Rebuilding...

In the 90's I did a very stupid thing.  I sold my comic book collection.  Everything I had collected in the 80's and early 90's was sold for about $2000.  I take consolation that this was at the height of the speculative market and I got what I feel was a fair price.  I did this for a very, very, very stupid reason.  I was pressured to by my then girlfriend (later to be known as the evil ex-wife).

From the mid-90's until 2005, I followed comics, but didn't collect them.  I would read at work (thank you Waldenbooks, Modern Myths and B&N).  What comics I did buy invariably got traded back in for credit.  I found I much preferred to buy and collect trades.  All those great story lines in a bound edition?  Perfect.  I have one 6-foot and one 4-foot bookshelf filled with trades and hardcovers.  I also have 3 short boxes filled with trades that I can't fit on my bookshelves. 

I was getting my fill of great comic stories, but something was missing.  There are so many great stories (and not so great) that haven't been collected.  DC, especially, does a poor job of collecting their backlist*.  I yearn for the comics I had back in the 80's.  Team books like the Avengers, JLA, X-Men (when there was one X-Men title.  One!), The Defenders, Outsiders, Fantastic Four, Teen Titans, All-Star Squadron.  The solo adventures of Spider-Man, Green Lantern, Captain America, Superman, Iron Man, Batman.  Goofy team-up books like Marvel Two-In-One, Brave & the Bold and Marvel Team-Up.  

In the past 2 years, I have slowly begun rebuilding my collection.  Once every couple months I seek out a comic shop that offers what were called Quarter Bin comics (but not all of them are a quarter any more) and spend $25-$50 on rebuilding my collection.  Shout outs to Modern Myths, Comically Speaking, Rubber Chicken Comics and Collector's Guild in Mansfield, MA for still offering bargain comics.  I also spent about $20 with Westfield Comics shopping their 25 cent Asylum section.  I recently put together a complete run of Comico's Justice Machine (I said they weren't all great) and was so happy!  I'm actually going to send them off to be bound into 2 hardcover collections (something I recently did with a complete run of Blue Beetle (1985) and the Armageddon 2001 annuals that DC published in 1991).

There's something so relaxing about combing through back issue bins and then the thrill of coming across something like Shogun Warriors #19 and remembering how excited I was originally reading the book (What? The Fantastic Four is in this?)

I'm currently at 12 short boxes (and growing) worth of memories.  I have a spreadsheet of comics I want to find and it's currently at 3250 comics.  I find that the list keeps on growing as I re-discover titles from my childhood.  The last time I went hunting, I came across issues of Infinity, Inc., L.E.G.I.O.N, Solo Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Mutant X and ROM and had to add all those missing issues to my want list.

* DC Comics appear to be improving in this category.  Plans are afoot to publish Legion Lost, the aforementioned Infinity, Inc and Suicide Squad.