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.