rmeinds me it’s the first appearance of Kitty Pryde, which is absolutely a significant event in the history of the series, the introduction of one of the now-quintessential members of the team. Hope she survives the experience! $160 in the guides now.

#5 – [New] Teen Titans #1: assuming they mean the comic by Marv ‘n’ George, of course. Still sells great. Guides for $70, which seems lowish…but the Marvel Comics Guide to Collecting Comics should have pushed the second issue, with the first appearance of Deathstroke the Terminator, as that now guides for $175. Hokey smokes.

#6 – Iron Man #115: boy, I had to look this one up. And it’s not even separated out from the issues around it in the current guide…numbers 101 through 117 are all lumped together, priced at $12 in NM each. The issue in question features John Romita Jr.’s first art on the title. Oh, and an Avengers appearance. …The Marvel COmics Guide to Collecting Comics should have plugged Iron Man #55, the first appearance of Thanos, a comic I get asked for nearly every day. For reference, that one guides for a mindboggling $1500.

#7 – Micronauts #1: $18 in NM now, but I don’t know if there’s a lot of demand for this right now. I mean, at this point in the list we’re into the stuff that will of course sell in higher conditions, as certain collectors are now looking for copies of Bronze Age books and will buy stuff like this because it’s it excellent condition, not because of any particular interest in Micronauts or whatever. By the way, I still don’t like the term “Bronze Age” — I mean, yes, “Golden Age” and “Silver Age” were marketing terms, too (“A Golden Age Classic” sounds better than “Here’s a reprint of some old comic we don’t have to pay anybody for”), but “Bronze Age” feels even more blatantly so. But perhaps I digress.

#8 – Rom #1: I was all ready to poke a tiny bit of fun at this, but the current guide has it at $75, amazingly! Guess I haven’t looked it up in a while. But this was a comic that had a fan following at the time, and still has some interest nowadays. Though, as folks found out, that interest of “nostaglia for Rom in the Marvel Universe” doesn’t necessarily translate to “sales on a new Rom comic that is separate from the Marvel Universe,” but What Can You Do?

#9 – Moon Knight #1: two words, please note. Moon Knight was a semi-hot character for a while, especially the issues that featured early work by Bill Sienkiewicz. Not a whole lot of demand now that I’ve noticed, though there’s an occasional blip in character awareness (such as the recent short run by Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey). And that series that began in ’89 ran 60 issues was in quite a bit of demand both early on and, due to some artist-driven collectibilty, near the end of the run. But this series, from 1980…$40 in NM in the current guide. Like I noted with Rom, primarily in demand by folks looking for “key” Marvels of the period, rather than out of Moon Knight fandom. But I know Moon Knight fans are out there, don’t get me wrong! Don’t write in to complain!

#10 – Ka-Zar #1: hoo boy. So, not, like, Amazing Spider-Man #129, or Marvel Spotlight #5, but Ka-Zar. Look, not casting aspersions on the former pulp magazine character that’s legally nothing like Tarzan, but was Ka-Zar ever a “hot” character? I mean, he must have been at least of some interest, with multiple series over the years, but I don’t recall there being a lot of fan demand. Maybe I’m just not remembering. And I don’t know which series of Ka-Zar they’re even talking about here. I’m assuming it’s the 1981 series that had launched around the time of this Marvel Comics Guide to Collecting Comics (which now guides for $5), but there’s the 1970 series (#1 – $65) and the 1974 run (#1 – $28), both of which would have surely been more than $1.25 at the time.

So there you go…once you get your hands on that time machine that every comic book collector wishes s/he could have, you can go back properly informed as to which funnybooks you need to buy to make your fortune. Because surely that’s the wisest use of a time machine. Sorry JFK, too bad passengers on the Titanic, we need to get multiple copies of Rom #1 to seal in plastic slabs.

Guide prices I list above of course don’t necessarily reflect whatever shenanigans folks get up to on auction sites, or price bumps due to the aforementioned slabs, or whatnot. But that should give you an idea, anyway, of a specific era in time where even the big comic companies couldn’t ignore a burgeoning interest in comics collectibility.

So I’ve been going through box after box after box of comics at the store, just piles of ’em from collections acquired over the last few years, and finally making some headway in getting the processed and put out for you, the people, to come and buy.

I’ve been pretty good about not pulling from said boxes to fill my own collection…plenty of stuff I’d love to have, but I’d love to make money on selling it even more. By and large I just keep to filling holes in the ol’ want list on things I’ve been seeking out for years, like some of the Atlas/Seaboard comics from the ’70s, and fanzines of pretty much any period. Oh, and the occasional Charlton Popeye.

Jumping back a bit, to back when I was but a mere non-comics-retail-working mortal, like most of you common folk out there, I was pretty good about picking up comics I was interested in. Particularly throughout the 1980s, when DC and Marvel discovered he idea of “mini-series” and put out a boatload of purposefully short-run titles, many of which caught my eye and were dutifully snatched off the racks by my young allowance-stretching self.

However, there were a couple of series that I wanted to pick up, but, for reasons long forgotten by God and man (but probably related to “that allowance can only stretch so far”) I never did get around to acquiring. One such as Sword of the Atom, basically “The Atom as Tiny Conan the Barbarian,” featuring some of that great 1980s-style Gil Kane art that the Kane purists may have pooh-poohed at the time but that I really enjoyed.

As it turned out, a run of that original Sword of the Atom was present in the stacks upon stacks of comics I was processing, and set it aside for myself. It did inspire me to check the ol’ Diamond Comics database to see if a trade paperback existed, collecting this mini-series and the three subsequent specials (which I did not have in the piles here at the shop, far as I could tell). There was a trade, published in 2007, and apparently long out of print, and going for some not-terribly-high but more-than-Mike-wanted-to-pay prices on your eBays and your Amazons and such.

Mentioning my quest for the remainder of this series did bring pal Nat into the shop with the first special for me, which was very nice of him. However, a Twitter pal picked up a copy of the trade in the clearance bin at his local shop for dirt cheap, and it is now winging its way to me via the tender mercies of the post office. Thus, with its eventual arrival, that will be one less missing comics experience from my youth. And I’ll be able to put those issues of the mini-series back out for sale…though I’m not sure what to do with the special, since Nat gave that to me as a gift. I’ll have to ask if he wants it back!

Now another comic that I inexplicably passed on during its original run was Night Force by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan. I was reading New Teen Titans at the time, and in issue #21 there was a special 16-page free insert previewing the forthcoming Night Force title.

Now, I liked that preview. I was into Gene Colan’s super-moody art, and I was enjoying Wolfman’s work on Teen Titans, and I was a fan of horror comics…or at least the weird, creepy off-on-the-distant-edges-of-the-main-fictional-universe books like, oh, say, Swamp Thing. But, again, like with Sword of the Atom, and for probably similar reasons, I did not pick up with series.

Not much later, the main character of Night Force, Baron Winters, plays briefly into one of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing storylines, which just sort of added to the “well darn, should have picked up that series” feeling I had. But I still didn’t. Even working at the other comic shop which had no end of full runs of Night Force (only 14 issues long, mind you) didn’t get me off my duff to pull a set aside for myself.

Many years later, a collected hardcover edition of that series was announced, and I sort hemmed and hawed over getting one for myself at the time. I did wait, however, and not too long ago I did finally get my hands on a new copy of the book for a bargain price. And I’m glad I waited…the printing on the original comics wasn’t awful, but seeing Colan’s art recolored on nice paper is a real treat.

Its title of “The Complete Collection” is bit of a misnomer, in that there were two follow-up series (in 1996 and 2012)…these were also written by Wolfman, but drawn by Brent Anderson (2nd series) and Tom Mandrake (3rd series). Not collected, and probably harder to find in the back issue bins. If only I’d bought that first series at the time, then I would have bought series 2 and 3 as they were coming out, and I wouldn’t be in this mess now.

And there’s your little bit of insight into what your pal Mike still gets for himself. I mean, I even bought the full run of Spanner’s Galaxy at the time, I have idea why I passed up those two series.

So this Twitter discussion with Pal Andrew got me nostalgic, in a way, for my days of comic collecting just prior to my frequenting dens of iniquity, er, I mean, comic shops…well, okay, same difference. Anyway, I was thinking back to my comic buying progression, from occasional purchases from grocery stores and newsstands, to buying those three-packs of Star Wars comics at Toys ‘R’ Us, to digging through stacks of old comics at used bookstores, to making the rounds on my bicycle of all the local convenience stores and that one nearby grocery store.

It was one day in 1983, while going to one of those convenience stores that was a little farther afield trying to track down an issue of something or other, that I ran into a friend of mine from school. I told him what I was up to, and he said “oh, you should check out Ralph’s Comic Corner, it’s a comic book store in Ventura, they should have what you’re looking for,” and thus did my long association with that store begin, leading to my evenual employment there, and of course to opening up my own store. So, should anyone ever ask how I ended up in my current situation, you can blame old schoolmate Brian Lindquist, wherever he may be now.

Not to say that Ralph’s was my first-ever comic shop. I visited one in Simi Valley prior to that, after having seen an ad or a coupon or something cluing me into its existence. That was a slightly further trek to make than the relative closeness of Ventura, so we didn’t go to that store very often (I think ultimately only about a half-dozen times, at most, including that one time I met Chris Claremont).

But, as I was saying, before delving deep into the world of THE DIRECT MARKET and all its horrors, I had various places around town that I’d hit up for comics, some relatively close, some requiring a little more of a journey, and you’d have to check them most of them out on a pretty regular basis to make sure you were seeing all the newest releases. The aformentioned grocery store usually had a pretty good selection, and, especially during the summer, more than once I’d show up on New Arrival Day just a little too early only to see the uncut bundles of comics sitting in a cart, waiting for some probably overworked employee to finally find the time to open ’em up and toss them on the rack.

The one place that was more of a “last resort” was a convenience store that was a little farther away than the rest, so I didn’t go there too often, especially since they inexplicably charged tax on comics (something that periodicals weren’t subject to in Califoria at the time), and even worse, sometimes the comics would have a price sticker directly affixed to the front covers! Eep! On the other hand, that particular shop was the one place I ever saw the Superman Spectacular out in the wild, which is still one of my favorite Superman stories, so I can’t think of it with too much disdain.

The best place in town to get comics was a place deep in Oxnard called the Strand Newsstand, which had pretty much everything. Tons of magazines, lots of paperback books, the extensive porn wing, and, of course, multiple spinner racks of comical books. Once I started going there (and we went there weekly, both my dad and I), my need to circulate amongst the other convenience stories pretty much declined (though I’d still pop in once in a while to tide me over between Strand visits). The weird thing about this newsstand, which has me wondering about their distributor situation, is that they’d occasionally get stuff that primarily would go through the comic shop direct market. PC Comics, such as Groo and the Berni Wrightson Master of the Macabre, I found there. Fanzines like The Comic Reader. The first issue of Don Rosa’s Comics & Stories. The Comics Journal. And they seemed to get things a little bit earlier than my other funnybook sources, too.

Whatever the reason for their comic stocking advantages, this store became the place for me to get my regular comics fix…even after discovering Ralph’s Comic Corner, this place was still closer to us and I split my purchases between both shops. Eventually, I did more or less fully migrate over to just buying from Ralph’s, especially once I started seeking out back issues.

A lot of those places I used to buy from have since closed up shop, or stopped carrying comics…presumably for reasons unrelated to my no longer visiting them. It’s certainly a lot easier for me now to stay on top of gathering the comics I want to read, since all I have to do is wait for them to show up at my store after I order them. (I mean, theoretically, given the usual vagaries of our supplier.) Definitely more convenient, but somewhat…lacking in the mystery and excitement I used to feel traveling from shop to shop wondering what will be there, what new comic will I discover, what new stories will I hardly be able to wait to get home to read.