Black Panther: Coolest man alive? You bet!

Comics are for escaping, but sometimes you can't and you have to deal with life events that require all your energy.  And when all your energy fails, you still have to find a way.  We all have to be heroes to someone in some way.  We may not shoot bolts of energy or webs, but we have to take care of our loved ones and they are worth more than comics.

But when moments are available, you can, and should, escape.

Over the summer, I was able to find the first and second appearances of Black Panther:

Leader of a technologically advanced nation somewhere in Africa, the Black Panther kidnaps the FF and pits himself in battle against them so that he may challenge himself against a worthy foe.  But they band together, like most heroes do, against a common foe:  the Klaw!  I believe the Black Panther Party actually took their name from these pages soon afterward.  I think Jack Kirby and Stan Lee should have taken their story of the noble warrior a step further and had him involved in a romantic triangle with Susan Richards and Reed Richards, but perhaps America wouldn't have been quite ready for an interracial arrangement.  After all, we were only getting over Susan Richards' crush on Namor, the Sub-Mariner, a creature of an entirely different race, the Atlanteans, even if he was half-human...

Last Month, at the NY Comic Con, I stumbled upon this issue which contained the first appearance of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.  Since Pep Comics #22, the first appearance of Archie, was several thousand dollars more expensive, I figured five dollars was a safe buy:

And recently, I came upon this little gem that brought back a lot of early 80s memories:

First appearance of Firestar in comic form, and apparently, before the cartoon even aired as well.  Yes, I really liked Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.  Especially when the X-Men made an appearance!

Well, I wish you all well and happy hunting!

Trading up...the hard way

In the field of collecting comics, trading up is a term that means to exchange a comic of lesser quality for the same issue but in much better (and more valuable) condition.  Let's face it:  sometimes you want a particular issue but you either can't afford the mint one or find the mint version.  So you settle until the right one comes along.  For me, I trade up by finding free books lying on the stoops of my neighbors and selling them to the Strand.

For some reason, my neighbors love to read.  And after they finish with them, they place stacks of them on for passerbyers to take.  For free!  After a few months, I was able to buy the following comics from my favorite location:

I really got into researching Marvel comics from the 1960s and decided that Spider-Man is the dude to collect.  It's taken some time to save up money from picking up free books, but the upside is that it's all profit.  So the money goes into my comic fund and my daughter's college fund remains untouched.  Yeah, my wife and daughter think it is strange whenever I come back home with an armload of books, but they know it's all for a good cause. 

Amazing Spider-Man #47 has a few of my favorite discovered panels so far:  Peter and Mary Jane are on their first date and they go to a going away party for Flash Thompson that has been set up by Gwen Stacy.  Dig them dancing!  Well, right up 'till Kraven the Hunter crashes the party...

Those crazy 60s.  No wonder all those college students digged Spidey!



The Walking Dead...in church...AAARRGH!

One of the most common advice on collecting comics is that you can find cheap comics in rummage sales.  There's no guarantee you'll find anything of real worth, but then again, it all depends on how you define a gem. 

I was walking around Carroll Gardens and saw a sign for a church rummage sale.  I figured I had some time to kill and decided to check it out.  I wandered a bit and saw clothing, used pots and pans, some paintings, and a long row of books.  I scoured the books and peered into some of the cardboard boxes beneath the tables.  No real comics...until I saw someone handling a lot of The Walking Dead trade paperbacks.  I thought I'd lost out on even inspecting them until I noticed that the gentleman was a church volunteer and was just straightening the books.  I quickly walked over and saw great potential:  Volumes 1-7 and 14 and 16, nine in total, for a buck each.  Considering that they typically retail around $14.99 each, that is a great steal.

I'm not really into horror.  In fact, all I need to know about horror is from watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.  Once those shows left the air, I felt no need to indulge in the genre anymore.  How could they improve on it?  Well, since I've never watched The Walking Dead on television nor read the comic, what better way to understand this phenomenon than kicking back and reading hundreds of pages of this horror story?   At just a few cents a page?  And with Volume One in hand, I can start at the beginning.

And you know what's made this deal even sweeter?  I spotted a used Taschen imprint, a book of photos by some German dude.  Taschen produces some great works on terrific stock and they are gorgeous books.  This also cost only a dollar.  So I bought it, sold it at The Strand, and basically paid for my comics.  Voila!  Cost Neutral!  And my daughter's college fund remains untouched.

Archie Andrews: Demon Hunter...sort of...

I was walking through Brooklyn Heights to visit some friends when I saw a building wide street sale on Henry Street last weekend.  Never to leave well alone, I decided to nose around and see what my wealthy neighbors were getting rid of.  Some fellow was selling a small lot of Archie titles.  They were a bunch from the mid-70s to the late 80s.  Among the ten that I picked up for 50 cents a piece were a small run of horror-themed "Life with Archie."  Wow!  Who knew that Archie dipped his toes in the (under)world of the occult!  Or did he? Well, that's what this cover seemed to infer.  Judge one for yourself:

Well, turns out that the "Devil's Disc" was actually a weaponized frisbee made out of steel used by a foreign agent whose mission was to steal a secret formula from some scientist who had a house on the beach and Archie and Veronica stumbled onto the crime and...anyway, no real demon...but what an eye-catching cover!

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter: Trading in your comics

I'd like to own Amazing Spider-Man #121 one day.  It's the death of Gwen Stacy issue.  A VF copy can be anywhere between $200 to $400 on any given day.  I made a deal with myself a year ago that my comic collecting would be cost neutral.  So this means I'm going to have to go through my collection and sell off anything that I can live without.  Not that it is going to be painless because I have some sort of weird connection with every issue, but you know, that's what will keep me from becoming a classic hoarder.

Last Saturday, I picked out about 60 comics:  a run of Animal Man, Robotech Masters and Dominion Police comics.  They're not particularly sought after and after a couple of stoop sales, I knew they would probably sit unloved through another series of stoop sales.  So they would be the perfect pawns to test this one place and see how it would go.  I've never actually gone to a comic place to sell anything.  You hear stories of places offering you only pennies per issues.  My tactic was to see how they bargained in order to inoculate me to this whole sordid business.  I won't give the name of the establishment because I'd like to be invited back in the future...

Anyway, I talked to one of the guys I know there.  We agreed to a trade.  He first suggested a one-to-one trade for whatever they have in their dollar bins.  That wasn't a bad deal at all because I knew I most certainly find something I like.  Then his boss came around and nixed that arrangement saying that trades were always 3:1.  That is, in favor of the house.  He went through the lot and basically said he would resell mine in those dollar bins...

So I went from 1:1 to 3:1.  I agreed to the deal.  My bottom line was that I would free up some space at home and I'd be able to find something I really wanted to read.  That's not to say that I didn't find the whole experience somewhat humiliating and humbling.  But why should it?  They're only comics.  And I could always find some issues that I could resell so that I can get closer to my goal of owning ASM #121.

Still...it sucks to know that the comics I read decades ago are pretty much worthless.  But I think I made the right decision to test the market to see where I can get the best deals.  If I had brought in boxes, I'd have had a harder decision to make:  accept a low offer or lug them all back home.  It does seem true that resellling them at comic places will not get you the best deals, but you do have the convenience of unloading them as quickly as possible. 

Why can't love be easy? 'Cause I'm a superhero and so are you...

One of the joys of reading comics from the 1970s is discovering how melodramatic these stories could end up becoming.  Daredevil had a pretty intense relatioship with Natasha Romanov, aka The Black Widow, during the early 70s, as he moved back and forth between NYC and San Francisco while trying to figure out how to make this independent woman of the Women's Lib movement happy.  One moment she was proud to be his partner, the next she felt smothered.  It finally came to a head in Daredevil #124 when she decided she had to break up with him: 

Art by Gene Colan. 

I can't help but shed a tear.  Sometimes I wish I could have a public argument with my wife while wearing long underwear and a mask.  Then the world can understand how deep I am.

Father reads comic to child because Mother wasn't around to stop the insanity

I cannot remember the first comic I ever bought.  Maybe it was that DC Blue Ribbon Digest of Weird Western Tales and the cover of Jonah Hex toasting in the desert sun.  I wish I still had it.  I read it until it was beat, bent, and nearly broke.  But darn if I didn't read it from start to finish everytime I picked it up. 

This evening, in between dinner and taking care of my mum-in-law, I took turns reading with my daughter, Maddie, from the following comic that she had pulled from a short-box:

Honestly, I have no idea the names of all four turtles.  There's Michelangelo, Donatello, and, uh, well...it gets worse because I can't tell them apart, either, even though they are coded by the color of their masks.  But you know, she laughed.  She read.  She enjoyed the kid-friendly pratfalls and goofiness of the turtles battling thieves and robots.

I don't care (much) that the condition of the comic went from a Very Fine to a Fine during our reading.  By next week, it'll be a Fine- and in a month, she'll probably ignore it as it lays unattended on the couch.  But it won't matter because tonight, we had fun.  In those few minutes, I'd like to think that I gave her a memory important enough to have and cherish.  And know that her old man had time for her.  Even if it was with a comic book.

Is this comic a reprint or a first printing?

I picked up the following pair of comics from a stoop sale in Bay Ridge.  One is from the 1960s, the other is from the 1970s.  Which one is the reprint?

If you said both, congratulations!  Either you are very knowledgeable about Marvel's proclivity to reprint their classic stories or you read the indica on the bottom of the first interior page:

As an amateur collector, I had to learn the hard way to pay attention to what I buy.  So now I always open the cover to read that indica to see which version of the comic I have.  Then if I like what I see, I proceed to inspect the issue for wear and tear.  Happy collecting!

Comic Book Find #2 and #3: Crazy! #2 and Captain America fights Asthma (again!)

I can say with much expertise that I am still an amateur when considering if a find is the right purchase.  I went to a stoop sale in Williamsburg this morning and came upon an elderly couple, probably in their early sixties, who were selling, among other things, a half box of comics.  I was a bit disappointed but I went through the box anyway.  There were quite a bit from the '70s but of all the ones that were still in somewhat decent shape, I selected the following:

This issue was probably no better than a VG+.  I hadn't heard of this Marvel title but I knew they had a similar satire title called Not Brand Ecch!  When I got back home and looked it up, Crazy! #2 is actually a Not Brand Ecch! reprint from 1968.  Oh well.  Still, for two bucks, it's pretty funny with art by Jack Kirby.  It's worth between $4 and $6, my guess.

There might be more from this couple.  The woman had leaned forward and said "This is just the hair of the tip of the iceberg."  She went on to say that she had more from the 80s and 90s and that she and her husband were going to have another sale soon.  So I gave her my email address.  We'll see what actually happens.  But it's nice to have a possible lead.  How much is a hair of the tip of the iceberg?  I'd like to know...

After Williamsburg, I headed over to Sunset Park to Joseph Koch's Comic Warehouse.  I pulled out the following comic from a lot that he had just gotten yesterday:

This is obviously a promotional comic.  I love these types of comics because the intent is to bring attention to important health matters.  Past promotional comics include Spidey helping kids avoid being sexually abused and the X-Men fighting hunger in Ethopia.  I also love them because sometimes the covers are kinda ridiculous.  Really?  Allergens in the form of bugbears?  And who's that green thing?  Does he really need a gun to spread asthma?  Mark Bagley, the artist, would go on to draw Ultimate Spider-Man.  It's not his best work but anything that helps kids fight asthma should be applauded.  Interestingly, a NM version of this comic is worth about $10.  Not bad for a one dollar purchase.  And apparently, this is the sequel!

This purchase also reveals another lesson in being an amateur:  had I known how much this comic was actually worth, I would have bought the other five copies.  Looks like I have to read up on my Overstreet. 

I finished up around 12:15pm and then spent the rest of the day with my family.  Remember:  life isn't always about comics, but there's no reason not to read them when you have a free moment.

I'll take that vintage Bordeaux...and Wolverine Limited Series #1 (1982)

I am up on a Saturday morning when I should be resting.  It is 4:30 in the morning and all I do is think about Greenpoint and Williamsburg...because that is where there sare stoop sales with comics in those neighborhoods on Craigslist.  "Vintage 80s comics" one of the ads says.  I don't know.  Should the 80s really be identified as a "vintage" era?  If so, then I am a very old man.  But the term "vintage," for whatever reason, stirs an undeserved and chaotic imagination of what one might actually find:  A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle #1 (1984)?   A Secret Wars #8 (1984), in which Spider-Man dons the all-black costume? None too original if you ask me, but for whatever reason this was considered a pretty big deal!  Or Avengers Annual #10 (1981), the first appearance of Rogue?

Sure, they're all great comics worth pursuing.  But in my book, "vintage" should apply to wines and dresses.  And Craiglisters should stop messing with my mind.  'Cause what I'll probably find are boxes of Marvel's New Universe Line (1986).  Does anyone remember D.P. 7?  Ugh... Well, that's the life of a comic book picker.

Joseph Koch's Comic Book Warehouse

I just love this place.  Located a block off the BQE in Sunset Park, it is literally a warehouse.  I walk up a flight of stairs and go past the sweatshop.  Sometimes there are women working on machines, sometimes the doors are shut.  I don't ask.  I just head to the back of the building and down a short corridor to the large room containing rows and stacks of boxed comics. 

I enjoy shaking hands with stout Peter and listening to him talk to another comic buff about how modern comics can't compete with the Silver and Bronze Ages.  I know he likes Howard the Duck.  I am amazed that Joe, with his unbrushed mane of white hair, has so much energy and never hesitates to seek out whatever comic someone asks of him.  There are the $1 comics in the front and the "the good stuff" in the back.  I would not be surprised to find the Ark of the Covenant lost somewhere here. Maybe it is under the "Archie" comics. 

This is a dirty place.  There is dust on everything I touch.  No cleaning detergeant has ever touched any part of the concrete floor I imagine.  The lighting is decent but there are some dark rows.  I think I see their cat, Fuzzball, darting in and out from the corner of my eye.  They give out free snacks on days that the warehouse to the public.  I like eating the Dunkin' Donuts donut-holes.  I am not as squeamish as I used to be.

Me, I like to lose myself for that hour of escape so that I can thumb through the $1 Marvel bins, my current interest.  I am going through boxes of Spider-Man, a character I was never interested in when I was younger.  Now I find several issues that I put aside to purchase:  the Spider-Man clone stories including the issue where Mary Jane tells Peter Parker she is pregnant and some early Ultimate Spider-Man issues from the early 2000s featuring an alternate storyline where Peter is a teen-ager again and working as a web-master for the Daily Bugle. I find some defunct-Atlas comics from the mid-70s where Larry Lieber, Stan Lee's brother, worked as an editor (sort of like an alternate version of Marvel that failed in real life), like The Scorpion #1 (an early Howard Chaykin work of noir crime-fighting set in the 30s).  I find Marvel Team-Up Annual #4, an awful story written and drawn by Frank Miller starring Spider-Man, Moon Knight and Daredevil fighting against some Purple Man with mind-control powers and the Kingpin.  I guess even the best writers flop from time to time. 

I sigh.  My hour is up and I have to go back home to take care of the family.  I pay the butcher's bill.  I wish Peter well and tell him I'll see him again.  He knows my name and wishes me likewise.  I come here that often.  I walk out and am amazed that the sun is still shining.  After going through hundreds and hundreds of comics, my fingers are black.  I wonder if this is how my lungs would look if I smoked.  Still, I have my comics.  They're not in perfect condition but they're cheap. And I get to enjoy reading them and knowing that if this be my one and only vice, then I'm gonna live a long time reading comics. 

The secret formula to collecting comics

No, there isn't a secret formula to investing in comics.  Just like there isn't one for buying gold, silver, stocks, bonds, etc.  Nevertheless, as in any long-term investment strategy, diversification is one important key to success and having fun in this hobby.  I'll come back to diversification later.  But first, there are legitimate variables to consider when considering what makes a comic valuable.  And when I say valuable, I mean highly sought after. 

Here's my formula:

Value =   ((Condition * Popularity) + First appearance or Death of a character) / Existing copies

It's a pretty rudimentary approach, I admit, and I'm sure a statistician could make it more robust (maybe Popularity should be cubed?).  But more importantly, it helps to guide me before I plunk down money:

1. I cannot anticipate the popularity of any existing comic.
2. I may be able to estimate the existing number of copies.
3. I can select the condition that the comics are in for my collection.
4. I can determine which issues have first appearances or deaths. 

The formula may help to explain how certain comics are highly valued now, but it cannot predict which comics will rise, or continue to rise, in value.  For modern comics, it is even more difficult to predict because there is little historical reference to base their future performance. 

Let us consider the relatively high values for these Modern Comics:  Batman #404, New Mutant's #98 (Deadpools' first appearance), and Batman Adventures #12 (Harley Quinn's first appearance).  When can  we expect these comic values to shoot even higher?  I don't know.  But one, or both, things must happen:  their populairy must rise even higher and/or the number of existing copies must fall.  Now, which factor is more iimportant: popularity or number of existing copies?  I would say that popularity is more volatile while the number of existing copies tends to remain stagnant.  Perhaps the real question is can we predict these comics' future popularity?  No.  We cannot.

And this is what makes comic collecting fun! 

Here's where diversification comes in:  buy what you like, but choose a few comics from the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages.  Depending on your budget, and if it's anything like mine, you might end up having a portfolio with a high number of issues from the Bronze Age and Modern Age compared to the Golden and Silver Ages.  And that's okay.  The key is not to lock yourself into one or two key comic (or even one era of comics) that may or may not experience a rise in demand.

And from a pure collecting point of view, it's nice to see how characters, art, and storylines change over the decades.  Who doesn't like to see how Batman's costume changes over time?

Alice Wance's Archie comics

This past Spring (or was it Winter...it's so hard to tell the difference nowadays, what with global warming), I walked into my neighborhood second-hand shop and found a pile of Archie titles on top of a bureau.  There must have been about 60 or 70 comics ranging from such titles as Archie (of course) to Betty and Veronica, Reggie and Me, Jugehead, and Archie and Me.  They were printed roughly between 1968 and 1972, so they were towards the end of the Silver Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age.  I selected the best of the lot, the ones that could best be rated between Very Good and Fine Minus.  In short, the ones with some wear but still in decent shape.

The ones I really appreciated picking up were the "Archie" books, the ones drawn by Harry Lucey.  What an artist.  His lines are so sharp and his character's expressions and body language are straight out of vaudeville.  You should look him up.  I'm sure you'll agree that he should be remembered as the quintessential artist for Archie.  His stories took me back to my grade school days when I would read every single Archie Digest that belonged to my cousin.

When I returned home with my find, I discovered the name of one Alice Wance handwritten on the interior page of one of the issues.  At first, I was disappointed because it meant that the comic would be devalued.  But then I started to wonder who was this young reader?  Her handwriting suggested that she might have been between eight and ten.  I thought about how much she must have loved those stories.  And how lucky she was to have had parents who bought them for her.  Those stacks of comics...maybe those all did belong to her and she read, and re-read, each and every one of them until she outgrew them and then did other things that teenagers did back in the 70s.  I didn't smell smoke from the comics, so I guessed that she didn't smoke or did weed. I hope.

I wondered what might have happened to her.  And how those comics ended up in a second-hand store.  I shuddered to think that she may have passed away.  If she was about eight in 1968, she would be about 53 now.  It would be a human tragedy that someone her age would no longer be alive.  I did look her name up on-line but of the two Alice Wances that I found, the public records suggested that they were between 70 and 80. 

I'd like to think that she took care of them as best she could.  There were no torn pages.  She didn't color them with crayons or markers.  The spines were somewhat rolled, suggesting that they were piled upon one another.  Maybe she kept them in a nice spot on the bookshelf by the bed and she would read them before going to sleep. 

I'd like to think that she had a really nice childhood and that Archie helped along the way.  It would have been something I'd like to have asked her.  And if she still read any today.

I save comic books from people who stack them inside shopping bags

Or at least that's how I feel whenever I find some in poor condition.  I remember at a stoop sale in Carroll Gardens, I ran into a guy whose parents were being evicted so he had gone back home to remove some of his own items.  As a child, this fellow had received many free comics from his father who once worked for Mad Magazine and now he was selling them, piles of them, on the sidewalk, out of shopping bags.

Well, I thought, there probably won't be any in near mint or anywhere close to collectible condition.  But who knows what one might find...this was a young guy, so most of his collection were from the 80s and 90s. He had a number of trades, too, none of which interested me.  But then in the bottom of a few piles, I found some comics worth saving:  a Flash #192 (the Flash saves a submarine from the clutches of some evil organization hiding in some sea cave), a Daredevil #44 (Daredevil fights against some maniacal toy master), and an Invincible Iron Man #15 (featuring some villian named the Unicorn - geez...). 

As I expected, they were in rough shape.  The covers were chipped and creased.  The spines were all stressed out.  The Daredevil one was in the worst shape:  some of the interior pages had started to separate.  In collector parlence, they were no better than in Good condition.  Basically worthless - if you wanted to resell it.  But I thought they were pretty neato.  Comics from the late 60s are not that uncommon.  You can get them on eBay and comic book shops in far better condition.  But I was happy to find and buy them for about two bucks a piece.

The nice thing about buying comics that are already hurt is that you really can't reduce their value any further.  And you can just enjoy reading them.

Best of all, Maddie selected a hardcover anthology of superhero stories, Bizarro World, conjured up by indie writers and artists.  Imagine if Batman and Superman were written by William S. Burroughs disciples.  She really likes those weirdo stories, especially the one in which Superman is found and raised by elves from the North Pole and grows up to be, well, Super Santa!

Cool Pick #1: Giant-Size Iron Man #1

Since I started collecting again, I've been trolling Craigslist as the weekends approach to see what stoop sales, if any, may involve comics.  It hasn't been easy to find many on any given Saturday or Sunday.  Some days, I go to the stoop sale and there isn't much to choose from.  Or I get to the location and there is no sale, which happened just last Saturday in Park Slope.  Still, once in a while, I find something pretty neat (yeah, I like using the word "neat").

One Saturday morning, I went to Bay Ridge and walked up to a sale organized by some hipsters (or what I think are hipsters.  I find that anyone younger, thinner, and unshaven to be of that ilk, and I mean it in the best sense of the word, no irony intended).  It was a house on 3rd Avenue just feet from the elevated BQE, but when I walked up the covered porch, I found myself rather insulated from the noise and grit of the highway.  A couple of short boxes with a sign that said "$1" made it very welcoming indeed. 

So I knelt down and thumbed through them.  No Golden or Silver Age find...but I did grab a stack of about eleven comics, many of them Marvel's Giant-Size series from the 1970s.  A few Captain Americas, one drawn by Jack Kirby, another by Gene Golan; a Men of War #1, an origin story about a Black soldier designated for grave duty who battled both racism from his own superiors and the Nazis; and a Giant-Size Iron Man #1.  This, the Iron Man issue, was a great personal find.

Well, what's so special about it, you may ask.  After all, it's just a reprint of some 1960's Tales of Suspense Iron Man stories.  Ah, but it does have the origin of Hawkeye and his first encounter with the Black Widow (before she changed her costume).  And where do they meet?  In Coney Island!  Wowsers!  And who else is in Coney Island?  Why, Tony Stark with Pepper Potts!  For a buck, I get to appreciate those early adventures, one of which takes place in Brooklyn, my hometown!

So, what's it worth?  For the condition it's in, Overstreet says it's about $9.  On eBay, there are several selling for around that price.  I think there's too much supply and not enough demand for this issue to sell well on eBay.  It's just a comic reprint even if there's a "#1" on the cover. 

Still, if I were to resell it at my own stoop sale, I'd probably place a $7 sticker on it and go as low as $5. I might be able to get my asking price because the Iron Man 3 movie is out and there are many kids in my neighborhood who like the character.  In any case, on paper at least, I'll make a profit.  And with that profit, I'll probably end up taking my daughter out for ice cream.  And that's how I roll.

But will I sell it?  That's the hard part of being part collector, part speculator:  being sentimentally attached to an old comic.  Maybe I have too much of the collector in me...We'll see.  I'll let you know what happens.

Batman Incorporated #8 - a painful lesson in speculation (oh, and Damian Wayne dies)

You know the issue.  This is the one from DC's New 52 line.  The one in which Robin, aka Damian Wayne, Bruce and Talia's kid, dies.  And the one that was chased by everyone, collector and speculator, on the day that it came out.  I couldn't get one because Midtown Comics, the one closest to my office, did not receive their shipment. No other store in Manhattan that day had any copies left.  I was able to get a copy the following week.  Then I saw the combo-pack bagged variant version with the digital code.  I thought, hey, why not sell it while it's in high demand?  I listed it on eBay.  Then it all went to heck.

A day or so after I listed it, I noticed that the back cover was creased.  I wasn't sure how that happened.  I may have just picked up a bad copy.  I pulled the listing and relisted it with pictures of the back cover.  Yeah, I was honest.  At the end of the seven days, I sold it for about $5.80.  I actually took a loss:  although I paid cover price for it ($3.99),  I underestimated the actual shipping costs for the buyer to assume.  So I ate the difference.  Add to that the eBay and Paypal fees...I figured I took about a $2 to $3 bath.  But at least my eBay reputation remained intact and was rewarded to an additional star.

I didn't lose my shirt.  My family did not have to go hungry.  But it was a humbling experience for me.  As a novice, I expected to make a few dollars.  And as a novice, I took a few metaphorical slaps in the face from reality.  Here's what I learned:

1. I should have paid more attention when buying the issue.  Collectors love Near Mint condition.  Mine was not and I suffered for it. I've seen comic store employees handle stacks of comics:  they're not awful about it but comic spines are fragile and suffer from being piled onto the racks ten or twenty at a time.
2. Know your shipping cost.  I thought I did, but I was lazy and just estimated.  Bad move, buddy.
3. Fees will eat into your profits.  And they will exacerbate your losses.

In the future, I expect not to sell anything on eBay unless I expect to make at least two to three times what I paid for the item.  How will I know that the auction will turn out in my favor?  Well, I don't.  But this cautionary tale will give me pause to seriously consider if the timing is right.

On the other hand, I did enjoy Batman Incorporated #8 and have the regular version in my collection.  Is it going to put my daughter through college?  No.  Is it going to be worth much more than the $2.99 I paid for it?  Unless the number of Damian Wayne fans suddenly rise in the coming decade, I don't think so.  In any case, I have a historically important story and it will be part of my permanent collection.  It just cost me a few more dollars than I had expected to spend on it.  Oh well...

So...what have I been reading lately?

If you're curious, here's a list of titles I've decided to try out:

Ultimate Comics - Ultimate Spider-Man
Why?  'Cause I picked up #22 in which Miles Morales' mom died and it really touched me.  Losing a parent has got to be pretty hard thing to deal with, especially if you're still a kid.  Then #23 introduces the Ultimate version of Cloak and Dagger.  Yeah, I really liked them back in the 80s, so why not collect this story arc?

Captian Marvel
Why? 'Cause I wanted to read about a strong, female hero.  I gave Batwoman and while I really liked the beautiful artwork by J.H. Willimas III, I found myself...bored by the story.  Reading this new incarnation of Captain Marvel actually spurred me to collect some of the original Mar-Vell stories.  I even bought a decent copy of Marvel Super-Heroes #13, Carol Danvers' first appearance.  I found a nice copy of the graphic novel Death of Captain Marvel from a stoop sale last year and cried as Mar-Vell fought valiantly as he succumbed to his illness.  In a way, I'm glad he's still dead.  It's a tribute that they didn't bring him back.

Helheim
Why?  I have to admit that I bought this on the advice of a few websites that recommended it as one to buy and hold and then sell later when it catches on in popularity.  With a low print run and a story about vikings and zombies, why wouldn't it?  But the story is so tragic and well drawn that I have grown to really like it. And to be fair, the websites all did say that it was a great read as well.

It all starts with a comic book

I started collecting when I was in high school.  I didn't have much money but I did like Batman, so I pretty much collected everything related to him for a few years.  My local comic shop of choice was the old Forbidden Planet when it used to be across the street from The Strand and when they had a great back issue collection in the basement.  They've moved since and no longer carry any significant back issues.  I didn't find out about how the Forbiddent Planet changed so much until about a year ago when I started to collect again.

I must have stopped collecting when I started college back in the late 80s. Money and time were scarce.  When I graduated, I went to work and then got my graduate degree in Social Work.  Got married and had a beautiful girl.  When Comic Con arrived in NYC in the mid-2000s, I went to them yearly and even brought my daughter along when she was old enough.  During all this time, I would stop in at the neighborhood comic shop on occasion and find a one-shot or a mini-series that caught my interest.  Nothing serious.  I was so far out of comics that I had no idea about what was going on with the characters.  I saw what happened to comics in the 90s and thought that there was no way I could ever trust comics again.  At least not whole-heartedly.

Then last year, everything changed (well, doesn't everything change eventually?).  On a whim and while trying to escape some of the pressures of life in general, I looked up Craigslist and found out about a flea market where someone was trying to unload, well, comics.  I went and thought about picking up only a couple of comics.  I thought, hey, why not get into the hobby and look for some "old comics."  And then I met the dealer who took out a bag of 70s comics he said he was trying to sell on behalf of a friend's widow.  For an ungodly sum of a few hundred dollars, I took possession of about 50 or comics and magazines, mainly Marvel, the core of which was a pretty decent run of Amazing Spider-Man (issues 85 to 125, but missing 121 and 122, sadly...).  I remember my heart pounding, my hands sweating because I had just blew some crazy cash on old comics.  I'm a pretty good saver so it wasn't like I had just given away my mortgage check.  But would my wife understand (a story that will be told some other day)?  I justified it by convincing myself that I deserved it after receiving a promotion and helping to take care of my sick mother-in-law.  I should have bargained with him.  I made the beginner's mistake of thinking I had scored.  I hadn't, of course, and I overpaid.  But it was an important lesson I had to learn. 

I took the comics back home and during the summer, I read a couple each day, rationing and enjoying each new story.  I read the letters columns.  I read Stan Lee's message to his readers.  I regretted having been born too early in the 1970s to appreciate how important Marvel was to the comic industry and how I missed this era of the Bronze Age.

Since then, I've sold a few comics from this lot (what I now consider my own core collection).  I've sold some other collectibles to be able to afford my new/old hobby.  I've started to do my own picking at stoop sales, local comic book shops, and Joseph Koch's Comic Book Warehouse in Sunset Park.  I've also visited other websites that project which Modern Comics may be worth collecting and which older comics may be undervalued.  All the while, I've kept my expenses in check with the goal of trying to make the cost basis as close to zero as possible.  My goal is not to strike it rich by finding that one comic.  My goal is to have fun.  And if I can make a 10% profit, well, that's just gravy.

So if you're new to this blog, welcome!  I'm going to try and share what I've learned so far from my own amateur collecting.  I'm also going to share some philosophy on how this comic book hobby has improved or affected my own view on life.

As far as philosophy is concerned, what I can say is that comic collecting can be one crazy hobby, an obsession that can spiral out of control, especially if one is afflicted with obsessive-compulsive thoughts, or at least if one is trying to escape from reality.  I've had good moments and bad moments.  But overall, I can say that comics saved my life.  Yeah, that's a hyperbole.  But since I'm talking about comics, I think hyperboles are okay.  I'll share my moments as honestly as I can and hope that maybe you'll find something useful, helpful, or just plain entertaining from this nonsensical hobby.