They killed him, but I'm keeping him alive...

Well as most of you know Captain America is no more, he was "killed" by Crossbones/Sharon Carter whatever.I won't elaborate on Marvel's latest gimmick, plenty of other blogs for that and I also don't believe that Cap's dead for good. So why am I writing about it at all...because I just got a huge stack of Cap books in the mail.

After all my tales of woe the previous months/years about very slow shipping, I finally caught a break. This morning an 25 lbs M-bag with about 170 caps (Silver-Bronze-Copper) arrived from the US
It was put in the system on Jan 21st and I calculated (based on previous misadventures) it would arrive arrive around the first of May..well it didn't, it got here now and only took 52 days. Or half the time of the previous ones.

I have no idea now anymore how the M-bag system works, my best bet is that they have a 800-pound gorilla working there who tosses the bag and the bag that lands the furthest away from base gets shipped first.
Anyway, I don't care, all I know I have a huge lot of Caps between #106 & #400 to read.
After getting my very first Caps a few months ago, I kinda fell in love with the series and decided to put together a nice long run, initially I was going for #100 (Captain America starts with #100) through to #200...but now I guess I'm going to go up to #400.
The next week will be pretty busy, re-bagging and boarding 170 books, grading them and putting them in my database and then fyscially moving them into my comic cabinets.But let's face it, that's the fun part of collecting.

Here's how 170 Cap books look, fresh out of the M-bag, I put one of the better covers next to the pile to give you an idea of the dimensions.

Amazing Amassed

My goal for 2006 was to complete Amazing Spider-man #1 - #500... but I got a little sidetracked and was about 4 books short around Xmas, I opted not to go out and buy any old copy just to make it, but to throw in the towel and admit that 2006 was going to be the first year since I started collecting where I didn't manage to complete a large series. I completed Thor #126 - #300 in 2006 (starting from scratch) but it really wasn't that hard.
But now, two months later, I'm proud to announce that I finally did it and have ASM complete up to #500. I completed the series around Valentine's day last month, but wanted to wait until #20 arrived safely as not to jump the gun. It arrived today so I'm very happy.

Unlike Avengers and Fantastic Four which I completed the two previous years I don't have the time/energy to make a scan of all 500 covers like I did Avengers HERE and FF HERE
Instead here are the covers to the first 9 issues..





I feel like I've come full circle now. ASM V2 #36 (the 911 issue) was the comic that got me into collecting, I bought it, read it and then decided to start collecting Marvel and haven't looked back since. Initial plan was to collect ASM #100 - #500 but then I went to see the second Spiderman movie and just had to buy a copy of #50. Suffering from completionist disorder I then HAD to fill in all the issues between #50 and #100. Second plan was to collect #50 - #500 and get #1 - #49 as Marvel Masterworks. But once that was done I knew I was kidding myself and decided to get all the issues.

Plan for 2007 is to complete JIM #83 - #125, complete Batman #200 - #400 and just maybe get a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15