The Mighty Thor Annual #13 (1985)

Every year my LCS, Boscos, has their annual back issue sale.  They have a big events room in their new location and part of it gets sectioned off to house all the boxes for the sale.  It's really a mixed bag of old and new comics.  The first week all issues are $4, which is slightly ridiculous, but you gotta start somewhere.  Every week the price goes down till the last week of August where I think everything is a buck or less.  But the manager's special is where it's at.  You can fill a short box up for $50 or a long box for $60.  And I think the big deal was 3 long boxes for $150 bucks.  That's a lot of comics.  The one long box is a good deal, but if my wife caught me bringing home a full long box I might get shot.  I opted to fill up a short box, much easier to sneak into the man cave undetected.  The whole point is I've got a box cherry picked back issues to share.  So let's start with The Mighty Thor Annual Lucky #13 from 1985.  I have a hard time passing up annuals, especially one's in decent shape.

I was taking a break and decided to pull something out of the short box which I have yet to fully organize into my collection and this Thor Annual popped out at me.  So why not?  I have to say the story is a little lacking, but it gave John Buscema a reason to draw Thor fighting Ulik and Mesphisto.  Basically the story shows just how big of a dick Mesphisto is.  It's a stand alone story that really has no effect on the Marvel Universe in any way.  But considering I paid less than a quarter for it, I won't complain too much.

2017 Halloween ComicFest Haul!!

It's the second best time of the year.  Of course the best time of the year is Free Comic Book Day in May, but Halloween ComicFest is a very close second.  Not as many free comics to choose from, but the lines were a lot shorter.  I ended up talking my wife into accompanying myself and my son to the event.  We hit up both locations of Bosco's, my LCS here in Anchorage.  Their mall location only had the mini comics, but we loaded up on those for my son.  The main store had all the regular size issues.  All three of us were in costume so we got 4 comics each.  I ended up snagging only 6 regular size comics for myself and the picked up 6 more mini's for my son.  Luckily, or not, for me my wife isn't into comics.  While only picking up 6 of the 18 full size comics available I got the ones I wanted.  And my son now has a huge stack of mini comics to trash.    We also grabbed some of the 25 packs of minis to give out on Halloween.  Here are the one's I picked up.

Darth Maul #1 is a reprint, but that cover!

 The Hellboy is also a reprint.  And I would guess just about everything was a reprint of some sort.

 Although I'm not sure about this one.  I'm sure someone can correct me.

 I couldn't pass up a Ghostbuster comic on Halloween!

 Batman, a no brainer.

 I already had a 1st print of this book, but again just a cool cover.

 Here are most of the mini's we picked up too.

2017 Halloween Comic Fest - Oct 28th!!

 Who doesn't love free comics, and who doesn't love free comics twice a year.  The second free comic event of the year, Halloween Comic Fest is this Saturday, Oct. 28th.  There are 18 full size books to choose from.  You can see a full line up at the Halloween ComicFest website.

Here's a sample.

The Evolutionary War Annual Checklist Card

Cross annual events were all the rage for Marvel in the late 80's and early 90's.  I'm not sure if the Evolutionary War was the first of the big cross-overs (I'm too lazy to do the research), but it definitely was the one I remember. I know I own a fair number of these and I also know I'm missing a few, like the Amazing Spider-man which is the first appearance of Speed-Ball.  I tend to keep all the freebie giveaways that comic shops give out.  So I still have my 1988 checklist.  There is one annual missing from the checklist that I always found amusing back in 1988.  Marvel branded the Alf Annual #1 as an Evolutionary War book.  If I remember right there is a very brief interaction with the High Evolutionary to justify it.  I was digging through a binder and found this card, along with a ton of other promo cards, inserts, and sell sheets and I'll be posting them pretty regularly. 

I might have to hunt down all the annuals I'm missing and have a big old Evolutionary War binge read.  

100 Pages of Awesome - Flash 214

I love big, fat, thick comics.  They are hard to resist.  Almost every DC 100 pager I have I got back in the early 80's.  I would dig through the back issue boxes looking for the biggest comics I could find.  I mean there were the big 60 pagers, and the humongous 80 pagers, but for my money the Giant 100 pagers were where it was at.  And I picked them up for buck or two.  As a kid who just wanted to read comics, the 100 page comics offered a ton of material and the books had multiple stories.  

The first 100 Pagers were the part of the Super Spectacular series that had 19 issues in it, starting in early 1971 and running through late 1973.  These all had a DC designation.  Like the Flash here was DC-11.  Some of the books were stand alones, others were numbered into an ongoing series like the Flash here.  There were no issues 1-3 as the numbering starts at 4 and issues 4, 5, and 6 do not have the DC prefix.  The one thing all 19 of the Super Spectacular 100 Pages have in common is they are just a big collection of reprinted stories.  The Flash, featured here, does have one Golden Age Flash story that was never published.  In 1974 DC started putting out these 100 pagers in a lot of their titles and they contained original material.  Some of the titles only had one or two 100 pagers in the run, other like Justice League and Batman had 7 or 8.  I will say most of the 100 Pagers I have in my collection are well read, ahem, not in the most pristine of condition and that's pretty typical of these square bound books.  The spines really take a beating and the front and back cover stock tears  easily.  

The book has no ads and a sweet wrap around cover.  The front and back cover are counted in the page count, but still a hell of bargain for a kid 30 plus years ago.

Iron Man #6 or How my mother guilted me out of buying Iron Man #1 30+ years ago.

To be honest growing up I was a DC guy.  I loved the JLA, and all the individual heroes.  That probably had to do with really liking the Super Friends.  But the one Marvel character I always loved was Iron Man.  I was never into Spider-man and even though I got into reading Spidey, I still don't consider myself a fan (gasp).  I managed to get into X-men only because the owner of the comic shop I went too gave me some sage advise,  "Buy X-men they always go up in value."  He was right at least for the bronze and silver age stuff.  I dug Fantastic Four and the Avengers, but I was never a big collector early on.  

But this post is about the featured comic.  Iron Man #6.  She's a real looker.  That spine is almost defect free.  Sure there are few minor issues, but overall it's one of my favorite books that I own.  I can remember saving my money up.  Mostly birthday and Christmas, but I also had a newspaper route and I would pocket my lunch money.  I had been eyeing a copy of Iron Man #1 at the Comic Book Shop, which I talked about last post.  It wasn't in the best shape, but still a decent copy, but Brad had it priced around $50 bucks.  That's big money to a 12 year old in the 80's.  

Let me back up to recent times first on how I ended up not walking out of that shop with one of my holy grails.  Last April I went down to Wisconsin to visit my folks.  I still have a large pile of comics boxed up in their basement and I've been devising a plan to get them up to me in Alaska.  Anyways over a couple drinks my mother recalls when I ended up buying issue #6 here.  If I remember I paid $15 for it back in the mid-80's.  This is why you don't take your mother to the comic shop, but a rides a ride.  Anyway time warp back to 1986 or 87 and I'm ready to buy issue #1.  I've saved for this.  My mother doesn't understand why I would want to pay so much for a comic book when there are plenty of good comics in the quarter boxes and new comics only cost 75 cents.  In the end her guilt made me pull back and I still ended up walking out of the shop with a silver age Iron Man just not #1.  And she still gave me crap for spending $15 bucks on that #6.

Origin Story

As far back as I can remember I've had comics around.  There were always a couple Richie Rich's, Archie's, or Looney Tunes laying around the house.  But I wouldn't say I was a collector.  I didn't officially, at least in my mind, become a collector until about 1985.  And there was one book.  One single issue that I can say started it all.

Justice League of America Annual #1.  I can't remember where I picked this issue up, probably at a flea market or garage sale, but the scan is the actual issue. I've had that book over 30 years!  And to be honest it's not in the best shape.

This book was my radioactive spider bite, it was the catalyst to my obsession.  It also led me to trading cards, but that is another story for another blog.  While I can't remember where I picked this issue up, I can vividly remember the first time I read it and the catharsis that followed.  I had been aware of super heroes, both Marvel and DC, but it wasn't until I read this magnificent story that it  all came together and clicked in my adolescent mind.  Here were all of DC's greatest superheroes all in one book, all in one super sized story.  It hooked me, and never really left.  The medium of visual storytelling with sequential art became an obsession.  

I was living in El Paso at the time.  My father a career military man was stationed at Ft. Bliss.  One weekend I remember heading over to one of the many flea markets that popped up all over the city in the 80's and coming across a table with piles of comics.  Now we would call these bronze age, but at the time most were less than 10 years old and everything in the stack was a quarter.  I pulled every JLA out of that stack.  And there began my comic collection.  Had I been more savey I would have also grabbed every X-men and Amazing Spider-man I could have found.  But I started off a DC guy.

As luck would have it there were two comic shops within walking distance from our housing unit.  The aptly named Comic Book Shop owned by Brad Wilson, who still owns and operates a comic store in El Paso called All-Star Comics, just down the road from where his old shop use to be.  Brad's shop would be where I would spend most of my time and money it was closer than the other comic shop, Rita's Fantasy Shop.  As far as I know Rita's is long gone, but there is collectibles shop in the same shopping center that could be it's descendant. 

From there it was all down hill.  And too be honest my attention has ebbed and flowed with the collection over the years.  I would never say I left the hobby, but there were definitely times where I was not buying a lot of books or any for that matter, but I still have all the comics I had as a kid.  I can thank my mother for not being one of those who cleans out the closets regularly.   

I recently came off of a 4 years hiatus of not buying any single issues.  Well to be honest that's not true, I just stopped buying new issues. Prices had just gotten out of hand.  But recently I've started to dip my toes back in.  This blog for instance is a direct result of my renewed interest in the hobby.  Coupled with the fact that my waning interest in my trading card hobby due to general boredom that exclusivity has brought to the market.

So here's to the old and the new and exploring the collection that has been sitting in storage for years.

Cheers

CB out

Time Warp or the 1st appearance of the Punisher was how much in 1986??!!??

I was digging through some of my old boxes today and came across my stash of old price guides.  It was a fun walk down memory lane and lot of wishing I had a time machine.  Overstreet has been putting out annual price guides since 1970, but with the internet they have become really an antiquated source of information, but even in the late 70's and 80's using a book that only came out once a year really didn't capture what the market was doing and to be honest could have held the market down.  In 1986 Overstreet put out it's first quarterly bulletin.  And it honestly was a game changer.  Eventually other price guides would come out and would become a monthly fixture in hobby shops as collector's wanted to find out what was hot and if they had any hidden treasures in their collections.  Let's have a look at what some key issues were going for in the summer of 1986.

1st JLA $380, about $500 today.

1st Spider-man $1150, about $2500 in todays money.

1st Appearance of the Punisher: Amazing Spider-man 129 for $2!!!!  That would change soon as the mini-series came out around the same time as this issue and once the regular series started that issue would top over $100 in just a couple years.

1st Wolverine, Incredible Hulk #181 - $30!

I could go on and on.  Oh to have not been 12 and had some pocket change in the mid-80's.

You could buy almost anything from comics in the 60s

Literally.

Double dip or how a silver age Nick Fury came home with me.

So I couldn't help myself.  After I watched the Packers try and give me a heart attach again this weekend I stopped by the small collectibles show I posted about earlier.  I really wanted to snagged that copy of Spider-Women #2 I had seen in the box.  After talking with the seller, Steven, again he mentioned it wasn't in that great of shape.  Which he was right about, but it was marked at a dollar so why not.  And then I started to look through his boxes again just to see if there was anything I could spend my last $10 on.  I ended up pulling this beauty out.

Steven had a price tag of $10 on it, but let it go for $8 and threw in the Spider-Woman.

All in all a great weekend.  And I'm super excited about my 5 book weekend.

Another new blog ung! Or how I got my first silver age Spectre comic

When I started my first blog, Collector's Crack over 8 year's ago I had intended for it to be an all encompassing collector's blog.  But over time it has evolved into more or less a trading card blog.  And then I branched out with my different collections.  From my player collections I created two new blogs, for me team collections I created 3 new blogs, for my obsession with Lego Minifigures I created yet another blog, and then I also have had blogs for my gardening and art.  And this year I've pretty much managed to ignore them all.  I've moved, had my gallblader removed, worked my butt off, and done a bit of traveling.  So blogging has really taken a back seat.  But never have I considered shuttering any of my blogs.  There was a time I was worried and fretted about putting out content on the blogs. Now not so much, but to be honest I haven't lost any followers, not like I go about unfollowing any blogs, even ones that have long since been retired.

So that being said I've decided to create yet another blog, focused solely on my comic collection and collecting.  I've been collecting comics as a hobby since I was 12 or so right around 1985. But that is another story.  I'm going to being this blog with some recent pick-ups.  And by recent I mean this afternoon. 

There was a small collectibles show in Anchorage this weekend.  And by small I mean less than 10 tables.  The show is really put on by the coin collectors society here, but they let in other guys to help pay for the space.  And as luck would have it there were a couple sports card guys and one lone comic book seller.  Steve who owns his own small collectibles business that he runs out of his home was there and from past shows I know he always has some killer vintage stuff.  I have a great story about when I first met him and he was showing off his Jackie Robinson bats, yes plural.  Anyways Steve had his vintage baseball stuff and a couple short boxes comics.  He also had some really nice stuff under glass that was way out of my price range.  I had only brought about $30 with me to make sure I didn't over spend.  I perused the boxes and we started talking comics and cards.  Eventually two comics caught my eye.  For different reasons.  The silver age Spectre comic just stood out.  It was the only one he had in the box and for $14 list price I couldn't pass it up.  Other than the yellowing of the white the book is really solid and complete.  The second book I saw was Spider-woman #1.  I recently decided to try and put a run together and I was looking for a #1.  Not only that it also was had a $14 sticker price and after looking at the book the spine was perfect and there only couple little dings in the corners and one small corner fold.  Sold.  After we stopped jawing I hand Steve my two comics and he offered both for $20.  The show's running one more day I really want to stop back by and look through the boxes one more time.  As I was getting ready to leave he mentioned he had a box under the table and anything in it was a buck a book.  And that's where I snagged the copy of Tomb of Darkness #22.  It's a little beat up, but I think it's a solid 5-6 and I can't pass up bronze age horror, even if it's just full of reprinted stories.

So welcome to my newest time suck.  Cheers
CB out.