Ever Have To Sell Your Collection..........

[sjarrell]

I sold a complete 1975-1983 X-Men run to cover rent in 1990. I still occasionally miss the copy of 94 that I had signed by Claremont and Cockrum when I was 12. But I didn't die.

I'm thinking about moving out a boatload of CDs to cover what my wife's short term disability (no maternity leave, alas) doesn't pony up. Mortgage, groceries. Diapers!

Edit: Oh yeah, and the goddamn speeding ticket...

When I was 18 and gearing up for the Senior Prom, I contemplated selling my comic book collection in order to get money for tuxedo rental, limo, flowers, etc. I even had a guy from a local comic book shop come over and look over my collection. For some reason, I wanted to sell the whole thing at one go, so I was unwilling to break it up and sell off parts of it. The guy offered me $200 just for my X-Men (and X-Men related) titles, but I refused (he was unimpressed by my complete runs of John Byrne on "The Fantastic Four" and "Alpha Flight") unless he took everything at once.

After I graduated high school, I lugged my collection around for the next several years. Tiring of that, I decided once again to sell my collection sometime around 1996 or so. This is shortly after the speculator comic book market crashed, devaluing everything. The guy offered me $40 for my whole collection, including those "X-Men" comics that were fetching $200 just a few years earlier (I had the "Death of Phoenix" and everything). I made a $45 counter offer, and he accepted.

In the years that have passed since that time, I have accumulated a collection that takes up only two long-boxes (which includes a few items from my old collection that somehow didn't get sold at the time. Not sure why. They must not have been with the other comics). Nothing terribly valuable, although I understand that my 1991 copy of "From Hell" #1 is worth a little bit of money. I feel bad, though, that I sold my original run of "Watchmen," because those have become quite valuable. Not that I care about the monitary value of my comics. I keep them bagged so I can enjoy reading them over and over again, not so I can sell them and send my daughter to college (they'll never be THAT valuable).

My biggest mistake as a comic book collector was letting two copies of "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" #1 slip away back when the comic was new. At the time, I didn't have a car and the comic book store was near my dad's office, so he would stop by on Friday afternoons on his way home and pick up my comics for me (this was pretty much en leu of an allowance). One week he came home with two copies of "DK" #1 instead of my usual order (which was all Marvel comics). I bitched and moaned and made him take them back so I could get my copy of "X-Factor" or "West Coast Avengers" or whatever crap I was reading. He has never let me forget that. I wound up getting "Dark Knight" when it came out in the Trade Paperback ediition (which I still have to this day).

It's actually amazing the good condition my comics are in, considering that some of them are over twenty years old now. My dad kept HIS comics in a paper grocery bag in the attic of our house. I used to read them all the time (that's how I got hooked on comics and also how I developed my adolescent devotion to Marvel). When I was a kid, most of my dad's comics couldn't have been more than five or six years old (including several Kirby FFs, Thors, and Captain Americas), but they already looked like hell (and look much, much worse now, even though I've kept them in plastic since about 1984. Of course, I wouldn't sell my dad's collection along with mine back in '96). I was reading some eleven year old comics last night, and they still look like the day I bought them...

I bought all of those X-Men again over the years, only to sell 'em again (#94-143 as a lot on eBay for $500 roughly half their book value) a couple years ago. I think more and more about unloading a shipload of comics as fancy reprints come available. I can read them if I want and don't have to dig through boxes to find them. Reading spines on the bookshelf is soooooo much easier. And they look sorta respectable, too.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

My first collection was stored in Philadelphia when we were in Africa and contained almost every issue of the Marvel "universe" from 1962 to 1966. The warehouse it was stored in burned down before we returned to America.

Ouch. Warehouses should be fireproof. Atlantic masters, Impulse masters, Decca masters, your funnybooks...

Ha fuckin' ha! The mortgage company had my deeds in a warehouse, which caught fire AFTER I'd paid off the mortgage, but before the firm got off their arses to send me my deeds! And then they wanted to charge me $150 to get copies from the Land Registry!!!!!!

They did it for free in the end - and I got some compensation out of them.

MG

[Jazzmoose]

On the subject of comics, there's one book I had that I don't regret selling. I had a beautiful copy of Superman #7 that I sold when my cat Godzilla needed an operation. Saved the little guy's life, and I never had any regrets about giving up the book. So circumstances make a difference...

[sjarrell]

On the subject of comics, there's one book I had that I don't regret selling. I had a beautiful copy of Superman #7 that I sold when my cat Godzilla needed an operation. Saved the little guy's life, and I never had any regrets about giving up the book. So circumstances make a difference...

A job for Superman.

[Jazzmoose]