I have a lot of comic books. If people ask if I’m a comic book collector I usually say yes but to me it’s a little more nuanced than that. I say that all comic book fans exist on a spectrum.
At one end of the spectrum is the collector. They buy a comic book, immediately put it in a bag with a board, and never open that comic book. Not even once. They don’t read it. They just want to own it. Owning it is their reward.
At the other end of the spectrum is a comic book reader. They buy a comic book, immediately read it (or maybe they wait a little while) and after it’s read they toss it over their shoulder never to think about the physical comic again. The reading of the comic is the reward.
To the collector the value is in owning the comic. To the reader the value is in the reading.
I tend to skew towards the reader side. I buy new comic books every week and read them. I like to keep my comic books so I can read them at a later date but I get rid of the ones I don’t think I’ll ever read again. I tend not to buy expensive back issues as a collector would but instead buy cheaper reprints of valuable comics if I want to read them. But I still, on occasion, buy comic books just to have them. I’ll read them too but I still just kind of want them. I want to collect them.
One of the big things in comic book publishing today is the alternate cover. That’s when they print one comic book with two or more different covers. Often a regular comic book can have four covers and a special edition comic can have fifty covers. That is a lot of covers.
Some people like to buy two or three of the same comic if it has that many covers that they like. I see this all the time on social media. Most people just pick the cover they like best and buy that one. That’s what I usually do. I’d rather spend my money on another comic I could read rather than the same comic with a different cover. Though I occasionally will buy a second cover. I have a section of my collection called “Bought just for its cover” and that’s where I put stuff like that.
One comic series I recently bought for their covers (though I will read them) is the 2018-2020 series from Boom Studios: “Firefly.” I am a fan of the TV show from the early 2000s and when Dark Horse made a comic book of it back then I bought a few issues of it. It was okay but not particularly good. I pretty much ignored “Firefly” comics since then.
Recently I was looking around eBay for a particular artist’s work (Christian Ward) and I stumbled onto this “Firefly” series. It ran 36 issues and each issue had about four covers. There were a lot of good covers in the series. I really liked them. So I bought some.
Most alternate covers are the same price as the regular book. Comics these days are mainly $4-$5 with some larger issues running more. That’s one of the reasons I never buy many alternate covers. The price really adds up over time. But I guess this “Firefly” series wasn’t very popular. I was able to buy various issues in lots on eBay.
All through December 2025 I was able to buy lots and I ended up with nearly the whole series for $2 an issue. I was also buying lots for the alternate covers that I liked. I ended up with around 80 issues of the 36 issue series but there were only about six duplicate covers in the lots I bought. Way better than $4 an issue.
I also got a second “Firefly” series in the lots. One called “Firefly A Whole New Verse.” It only ran six issues but I got multiple covers for that one too. All together I think I got around 100 issues of “Firefly.”
What do I do with all of these comics you ask? I’ve been sticking them out on a side table. I pick about six of them in the morning and just set them down. As I’m going about my day I’ll wander over and look at a cover. Then I’ll put that one on the bottom of the pile. I find it fun to have so much good art to look at.
After buying lots of “Firefly” I was still missing two issues. So I decided to but them online. I keep a want list at mycomicshop.com so I picked up a few things off of that too. They were all cheap comics at around three dollars a piece. Not as cheap a $2 a piece but still okay. Here is the stuff I got.
Vanguard Illustrated – 5-7 – This is an anthology series from Pacific Comics in the early 1980s. I have had the first four issues since I bought them off the racks when they first came out. I have always wanted to finish off and reread the series so now I can.
Johnny Nemo magazine – 2-3 – I have the first issue of this 1980s series by Brett Ewins and Peter Milligan and I’ve always wanted these two. I think it was supposed to run six issues but it didn’t make it. I reread the first issue recently and then put these two on my want list. It’s a forgotten comic these days buy it’s a colorful, fun, future punk 80s series.
Box Office Poison – 2-3 – By Alex Robinson this is one of my all time favorite comics. It came out in the late 1990s and it captures that era very well in a slice of life story. I think issue four was my first issue of it (after which it went on my pull list) and then I got a collected edition of issues 1-3 so I could read the issues I missed. Last year I bought a mint condition copy of number one but I still was missing two and three. It ran 21 issues and now I have them all. There is also a one volume collected edition that I highly recommend.
Wasteland – 7 – I used to have a hardcover collected edition of this indie series “Wasteland”. I thought it was okay but I decided to give the book away to one of my students (that’s what I do now with stuff I don’t think I’ll read again). In looking through the book one last time I saw this single issue drawn by Carla Speed McNeil. She is one of my favorites so I decided to track down the single issue and put it on my want list to buy one day.
Three Jenny Frisson Covers – Three random indie comics that had Jenny Frisson drawn covers that I really liked. They were only $3 a piece so I decided to get them. These are 100% cover purchases. But I’ll still read them.
Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD – 3 This one I bought to make a video. I have a reprint of the issue that I was looking at and I noticed Jim Steranko (the artist and writer of the issue) doing some interesting things with the horizon lines in the drawings. I decided to make a YouTube video looking at the issue but I wanted to see the original comic so that I could see the original page turns. It cost me $13 on eBay and I did make that video.
Nexus -v2 1 – I haven’t got this yet (it’s in the mail) but I just bought a book from Steve Rude’s website so that got me to pull out my original Nexus issue. Mine is scuffed up. It’s been that way since I bought it but I checked on eBay and saw that I could get a mint condition version for $12. I decided to get it.
There is one that I just wanted to own a perfect looking copy of. Sometimes I move all the way to the collector end of the spectrum.