I’ve got a lot of comic books. That’s no surprise to anyone who knows me. After all I am a comic book collector. I’ve been a bit of a comic book accumulator at times and over the last few weeks it has been time to clean some things out. Contrary to popular belief the vast majority of comic books are worth almost nothing. In fact so close to nothing that they are, in fact, worth nothing. Just like people mostly want baseball cards that are of famous players or are rare people only want comic books of famous characters or ones that are rare. The other 99.9% isn’t in very high demand.
I’ve noticed the comics I’ve been cleaning out break down into a handful of different categories. The first category is where I learned just how little demand there is for most comics. About six years ago I was out of work. At about the same time a friend of mine was getting rid of a bunch of his comics so he gave them to me. I took them for the express purpose of selling them on Ebay and making a little cash. That turned out to be a big pain in the ass and there wasn’t a whole lot of cash to be made.
It was easy enough to post the comics that were in a long run. If I had twenty issues in a row of Batman that was easy to write up, post, and it would get looks. But if there were three or four issues of some random comic they would take just as much time as a long run to write up, take a photo of, post, pack up, and ship. And no one would care about them. If I was lucky I could get a dollar and issue for the long run of Batman comics. The others would sell for, maybe, four for a dollar. That’s a lot of work to make a single dollar and eventually I found more lucrative work and quit bothering with Ebay. But I still had a bunch of random comics laying around.
The second category is comics I dragged home from work back when I used to work in the production department at Marvel Comics. Sometimes I’d be a bit bored at work so I started collecting comics that I’d find around the office. Not any old comic but a few series that I had a minor interest in that weren’t part of whatever comics I was already collecting. It turns out that I did this a couple of different times over the years. I notice I have some issues of Iron Man, Thor, and the Avengers from around the year 1999. They were stuck away in a box in my closet. I don’t even remember them but there they are. The next batch is from around 2004. Dragging random comics home wasn’t something I did all the time since I have plenty already but on these two occasions I sure did.
As a subset of those two “Around the office” collections I found a bunch of early 1990s specialty covers comics. Hologram covers, foil covers, die cut covers, extra shiny covers and the like that were all the rage in the 1990s. I hated all of those gimmicky covers when them came out and so I had none. Ten years later when I saw them abandoned at the office I decided to take some home and add them to my collection out of pure nostalgia. I figured why not have a few examples of these fancy useless covers? I think I’m going to keep these ones. I only have about twenty of them and that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number of ones I’m getting rid of.
Yet another subset of this set is a bunch ow “Wizard 1/2 Editions”. Those are comics that were specially printed by Wizard magazine.They were promotional giveaways that fans would have to buy Wizard magazine and send in coupons for. They would also send a bunch of copies to the Marvel offices where they’d just lay around. One day I decided to see how many of them I could collect from about the place. I have ten or so of them. Not a huge collection.
The third category is comics that a friend sent me. He was working for DC comics and would, on occasion, drop a bunch of comics into a box and mail them to me. It was always fun having a box of comics show up in the mail and seeing what was in there. Of course most of the comics were dreck but that was okay. I got a chance to see and read comics that I never would have bothered to even glance at on my own. Over a year’s time he must have sent me half a dozen boxes which added up to, at least, a few hundred comics. I don’t really need all those piling up around the place anymore.
The last category is old stuff that’s been in my closet for a long time now. I have yet to go through that batch so I’m not exactly sure what’s in there. There are only about six or eight short boxes of comics there but I haven’t looked at them in a decade. The last time I had a big purge of my collection was in the late 1990s and that’s when these boxes were put in the closet. They were the comics that I cared least about in my collection but didn’t want to get rid of. They’re still sitting there.
Most of them are from my high school years. They’re comics that a friend of mine collected by then he quit collecting comics and gave them to me. I’m not saying they have much value but out of all the ones I want to clean out they have the best chance of being worth a little something. I think there are some copies of 1980s X-Men stuff and some Frank Miller Wolverine and Daredevil comics. Beyond that I’m not positive. There are probably a bunch of mediocre 1980 series that I was unsure if I wanted to get rid of them back in the late 1990s so I stuck them in the closet. Well, the closet is full now so it’s time to clear stuff out. Ain’t that the way of life.
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