Nuff Said

2245 comics read in 2011 - Final tally

2012-01-01T22:22:00.004+01:00

2245 ... that's the magic number for 2011, the year that was. I've bored everyone to tears (most of all myself) with the updates on how my quest to read 1000 comics in 2011 went.
Well along with the year, the quest is over and these are the points from the Belgian jury.

As I wrote before, I got bookcurious halfway and decided to go for 2011 comics, because let's face it ... a 1000 comics a year, or less than 3 comics a day isn't exactly a stretch. Once I reached 2011 comics I felt happy and sad at the same time. Happy because I manged to pull it off and reach an even higher level in the never ending game of Geekquest, but also a bit sad because I knew I would start slacking in the final 6 -8 weeks.

And slack I did...with the last two months being among the underachievers of the year.
Anyway I've stopped posting all the comics I read this year, but will post a final breakdown per month.

I've also just decided I'll take up the gauntlet again and shoot for 2012 comics in 2012... and will probably make a small post about it now and then.
The trick I learned this year is to stay away from Golden Age comics, they are too big, way too wordy and I fell asleep during half of them, cutting into my reading time. So I'm foreseeing that it will be mainly moderns I'll be reading, on a good day I can read about 10 - 12 of these per hour...which says as much about me as it does about today's comics :(

January 169 comics read.
February 184 comics read.
March 155 comics read.
April 235 comics read.
May 190 comics read.
June 225 comics read.
July 141 comics read.
August 311 comics read. (yeah baby ! )
September 274 comics read.
October 110 comics read.
November 88 comics read.
December 146 comics read.

2011-11-06T15:31:00.005+01:00

I once heard somebody say that Batman is so good he could be a Marvel character... which as a Marvel zombie myself, struck a chord. Now I must admit I have nothing against DC, it's just that I chose a side and am sticking with it.

But there is no denying that Batman is one of the all-time great comic book characters, maybe the most iconic one of all. So even I couldn't help but start collecting Batman. My initial target was to get #1 though to #500 ... But that's a very tall order. I still haven't broken the top ten issues yet, but I do have a nice #11.

I still need about 40 issues to get them all, but I went for the Joker covers first.
Everybody loves the Joker and he really knows how to jazz up a cover.
In this video I'm showcasing my complete set of Joker covers from the Batman series from the Golden and Silver Age, from Batman #1 to Batman #200.

I didn't bother with the Joker covers from #200 onwards as it would have made the video too big and most of you have probably seen them all. But who knows there might be a few GA or SA covers here you've never seen. Enjoy !

A 1000 comics in 2011 Indian Summer

2011-10-03T21:42:00.005+02:00

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, but I was almost buried under a mound of comics..a bit like Spidey when Kraven put him 6 feet under. That's how many comics I read the past two months.

I knew that August would be good as I had a lot of free time, away from TV and computers and just me, a deckchair, the beach and some adult beverages. You gotta love a holiday in the sun when half your luggage consists of trades and comics.
Plus I had to make up for July where I only managed 141 comics.
August made well up for that slip, in fact I have now fully accepted that I have no life to speak of as I read 311 comics in August (-insert mocking graemlin here -)

Much to my surprise I was able to continue in the same vain throughout September and clocked up another 274 comics in that month. Mainly because I started reading a really long run of Hellblazer in August (260 issues) and just continued reading in September.

So after all that I'm now less than 100 comics away from breaking my target of reading 2011 comics in 2011. October looks like the month where I reach my goal, but I've already decided to just continue until January 1st just to see how many I manage to read in one full year.

Anyway, for you librarian-types out there here's what I read the last two months :
(deep breath)

August 2011 311 comics read.

Lone Wolf & Cub Book #3 (3 comics)
Fafhrd & Gray Mouse Book #1 (2 comics)
Reload 1-3
Wolverine the JUngle Adventure (2comics)
Iron Age 2 (2 comics)
Iron Man 2.0 #6 + #7
JIM 625
Logan's run aftermath 2 + 3
Marvel zombies Supreme 5
Mighty Thor 3
Moon Knight 3
Mystery Men 2 + 3
Planet of the Apes 3 + 4
RASL 11
Red Skull 1
Red Skull 1 + 2
Red Sonja Revenge of the gods 4
SHIELD 2
Sherlock Holmes Year one 4 + 5
Supreme Power 2
That Hellbound train 2
The Mission 5 + 6
The Strange case of Mr Hyde 3 + 4
Ultimate Fallout 1-3
Batman the Dark Knight #4 (2011)
Conan, island of no return #2
Conan Road of Kings #6
Conan the Barbarian The Mask of Acheron (2 comics)
Creepy #6 (2011)
Criminal the last of the Innocent #2
Daredevil #1 (2011)
DC Comics the new 52 (2 comics)
DC retroactive Batman the 70's
Fear Itself #4
FF #5 - FF#7 (3 comics)
Formic Wars Burning Earth #7
Hellboy the Fury #2
The Boys #56 + #57
The last mortal #2 + #3
LOEG Century 02 1969 (4 comics)
The Mis-adventures of Adam West #1
The Walking Dead #86 + #87
Ultimate Avengers vs New Ultimates #5 + #6
Warlords of Mars Dejah Thoris #5
Warlords of Mars Fall of Barsoom #1
Warlords of Mars #8
Northlanders #1 - 42
Saga of the Swamp Thing 1-7
Thor Viking 1-5
Hellblazer 200 - 237
Hellblazer 1-110
Red Prophet Tales of Alvin Maker 1-6
Orson Scott Card's Goldbug
Criminal - The Last of the Innocent 3
Ultimate Fallout 4/5/6
The Walking Dead 88
The Cape 1
Ultimates V5 #1
That Hellbound train 3
Supreme Power 3
Mystery Men 4
Moon Knight 4
Kick Ass 2 #3
JIM 626
Iron Age 3 (44 pages, counts as two)
Iron Age Omega
FF 8
Fear Itself 5
Elephantmen 32
Daredevil (2011) 2
Conan Road of Kings 7
Batman the Dark Knight #5 (2011)

September 2011 274 comics read.

Criminal Bad night 1-4
Hellblazer 111-199
Hellblazer194 - 199 + 238-257
Fables 19-27 (8 comics)
Hulk (2008) 1-21
Justice League (2011) 1
The Rinse 1
Ultimate Hawkeye 1
Hulk (2008) 22 - 37 ( 16comics)
Drums #1 & #2
Iron Man 2.0 #8
Planet of the Apes #5
Red Skull #3
The Last Mortal #4
Conan (Dark Horse) #1 - #50
Catwoman #1 (2011)
Chew #20
Conan Road of Kings #8
Daredevil #3 + #4 (2011)
Fear itself #6
Hellboy The fury #3
Moon Knight #5 (2011)
Mystery Men #5
Northlanders #43
Planet of the Apes #6
Proof Endagered #4 + #5
The Boys #58
The Vault #1
Ultimate Hawkeye #2
Warlords of Mars Dejah Thoris #6
Warlords of Mars Fall of Barsoom #2
Warlords of Mars #9
The Umbrella Academy Apocalypse Suite #1 - #6
House of Mystery #1 - #41 + annual #1 + #2

A 1000 comics in 2011 JULY Summer slacking

2011-08-04T17:18:00.004+02:00

Well Summer finally arrived and with that my 9-week long holiday began, weather was awful in July so all of this should have combined in to a perfect storm and made for excellent comic book time. Alas things turned out differently.

I really have no idea how it happened, but July was my worst month this year concerning the amount of comics I read. I had a lot of free time and still only managed to read less than 150 comics. A pittance compared to the previous months.

Now before all of you start thinking that I spend all my time at work reading funny books and that's why the amount is so low this month I need to clarify some things.
I entertained my friend Andy for about a week and took him to Holland, France and the UK and there was just not time (or inclination) to read comics at all, we just had way too much fun.

I also cleaned out my attic and spent half a week migrating one of my systems from Xp to Win 7 (64)....and believe you me, I would have much rather spent that time reading comics.
Set up a new laptop and spent days trans-coding video files for my Ipad²

In August I'm going on holiday again, but this time it's a beach holiday, so I'm going to pack about 150 comics (and a few books) so let's hope I get my numbers up again.

Anyway, the results of the Belgian jury for the July month of the year 2011 :

JULY (141)
Marvel Team -up #51 - #80
The Horrorist (90 pages counted as 4 comics)
Chiaroscuro 1-3
Detective Comics #395
Lucifer Nirvana (48 pages)
Blade Runner #1 & #2
Raiders of the Lost Arc 1-3
Wulf 1
Ironjaw 1
America Vs The Justice Society 1-4 (counts as 9 comics)
Books of Magic 1-4 (counts as 9 comics)
Conan Savage Tales 2 + 3
Eerie 32/33/34/35/36
Creepy Archives #10 (Creepy 46/47/48/49/50) 290 pages : 13 comics
PVP Awesmology 600 pages 27 comics
Marvel Team-up #81 - #98
Alpha Flight #1 (2011)
B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth Monsters #1
Batman - The Dark Knight #3
B.P.R.D. Casualties #1
Captain America #1 (2011)
Chew #19

A 1000 comics in 2011 JUNE - initial target reached

2011-07-08T15:45:00.005+02:00

No need for false modesty now, I've always known I would get to the 1000 comics mark well before the last day of 2011. But I wasn't sure I would get to 2011 comics in 2011...well I'm getting more confident now.

During the month of June I managed to already reach the 1000-comics-read-point, which was good as to be on track for 2011 comics I had to reach at least 1006 comics before July 1st. At the time of writing I'm now at 1200 comics, but have to be careful as I'm doing a lot of traveling again this Summer. I just got back from another comic trip and I'm still visiting London in July. In August I'll be going to Asia for another three weeks and really don't see me lugging a suitcase of comics with me.

Today I received about 15 hardcovers from my friends at www.cheap-comics.com so that should cover my 180 comics for July, but I don't know how August will fare...maybe I'll break down and get an Ipad² and get a digital subscription for all the modern comics I read monthly...Hmmmm ?

For you comic-book fans, here is the list of the 225 (a new record ! ) I read in June 2011 :

JUNE (225)
Marvel Team - Up 21-50
FF #3 + FF #4
Conan - Road of Kings #5
Daredevil Reborn #4
Elephantmen #31
Iron Man 2.0 #5
Journey Into Mystery #623
King Conan - The Scarlet Citadel #4
Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead #5
Kirby - Genesis #0
Planet Of The Apes #2
The Mission #4
Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates #4
The Mighty Thor #2
Red Sonja - Revenge of the Gods #3
The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde #2
Hellboy The Fury #1
BPRD The Dead Remembered #3
S.H.I.E.L.D. #1
Flashpoint #2
Moon Knight #2
Witchfinder Lost And Gone Forever #5
Fear Itself #3
M.D (EC Comics) 1-3
Starman (1996) 1-80 + Annual 1/2 + Secret Files 1
The Boys #55
Criminal - The Last of the Innocent #1
Annihilators #4
Formic Wars Burning Earth #6
The Iron Age - Alpha #1
Journey into Mystery #624
Logan's Run - Aftermath #1
Mystery Men #1
Love and Capes - Ever After #4
Conan - Island of No Return #1
Kirby Genesis #1
Last Mortal #1
Ultimate Captain America #4
Red Sonja Blue One-shot
Supreme Power #1
Warlord of Mars - Dejah Thoris #4
That Hellbound Train #1
Love and Capes - Ever After #5
Iron Man V2 (Heroes Reborn) 1-13
Iron Man V3 #1 - #55

A 1000 comics in 2011 MAY (I have another)

2011-06-05T14:00:00.003+02:00

May was the first month where I really struggled a bit. I still have a ton of unread comics,but the last few months I was concentrating on all the trades I still had to read and have now nearly wiped them all out.

The problem was that I couldn't decide which series to start with so in the end I settled on two series that I plan to sell in the near future, and it would be a shame to sell them without even having read them. About 30% of the comics I read this month were moderns, which is good as that way I'm still keeping in touch with today's market/story-lines.

I'll never "love" modern comics as much as I do the Silver Age and Bronze Age ones, but a lot of them are very well written and some of the art isn't bad either.

Anyway here's the list... I read 190 comics in May 2011 which brought the grand total on May 31st to 938 comics read in 2011. I should crack the 1000 comics mark somewhere during the first week of June.

Ultimate FF 1-37 + annuals 1,2
X-Factor 1-70 + annuals #1 - #9.
Annihilators 2
Dark Horse Presents #1 80-pager (3)
Feat itself Sin's past one-shot (4)
Journey Into Mystery #622
Red Sonja Revenge of the Gods #2
Ultimate Thor #4
Iron Man 2.0 #3 + #4
Warlord of Mars #6
Warlord of Mars - Dejah Thoris #2
The Walking Dead #84
Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead #4
FF #2
Hate Annual #9
Conan - Road of Kings #4
King Conan - The Scarlet Citadel #3
Sherlock Holmes - Year One #3
The New York Five #4
Ultimate Avengers vs New Avengers #3
Planet of the Apes #1
Rasl #10
The Mighty Thor #01
The Mission #3
The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde #1
Moon Knight #1
Annihilators #3
The Boys #54
Sir Edmund Gray, Witchfinder - Lost & Gone Forever #4
Marvel Zombies Supreme #4
Thor, whoever wields this Hammer (JIM 83/84/88)
B.P.R.D. The Dead Remembered #2
Fear Itself - Spider-Man #1
Fear Itself #2
Fear Itself - The Homefront #2
Gladestone's School For World Conquerors #1
Extra (EC comics) #1-#5
Formic Wars Burning Earth 1-5
Flashpoint #1
Captain America - Hail Hydra #5
Chew #27
Warlord of Mars - Dejah Thoris #3
Hellboy Being Human one-shot
Marvel Team - Up V1 1-20

Bagge's Belgian Beauty

2011-05-18T22:22:00.005+02:00

In the wake of the incredible Heritage sale where a page of The Dark Knight sold for almost half a million dollars I'd like to talk a little about original comic art. This is just a small story, but I though I would share it anyway. It's kinda corny...but hey so am I.

First of all I need to explain how much I love Peter Bagge. I'm a big Marvel zombie and my comic collection is almost made up of Marvel from 1961 (FF #1) to 1984(Secret Wars #1) that's what I know and love and those are the parameters for most of my original art pages as well. There are some exceptions, but those are few and far between.
But ever since somebody gave me a copy of Hate #17 as a freebie I have really enjoyed the crazy world of Buddy Bradley, Lisa and all the other misfits. Since then I've bought all the stuff Peter Bagge has made and together with Robert Crumb he's probably the only underground artist I enjoy (I'm pretty vanilla )

I always wanted to own a page with Buddy in his comic book shop, but those are the most popular ones and I've never even seen one. Anyway today my local comic book shop had a copy of Hate annual #9 for me. Peter Bagge has all but stopped with the Buddy series and for the last 5 - 6 years, has only released one Hate comic per year.
So I saved it for last as it's a delicacy only savored once every 12 months.
The issue was finished far too quickly, and when I turned the last page, I was pleasantly surprised by this :

Peter Bagge made a strip about Belgium :roflmao:
(CLICK to enlarge)

Being Belgian, I can tell you he hit the mood perfectly, every and any time I'm in the US and I tell people where I'm from, I need to give them extra info...and the info in this page is almost 100% identical to what I tell folks...

At first I thought of just taking the comic with me when I'm traveling again and just whip it out and show it to everyone when I'm put on the spot...but then I had an idea.
I looked up Peter Bagge's email address and wrote to him, telling him how much I had enjoyed his stuff over the years and that this latest "Belgian" piece was just perfect....oh and BTW is it for sale ?

I didn't have a lot of hope as I went to the site where he usually sells his art and it wasn't there...
Less than an hour later Peter Bagge replied to me, thanking me for the mail and telling me everything he knew about Belgium was on that page and that he should have included the Smurfs as well lol
Oh, and he had kept the page, and had not put it up for sale, but if I was interested he would sell it to me, as it would be cool to have that page actually ending up in Belgium.
Five minutes later I paypalled him his asking price and the original art to the page was mine.

This was the first time I have ever contacted an artist, for any reason whatsoever and it was a very enjoyable experience and I can't wait to get my "Belgium" page.

A 1000 comics...April overdose.

2011-05-04T13:28:00.006+02:00

April 2011 came and went and brought a lot of nice, sunny days. I'm happy to report that at least 30% of the comics on the list this month were read lounging in the garden, enjoying a beer (or five).

You'll also probably notice that I went completely overboard and read 235 comics this month, or an average of about 8 comics a day, every day. May and June will seem like lean months compared to this. Anyway I'm at 743 comics now after 4 months, so the new total of 2011 comics even seems feasible at this point.

Here's what I read this month :

Strange Adventures #205-216 Deadman
Brave and the Bold (vol.1) #79, #86 and 104
Aquaman (vol.1) #50-52
Challengers of the Unknown (vol.1) #74
Criminal V1 #6 - 10
Criminal V1 #1 - #7
Amazing Adventures #1-6,
Amazing Adult Fantasy #7-14
Amazing Fantasy #15.
Creepy #42 - #45
Elephantmen - Man & Elephantman #1
B.P.R.D. The Dead Remembered #1
Fear Itself - The Homefront #1.
Infestation #2
Kick Ass 2 #2
King Conan The Scarlet Citadel #2
Logan's Run The Last Day #6
Marvel Zombies Supreme #2 + #3
Sir Edmund Gray Witchfinder Lost And Gone Forever #3
The Boys #53
The Mission #2
Chew #18
Captain America - Hail Hydra #4
Eerie #28 - #31
I kill giants #1 - #7
Infinite Vacation #2
Fear Itself #1
Hellboy - Buster Oakley Gets His Wish One-shot.
Ultimate Avengers vs New Ultimates #3
Love and Capes - Ever After #3
First Wave Special #1
Catwoman #1-#18, #32 & #50
Catwoman Secret Files and Origins #1
What If Karen Page had lived
What If Jessica Jones had joined the Avengers
The Pulse #1 & #2
Flinch #2
The Losers #1-#8
30 Days of Night Bloodsucker Tales #1 & #6
Dark Days #5 & #6
Black Dragon #1-#6
Lucifer, the Morningstar option #1-#3
Alias #1 - #28.
Captain America Comics #1 - #4
Wolverine Logan #1 - #3.
The Uncanny X-men #151 - #175
Tales of the Crypt #7 - #12
Captain America #43 - #50, #600/#601
Captain America Reborn #1 - #6.

The final bricks in the wall.

2011-04-19T17:10:00.000+02:00

Pop quiz hotshot, what do Incredible Hulk #92, X-men #63 and Sandman Mystery Theater #66, #69 & #70 all have in common ? Give up ? I thought you would, well I got them all in a single package this week and they each were the final issues I needed to complete those three series.

It's a nice coincidence that I managed to complete three series all at once, especially considering, the X-men series took me five years, the Hulk four and the Sandman MT books have been on my want list since 2007 !!
So how come it took me this long to get them and was it pure serendipity that I managed to get them all in the same month ?

Now none of them are particularity expensive, the Overstreet Price guide has the Hulk #92 (in NM) at $5, The X-men #63 guides F/VF at $60 and the Sandman Mystery Theater are at best worth a few bucks each. The trouble was finding them in the first place and getting a decent deal in the process.

X-men #63 was easy to find, it's plentiful in any grade and never sells over guide. It's one of the better issues of the first X-men series, Neal Adams goodness and a cool Magneto cover. But for some reason it ended up the last issue I still needed to get. I really don't like paying $14.00 in shipping for a $50 book...so each time I saw one for sale I was hoping to bundle it with something else to save on shipping, but I struck out every time and passed.

By sheer chance a collector was selling a bunch of Silver Age X-men books, including this one AND some modern books..including the elusive Incredible Hulk #92.

Now Hulk #92 is the very first Planet Hulk issue, which is the best Hulk storyline of the last 20 years, so collectors have been scrambling for this book which starts it all. Last year I was able to purchase the entire Planet Hulk run...with #92 missing. Every comic book store I've been to in the last 3 years had this issue missing...Sure they were on eBay, but at 2X to 3X the guide price (and then I would have to break my rule of paying shipping for a single book as well). But like I said I finally found a seller who was selling it a reasonable price and had another book I wanted.

And then there were the Sandman Mystery Theater books. A lesser known Vertigo title, but one of the very best from the 1990's (not to be confused with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series). Sandman MT lasted for 6 years and never disappointed, if you go back to this post from May 2007 you'll see I was already raving about the series...and I was also boasting that I had completed it. Well I wasn't lying, I was only being stupid...I thought the series stopped at #65 and later found out it went on another 5 issues. Which of course,I didn't have.

So I started hunting them down which turned out very difficult. The final five issues didn't have a large print run as the series was slated for cancellation and a lot of comic book stores didn't even bother to order the final two issues.
Issues #69 and #70 were particularly difficult to find. Remember these are basic $3 books which will never appreciate or become valuable..and still Mile High comics is selling #69 for nearly $15 (5X guide) and doesn't even have a single copy of #70 for sale. The only people buying these are the idiots like me who complete series and just have to had every single issue.

But getting all of them was more than worth it, nothing beats the feeling of getting a series complete, and when you manage to do more than one in a year, not to mention a week, it's a real red letter day on my calendar.

With X-men #63 I now have X-men #1 to #250 complete, I used to have #251 - #450 as well, but I sold those in the big purge of 2010.

With Incredible Hulk #92 I now have amassed my longest and completest run ever.
* Incredible Hulk V1 #1 - #6
* Tales to Astonish #59 - #101
* Incredible Hulk V2 #102 - #474
* Incredible Hulk V3 #1 - #112

That's 544 consecutive Hulk issues from 1962 tot 2007 (when the series ended and I did as well)

And with those Sandman issues, I can finally proclaim Sandman Mystery Theater #1 - #70 complete (and yes, this time I've checked to see that #70 is really the last issue)

A 1000 comics...the March report

2011-04-04T13:39:00.003+02:00

March came and went, and happily brought a touch of Spring in the air. Not that I noticed much of this as I was, of course, inside..reading. I must be honest here, March wasn't as easy as January or February as there were much more distractions (damn sunshine !) but all in all the outcome was OK.

I managed to read 155 comics this month, that's 20% less than February (184) and 10% less than January (169)...but still an average of 5 comics a day. Let's be honest here, I've no doubt I'll reach the 1000 comics mark this year. I'm really enjoying this and have tons of unread stuff still to read, but here's the twist : Somebody suggested I'd try and go for 2011 comics in 2011...which is an absurdly high number. But strangely enough I'm still on target. I will need to read an average of 5.5 comics a day...every day and that's a tall order. But hey nobody said it would be easy.

Here's the list I read in March, again a nice mix of vintage and modern issues.

Eerie 23 - 27
Ultimate Captain America #3
The Boys #52
Chew #17
Annihilators #1
Marvel Zombies Supreme #1
The Eternals (Neil Gaiman) 1 - 7
Mysterious Suspense 1
More Fun Comics 101
More Fun Comics 73
Whiz Comics 2
Detective Comics 359
Sensation Comics 1
Sandman Mystery Theater #57 - #70
Captain America #301 - #350
B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth Gods #3
Captain America - Hail Hydra #3
Conan Road of Kings #3
Infamous #1.
Legion of Super Villains One-shot
Love and Capes - Ever After #2
Strange Tales (2010) #1 - #3
Startling Stories: The Megalomaniacal Spider-man
Red Sonja, Revenge of the Gods #1
Sir Edward Gray Witchfinder Lost & gone forever #1 + #2
The Walking Dead #82 + #83
Victorian Undead 2 #5
The Mighty Thor" #39-#44
Captain America and The First Thirteen one-shot
Fear Itself - Book of the Skull #1
Iron Man 2.0 #2
Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates #2
Warlord of Mars #5
Warlord of Mars - Dejah Thoris #1
Fantastic Four #536/#537/#538
Thor #1 - #12
Thor #600/#601/#602/#603
Thor Giant sized Finale
Batman The Dark Knight (2011) #1 & #2
FF #1
Daredevil reborn #3
Orson Scott Card's Speaker For The Dead #3
The New York Five #3
Caligua 1
Deus Ex 1
Sherlock Holmes - Year One #2
Criminal #1-5

A 1000 comics February

2011-03-07T10:57:00.004+01:00

Well I managed to hang on and continue my reading quest of 2011. It's been a lot of fun and I'm convinced now that not only will I reach the 1000 comics mark, but I'll keep reading long after that. By my last count I still have over 3000 comics which I haven't read yet...so I'm good for a while ;)

Anyway this is what I read in February :

Creepy 33-41.
Amazing Spider-man #562 to #578.
Amazing Spider-man #501 to #524.
Eerie 1 - 22.
B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth Gods #2
Captain America - Hail Hydra #2
Doctor Strange - From the Vault #1
Hellboy The Sleeping And The Dead #2
Iron Man Thor God Complex #1
The Walking Dead #81
Ultimate Avengers vs New Ultimates #1
New Ultimates #5
Ultimate Thor #4
Victorian Undead II #4
Warlord of Mars #4
Ultimate Captain America #2
The Boys #51
Daredevil Reborn #2
Love and Capes - Ever After #1
Silver Surfer - an all new beginning #1
Iron Man #252 - #300
Iron Man 2.0 #1
King Conan Scarlet Citadel #1
Orson Scott Card's Speaker For The Dead #2
Sherlock Holmes - Year One #1
The Mission #1
The New York Five #2

A 1000 comics in 2011

2011-02-01T21:24:00.004+01:00

One of the pitfalls of collecting comic books is that soon the collecting becomes a goal on its own. You don't collect anymore to get to read a good story, or to find out something you didn't know about your favorite character. No, at a certain point your collection becomes so important that you collect just for the sake...of collecting.

I tried to resist this for years, but slowly I turned away from being a comic reader to a comic collector who reads, to finally a comic collector. There were years where I bought a few thousand comics and maybe read 50 to 100 comics that year in total. One of the questions I get asked the most when I show off my collection (in real life or through my Youtube vids) is "Have you read them all ?" My standard answer for years was something like : "Well I'm a few thousand behind schedule, but one day I'll catch up". After a certain time I'm not sure even I believed it anymore.

Now since my collection basically got completed sometime in late 2009 the deluge of new incoming comics has slowed down considerably, but still I didn't have the time or the inclination to start reading. About a year ago I made the decision to start selling off a major chunk of the collection (almost everything from 1985 - 1999) and in doing so I committed the awful sin of selling comics, even large series, that I hadn't even read. I could hear Jack Kirby turning over in his grave.

For some reason I read more books and magazines ABOUT comics and comic book history than I did reading the actual comics themselves. Deep down inside I knew this was wrong, but I was stuck in a rut.

Now let's fast forward to the end of December 2010 a couple of friends and acquaintances on the CGC boards made a New Year's resolution to read more comics in 2011 and I happily jumped aboard that train. About 10 of us took up the challenge to try and read 1000 comics this year, or about 3 a day, every day (or 84 each month).
I started on January first and the first month is now over and I'm happy (and yes proud) to say I read 169 comics this month..I WAY overshot my target, but I know it's better to have a little in reserve for the lean months.
I'm really hoping I can stick with it for the entire year and am curious what my grand total will be. I'm pretty sure the 169 comics I read this month will not be surpassed this year as I had plenty of free time and motivation to start off with.

I did ad an additional clause to my personal quest, only 25% can be comics I have read before. I still have thousands of comics I haven't read before, so that shouldn't be a problem, but I just put it there to stop me from re-reading favorites like the 75 Sandman issues for the 5th or 6th time.
I'll try and post a monthly update, and here's the list I read this month.

January 2011 - 169 comics

Strange Adventures #117, 120, 123, 126, 129, 132, 135, 136, 138, 141, 144, 147, 150, 153 156 and 160 (16 comics)
V for Vendetta #1 - 10 (10 comics - re-read)
Journey into Mystery #87
Daredevil #159 #160
The Brave and the Bold #40
Marvel Premiere #15
Batman #108
Creepy #1 - #32 (32 comics)
Hellboy The Sleeping and the Dead #1
Ultimate Avengers 3 #5 + #6
Warlord of Mars #3
Stuntman 1/2/3
Conan 1-24 (24 comics)
Ultimate Captain America #1
Captain America Hail Hydra #1
The Walking Dead #80
Conan - Road of Kings #1 + #2
Captain 3-D #1
Fighting American #1 - #7 (7 comics)
B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth Gods #1
Daredevil Reborn #1
Infinite Vacation #1
The Thanos Imperative - Devastation one-shot.
Weird Worlds #1
Victorian Undead II #3
Fighting American V2 #1
The Double life of Private Strong #1 + #2
Adventures of the Fly #1
Marvel Westerns: the two-gun kid,
Marvel Westerns: western legends,
Marvel Westerns: kid colt and the Arizona girl,
Marvel Westerns: strange Westerns starring the black rider,
Marvel Westerns: outlaw files
Captain America 25/26/27/28/29/42 (18 comics)
What if ? 22/23/26/27/29/30/31/32/33/34/35/42/43 (13 comics)
The Boys #50
FF 587
Shazam #1 (2011)
Lady Death #1 (2010)
Infestation #1
The New York Five #1
Orson Scott Card's Speaker For The Dead #1
Proof Endangered #1 + #2

Have to go now as it's already a new month and I still haven't read a comic today.

Journey Into Mystery...and beyond

2010-12-30T17:58:00.008+01:00

Thor has always been somewhat of an odd duck in the Marvel stable...great art, great stories, possibly the strongest hero in the Marvel Universe, but virtually unknown to the general public.

Up to a few months ago, only comic book fans would have known that the Norse god of thunder is also a regular Marvel character...and that he tends to speak in Shakespearean English. I guess it was just a step too far, people could suspend their disbelief and accept an angry guy turning green and hulking up, a rich inventor and AA-club member making a 21st century armor and even a guy getting bitten by a radioactive spider...but a 1000 year old mythical Asgardian god that comes to Earth and sounds like Macbeth or even Hamlet...nah that just wouldn't fly.

So for nearly 50 years, The Mighty Thor, to use his full name has been a b-player at best. Which is a shame because there are some very nice books in the series. Most of the top artists and writers loved to work on Thor as there were almost no boundaries. Space adventures, magic, mythical legends, down to earth rough and tumble with the Avengers...it's all happening for Goldilocks. Jack Kirby has even gone on record to say that Journey into Mystery was his favorite series to work on. You can't really get higher praise than that.

So anyway, as most of you know Marvel will be releasing the Thor movie in 2011 and this could very well propel Thor into the limelight and the public eye.
Even if the movie flops, the ad campaigns will reach into every household and hopefully people will finally understand what it really means when it's Hammer Time.

For me it will be a welcome relief as I have tried to get people to start reading Thor (any time period) but almost nobody does...so to get the ball rolling so to speak I've made a little video of the very first Thor covers/comics, when the series was still called Journey into Mystery.I managed to complete Journey into Mystery #83 up to Thor #400 a few years ago and still haven't read them all..but I just might start on them in the coming weeks.

The video on this page is only the TRAILER, if you want to view the full video (and you know you want to) just go to my Youtube channel : ---> Thor's Journey into Mystery full video. Oh and watch it in 480p for more details.

Trailer :

Size Matters, of course it does.

2010-11-23T17:10:00.007+01:00

Even though I'm already somewhat over the hill, I'm happy I was able to carry my new comic book up the stairs. If it had come out in 10 years time I would have had to hire someone to carry it and perhaps turn the pages for me. You see I think I just bought the biggest comic book ever.

The year 2010 marks the 75th year anniversary of DC comics and veteran collector and DC-completist Ian Levine had been shouting since 2005 (the 70-year anniversary) that DC should somehow "do" something "special". Anyway 2005 came and went and in 2009 Ian started making a lot of noise again so that DC didn't glance over the 75th thingy.

Well they didn't and much to Ian's joy they kinda included him in the festivities.
In the beginning of 2010 DC and Taschen Books went over to Ian's home from Germany (three times) to photograph all sorts of covers and interiors form his DC collection.
The results were to be used in a huge six hundred page massive coffee-table book on the history of DC for their 75th Birthday.

Ian also showed us a few of the preview pictures and between that and him hyping the book I was sold and signed up for an advance copy. Cover price was a staggering €150 but seeing the book weighed nearly 15 pounds and with over 720 pages and 2000 images — including covers, interiors, original illustrations, photos, film stills and collectibles I thought it was worth it.

Anyway I waited for near 5 long months but today I finally took hold of the book. Now there are BIG books, there are GIANT books and there is this book...
Take a look at the pics to see the dimensions and step back...you don't want it to crush you.

I'm going start reading it today and I don't expect to be finished any time this year...but on first glance it's a wonderful book, very complete, all the info you could possible want and the reproduction of the old artwork is the best I have ever seen. Telling the tales behind the tomes is 38-year DC veteran Paul Levitz (pictured), whose in-depth essays trace the company’s history, from its pulp origins through to the future of digital publishing.
If my math is correct, Marvel should be 75 years old in 2014 as their first (Timely) comics came out in 1939...hmmmm are you listening Marvel ?

I used the wonders of video to give you an idea how big this book is, watch the small preview here or click on the video to go to my youtube channel and watch it in higher-def.

After The FACTS.

2010-10-24T19:53:00.007+02:00

Looking back at my very hectic but fun day at FACTS 2010 this year, a few things come to mind, but I would like to start straight out of the gate, with the feeling I had all day. This is a great hobby we have and sometimes we tend to forget it. Sitting at home behind a PC screen, scrutinizing every single detail of every single comic or storyline, getting into online flame-fests and being sarcastic slash negative because it looks right the cool thing to do.

But when it comes down to brass tacks, this hobby is all about the people.. I met an army of nice people today, from A-class artists, to very young fan-boys, from indie publishers to volunteers who go without sleep to make sure everyone is entertained. From retailers who actually care more about pleasing the customer by selling them a fantastic hardcover than by just the sale.

I'm guilty of being too jaded myself, telling everyone in earshot (and beyond) that cons really aren't that great, that there are better deals to be found online, that they are loud, expensive and crowded, that the food is bad and the service is worse etc etc...Well I was wrong, cons are the lifeblood of our hobby and you are really missing out if you don't attend one near you.

By now if you are guessing that I had a great time then you deserve a gold star. I hardly bought anything (one comic !) worked my ass off and already left the house at the crack of dawn, but it was all worth it. Here are some highlights. I forgot a lot of things and will undoubtedly have left some people out, sorry for that, but I still love you.
The very first and probably the biggest highlight was getting to meet Dave Gibbons.
After we had build up our booth, I walked over to the next hall and the Artist's village. There were already people queuing for Frank Cho and Greg Cappullo, the line for Dave Gibbons was still empty which kinda surprised me. Mind you this was about 1 1/2 hours before the artists were due to arrive and the general public was admitted.

At 9.00 AM the early-bird ticket holders were admitted (one hour before the rest) and at 9.15 I walked over the artist section again. The line for Cappulo had grown to maybe 20 people, about 10 for Cho and three fans were eagerly waiting for Dave Gibbons.
As I didn't expect a lot of sales before 10.30 AM and my partner was manning the booth, I decided to get in line as well.Dave showed up at about 10.05 AM and was eager to go. Frank Cho and Brandon Peterson showed up each over an hour late...All the artists had sampled some Belgian beer the night before and only Dave Gibbons was able to to fight the hangover and be there on time. Separating the men from the boys and showing he is the consummate professional.
The first person in line wanted a Rorschach head-shot, which Dave drew in about 10 minutes and looked really nice. Oh, prices were €50 for head-sketches and €75 for full figure. Quickie sketches and sigs were free. Second guy just wanted his Watchmen trade signed, so that went quickly and the third guy, whom I regularly talk to online, wanted a Comedian sketch..which I think looks fantastic, so I included Philippe's commission here as it is truly breathtaking seeing Dave draw this in a matter of minutes, first blue-line then ink...he was like a machine. (Yes Phille I was looking over your shoulder when Dave drew it)

And then it was my turn, I had brought my Watchmen page along and asked Dave to sign it, he looked it over for a while and told me "it's always nice to see an old friend", referring to the page of course :)

We chatted a bit,he asked where I got it and told the story of how he sold the art (per complete issue !) to London's Comic Showcase store. I don't know if Dave wants it out there how much he got for each issue + cover, but I was shocked to find out how low it was. But seeing Comic Showcase then sold the pages for between £70 and £150 each, you can figure it out.

Mister Gibbons and I also discovered we had a mutual friend, Paris_Fred...now there's a guy who gets around. I didn't want to take up too much time as the line behind me had now grown to over 25 people (and it didn't seem to get any smaller throughout the entire day) so in parting I asked him who his favorite artist was and after some thinking he said "Wally Wood"...Dave Gibbons was really a very nice man to meet, an excellent artists and he has excellent taste in other artists as well :).

I also saw a lot of old friend who it's always a delight to bump in to (you know who you are !) and finally met some people I know from various chat-boards face-to-face...which is always nice.
I sold a lot of trades and hardcovers at the cheapcomics booth, but most of all tried to talk to people about which series they liked and suggested other titles they might also be interested in (Anything Walking Dead flew of the shelves).

I'm always in awe of all the people that spend months making their own costume and then proceed to walk around it it, sweating like a pig and not being able to buy anything as they can't stoop down to look in the boxes, and even if they did....where would they put it as they have no pockets. There were a LOT of cos-players at FACTS, but the guy walking around in the home-made Iron Man suit deserves deep deep Kudos ! I wonder how many batteries it took ?
I was also impressed by my friend Malkavian of Brainfreeze who was immaculately dressed as a pony.

But what really got to me were the independent publishers, the small-time companies who still publish comic books, against all odds, for the simple reason of the love for the medium. I'm pretty sure most of them don't break even and still they persevere. My deepest respect goes out to the people at Dropcomics and especially to my friends at Windmill Comics This Dutch team of writers, editors and artists are keeping the spirit of early comic fandom alive. They are the lifeblood of the hobby and I consider them today's Jerry Bails, Don Thomson, Biljo White or Roy Thomas. Thanks guys, may fame and fortune find you some day

FACTS of life

2010-10-20T18:08:00.005+02:00

This weekend (23rd + 24th of October) I'll be attending the FACTS convention again. if my math is right it will be my 9th time. Now for all you non-Belgians, you should realize there are NO Comic book conventions at all over here, in fact I don't think there are more than a handful throughout Europe.

Sure we have comic strip cons nearly every month, but the American comic book isn't exactly a staple here.
In essence Facts isn't really a comic book convention, it's a popular culture convention, much along the line of the big San Diego Comicon.
When I started to attend there were maybe 10 comic book dealers and no books older than say ten years. Slowly the comic book part was dying and I remember one glum year where there were just 5 comic book dealers and there was nothing at all that interested me.
But the next year some new people joined the organization (yes Boom, I'm talking about you) and the comics part started to blossom again.
FACTS was able to book more and better artists, which in turn led to more fans turning up which lead to more dealers coming which lead to even more fans coming etc...

Last year the 15.000-attendance (or 15,000 if you don't like the metric system) figure was breached, which is incredible for such a small country and this year everybody fully expects that figure to be reached and even overtaken again.
But alas some things haven't changed, there still is almost nothing at the entire con that I'm looking for. There are almost no Silver Age or Bronze Age books for sale. Can't really blame the dealers as the brave ones who do bring them, don't sell a single issue. There is just no interest in vintage (and expensive back issues). Most collectors, no strike that I should actually call them "readers", are interested in trades, hardcovers and cheap singles from the last 10 - 15 years. Why buy a €300 Silver Age Spider-man book when you can buy the hardcover for €20.00 and have enough money left to buy hundreds of cheap one-euro comics.

Some readers do become collectors over time, but it's a slow progress and doesn't really happen the first 5 years when somebody comes into the hobby.
And to be honest, the rare vintage stuff that is for sale at FACTS can be found cheaper online most of the time. At the con you pay more for the convenience of being able to look through the book, don't have to pay shipping and be secure in the knowledge that the comic doesn't have to be shipped thousands of miles.

So why am I still going ? Well mostly because it's a lot of fun. I know a lot of people there among the staff, exhibitors and visitors and it's always a treat to meet up with them every year. I also tend to go toy-shopping for my kids (this year my son wants a Joker action figure and my daughter wants a Power Girl or Hawkgirl).
And then there are the artists...all credit to FACTS, they manage to get top-shelf artists every year, but as I'm not a modern comic book fan, most of them don't toot my horn...but now and then they get one that even I in my curmudgeonly way like.

I'll be lining up this year to do a meet and greet with Dave Gibbons and have him sign my Watchmen page...that should be nice.
But mostly I will be selling trades and hardcovers at the cheapcomics.com booth, like each year I'll be assisting my friend Chris to bring wonder and joy to the masses in the shape of luxury (and cheap) reprints.
It's always a lot of fun to meet other readers/collectors, to try and answer their questions and generally talk "comics" with them. Maybe steer them in the direction of a new series they didn't know or help them complete a storyline.
I'll probably be dead tired at the end of it all, will have spent too much money on toys, won't be able to go box-diving to find some bargains and will undoubtedly forget to eat again this year....but I can't wait. Bring it on, it's FACTS time again.
Oh and if you are looking for me, I'll be the one wearing the green suede Puma's.

Comic book collection the movie

2010-07-23T10:32:00.008+02:00

Just a follow-up post this time. I sat down and opened up all the packages I brought back with me from my comic-book odyssey in the US. If the vids are too small, just click on them and you will be magically transported to my Youtube channel where you can watch them in full-size. Enjoy

Comic book collection...it just got bigger (that's what she said)

2010-07-17T21:54:00.006+02:00

In july 2010 I took one of my comic book pilgrimages to the US to meet up with some friends, get to meet comic book collectors, visit a bunch of comic book stores, do some business and buy as many nice comics as possible.

This trip was a particularly fruitful one as not only did I have a splendid time meeting up with my comic buddies and business partners ; Jaime, Arturo, Christobal, Andres, Miguel, Jorge, Timotheo and Adamo (the names have been "Spanished" to protect the innocent) but I got meet a lot of very nice people and co-collectors.

I managed to score a very nice bunch of Silver Age books and take some keys, treasuries and magazines back home with me. In fact it was a miracle that I made it as I was hauling two giant suitcases halfway across the world. This time I concentrated mainly on the states surrounding Washington DC and the South and visited 6 US states (yes I know DC is technically not a state...). Again the best books came from private collectors that were open to selling them or trading them but I also managed to find some decent books at some of the comic book stores. Now it is true that a lot of comic book stores have closed down and than most of them don't hardly have any GA/SA/BA inventory, but there are still some of them out there.
I was very impressed with a couple of stores around the Orlando, FL area and one store in Knoxville, TN.

This time I also picked up some modern books...there were still a few runs I needed to complete, and those issues were pretty hard to find. Sure I could get them online, mostly one comic at a time, but picking up a $5.00 and then paying $14.00 shipping is pretty silly to me. I was very hard to go through hundreds of boxes to find the few modern issues I was still looking for. Some I paid more for than what I would pay online, but there were no shipping costs, which helps a lot on cheaper books. If you buy a $2000 book, paying $30 shipping doesn't kill you, but it kills me to pay those high shipping prices for cheap books.

The biggest score, not in monetary but sentimental terms was the large number of Treasuries I managed to get. These over-sized books are near impossible to ship overseas and are always quickly snapped up by collectors as everyone that likes comics just loves Treasuries. But I'll save the details for a future blog-post focusing on Treasury sized-books.

The trip ended on a high note as I had made an appointment nearly half a year ago to go see and research the original art to Amazing Fantasy #15 in the Library of Congress in Washington DC...and it really took my breath away. But again I'll write a separate entry about that in the very near future.

All in all it was a fun experience but not for those who get road-weary. Getting there and back took 8000 miles of air travel and that's not counting the few thousand miles I flew, drove (ok, I was driven, but still...) and walked in the US.

I carefully wrapped up all the stuff I bought and decided to take back with me and here's a pic of a bunch of them. Enjoy and stay tuned for more posts concerning this trip.

What to collect.

2010-05-22T14:27:00.004+02:00

I’ve never collected for financial gain, never considered myself a “comic-investor” or bought multiple copies of a hot new book with the intent of selling them. But realistically almost every GA/SA/BA collector does a little speculating and is hoping his collection will go up in value. Of course what a lot of people seem to forget is that if your collection goes up in value so do the books you still want, and you end up paying more for the books on your want list.

But it’s a lot of fun (and for most also part of the attraction) that if you collect carefully and make informed decisions, you stand a good chance of at least not losing money. In fact a lot of comic collectors use this as an excuse when a wife/girlfriend/friend keeps hammering on how much money they spend on “funny books”. The de facto reply is almost always “yes but this book will be worth x-amount in y-amount of time” or “If I go down the pub every night the money is gone as well and now at least I have something to show for it”

So it’s not surprising that most questions and queries I get, both here and on my Youtube video channel is what books to buy and how much I paid for a certain book. Now as a rule I never divulge how much I paid for a certain book…that’s my prerogative and it’s nobody else’s business. If I get a book way below market value and I post the price, it almost seems like bragging and laughing in the face of the guy that sold it to me…which I think is very uncouth. Also if I paid a significant amount of money I don’t want to be avalanched by mails and messages telling me I could have gotten a small car or end world famine for that price.
Again, it’s my money and mine to play with.

But I’m always very happy to help people that start collecting or are narrowing their focus on what books to get. The general rule is and will always be “collect what you like”. Get the comics you love, the ones that ring your bell or transport you back to Nostalgia Road and don’t put possible future appreciation as your number one goal. Sure it’s sweet when your comic increases in value but if you buy it to never look at it and just keep it in a safe somewhere for 5 years and then proceed to sell it off…then think about investing in gold.
It’s the same low-thrill hobby and you’ll probably do better in the long run.

So, OK you LOVE Silver Age comics and want to start buying and will love the comics for ever…so where do you go from here ?
Well there are two trains of thought here. A lot of people will tell you to always buy the highest grade possible as these will appreciate the quickest and the most. Well these people are 100% correct, but most comic fans I know would rather have 3 nice mid-grade books for the price of one high-grade book. So if you are only interested in high grade books the following advice is not for you.

Congratulations, you’ve made it this far, this means you are ready to buy low to mid-grade books that are fun to own/collect and have a chance of making you some money.
Well for starters you can not go wrong with very early Marvel Silver Age, especially the “Big Two”…Amazing Spider-man and Fantastic Four. Most collectors will always be interested in the first 20 issues (at least) of these wonderful series. They are the cornerstone of the Marvel Universe and are riddled with keys. If you do not overpay then you will make a profit down the road as these keep going up year after year.
Some do it slowly but surely, others take huge jumps at a time (Amazing Fantasy #15).

In fact it will be much easier to unload three or four books in the 2.0 range than one book in the 5.0 range. There are still a lot of collectors out there who want to own a certain book and don’t really care about grade. So low grade books are perfect for 90% of the collectors that just want to build a collection and don’t want to mortgage the house to buy certain issues.

Stay tuned for part 2 next week.

Time Capsule

2010-04-14T20:38:00.004+02:00

Sometimes it's not all about being busy or not having enough time...and often it isn't even about just being too bone-idle...No the reason I've been away so long again is plain and simple that I had zero inspiration and had no idea what to write about. And I rather not write anything than ramble on without rhyme or reason.

Previous entries were almost always about my new purchases. Series I was completing, runs I was putting together or sweet sweet keys.
But after collecting for 7 years now I'm almost done...and I don't buy that many books anymore. What I now mostly buy are upgrades, but does the world really want to read that I've upgrade my Fantastic Four #5 from CGC 4.0 in OW pages to a CGC 4.5 with W/OW pages ? I don't think so.I did complete a very large series recently that I've been working on for almost 3 years, but I don't have the final book in hand yet and when I do I'll probably make a video of it all..yes my Youtube channel is getting all the love (and the hits) these days. So look out for that in the near future.

While I haven't been buying the great quantities I used to, I have been selling quite a large number of books. At one point I had nearly 12.000 books which I managed to whittle down to around 10.000 but that was still way too many. So I decided to get rid of all my books after the 1985 cut-off date. Why 1985 ? Well I've always been of the opinion that something was lost after Marvel released "Secret Wars" in 1985... it was like the Marvel universe expanded ten-fold and the quality got lost among the claptrap. It was also the time I stopped reading comics as a kid (Secret Wars #1 was the last comic I bought for almost 20 years)...my own Time Capsule as it were.

So in brief I should be able to get the collection down to about 6000 books, almost all from 1961 to 1985 every Superhero book From Fantastic Four #1 to Secret Wars #1.
I've been trying to re-read all the books that I'm selling.. but it's not easy. I recently sold Amazing Spider-man #301 - #441 and before I put that huge pile in a box to ship out I sat down and started reading the books again...I didn't last long.
I didn't care for the stories and the art did nothing for me. I understand people growing up with these book might have a soft spot for them...but I knew if I didn't sell them right there and now, I would never read them again...so why keep them.

Amazing Fantasy #15 ...part 2

2010-02-16T15:32:00.007+01:00

One of the questions I get asked most of all is if I have a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15. Now matter how many thousands of books I show, no matter how many keys I lay out,it always comes down to the KING of Marvel Silver Age books...AF #15 the very first Spider-man.

It's hasn't been an easy question...sure the answer was easy (a firm "no !") but there was so much baggage associated with this question that I could never just answer with a one-syllable reply. You see I USED to own a copy...which was my pride and joy and which cost me an arm and a leg...but something happened to that book... I accidentally tore it apart while reading.
I'm not going over the entire story again, armchair critics, rubberneckers and people who identify with "Nelson" of the Simpsons can read it here : My own personal AF 15 horror story.
The story did have a somewhat happy ending... I had the book professionally restored and I traded it with a friend for a page of original art. We were both very happy with the deal...but I didn't have a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 anymore.

So why am I revisiting old ghosts ? Well for the next 2 1/2 years I kept looking at the AF #15s for sale, I saw the prices rise and rise each year and saw the chances of me getting another shrink with each passing Heritage or Comiclink auction. And still the question kept coming, both here and on my Youtube comics channel "Do you have an Amazing Fantasy #15"..stinging every time.

When 2009 rolled around I made a decision, come hell or high water I would get a copy this year. I tried to get at least 10 copies that year, but all went for far too much money or just weren't the "right" copy for me. But just when I thought it was all for the birds, I "found" the perfect book just after Xmas. It was about $500 more than my absolute max I wanted to pay, but sticking to my very rigid maximum price had gotten me nearly three years of frustration and empty hands..so I went for it.

Cutting it very close, but by some small miracle I managed to get myself a new copy of the biggest Marvel key, days before the end of the year. In hindsight I don't think I overpaid, book looks fantastic in hand and is by far the best looking book (in grade) that I have seen over the past years (and believe me I saw a LOT of them).
That the book is completely without Marvel Chipping and has OW/White pages is another big bonus.

Nothing left for me to say now, just let the picture do the talking.

And if you are in the mood for a Marvel Silver Age Keys smorgasbord, then take a look at my latest video, featuring, among other illustrious company, the above book.
And before people start mailing me again that the videos are way too small, I agree ...I agree, that's why if you click on the video or just Click here and put it up at 720p (HD picture)

The best series you've never read

2009-12-31T16:29:00.006+01:00

OK, we all agree that Alan Moore is a fantastic comic-book writer, I won't use the word "genius" as I personally think geniuses are few and far between, but it's hard to read any article about the "bearded-man-of-Northampton" where the word isn't (over)used. Having said all that, he is my favorite comic writer, narrowly beating Neil Gaiman and Stan Lee...so it's a shame that one of his best series hasn't been available for over 15 years.

Marvelman was a British knock-off of Fawcett's Captain Marvel and was devised by writer Mick Anglo to take Cap's place when Fawcett discontinued the title after a lawsuit from DC Comics. So to be frank, the only reason that Marvelman was created was an economical one. The UK publisher wanted to continue publishing comic books and they had just lost their major star...so why not make one up.

Marvelman was very similar to Captain Marvel: a young reporter named Micky Moran encounters an astrophysicist (instead of a wizard) who gives him his superpowers based on atomic energy. To transform into Marvelman, he has to speak the word "Kimota" (phonetically, "atomic" backwards; rather than "Shazam"). Readers didn't seem to mind and this humdrum title sold fairly well in the UK in the mid-fifties.

Fast-forward to March 1982, "Warrior"a new British monthly black-and-white anthology comic is launched.The first 21 issues feature a new Marvelman story written by Alan Moore, predating Watchmen by a few years, Moore touches on many themes of his later work, including the superhero as a source of terror, the sympathetic villain, and exploring the mythology of an established fictional character.The result is fantastic. The new Marvelman is a fabulous comic-book series, very complex, very layered and quite disturbing.

In August 1985, US comic book publisher Eclipse begins reprinting the Marvelman stories from Warrior, colorized and re-sized. However, they were renamed and re-lettered throughout as Miracleman, due to pressure from Marvel Comics. Issues 1-6 reprinted all the Warrior content, after which Eclipse began publishing all-new Miracleman stories from Moore and new artist Chuck Austen, soon replaced by Rick Veitch and then John Totleben.
Alan Moore continues to write the series up to #16 and ends with a bang, the fight scene is #15 is highly disturbing, featuring a degree of violence not previously seen in superhero battles and let's not forget the even more disturbing beating and rape of Kid Miracleman. In fact Miracleman #15 can be seen as the very first "grim and gritty" comic that led to a real avalanche of the genre during the 90's and the subsequent comic-boom.

Neil Gaiman picked up the series at #17, and developed it further in the 1990s, working with artist Mark Buckingham. He planned three books, consisting of six issues each; they would be titled "The Golden Age", "The Silver Age" and "The Dark Age".
Two issues of "The Silver Age" appeared, but issue #24 was the last to see print. Issue 25 was completed (apart from colouring) but due to the collapse of Eclipse it has never seen light.

So now you think, well some other publisher will continue where Eclipse left off and finish the run...well no such luck. Marvelman/Miracleman has been tied up in courts for over a decade. The legal ownership of Miracleman is a complicated story and until it's resolved there will be no more issues...worse still no reprints. And that's why I chose the title of this little blog-entry, it's a crime that so many comic-fans have been deprived of the chance to read one of the best comic series that has ever been made. Both Moore and Gaiman turned out some of their best work here and it should be enjoyed by all comic fans.

I know that a lot of comic fans are a lot smarter than I am and don't go around spending tons of cash of cash on back issues, but instead opt to buy a new TPB or hardcover which reprints the story...well even that is impossible. The few TPBs that were released before all the litigation started have become even rarer than the original issues and some command prices between $100 and $350 on eBay...for what are essentially reprints.
The first few issues aren't that hard to find or that expensive, but expect to pay about $350 - $500 for a decent complete run (1-24)
So let's hope one day the whole mess gets cleared up and the epic story that is Miracleman can be reprinted and discovered and enjoyed by everyone.

Meanwhile here are some of the covers. I finally managed to complete the series, it took me a few years and two years ago I was just short of issues #20 and #24 and for some reason I just couldn't get them...Mission accomplished and now for the first time ever I'll be able to read the story from beginning till the end. I was lucky to find two of the TPBs here in Belgium about 5 years ago but I've never read the story in true comic book form.

Tales of Suspense Completed

2009-12-12T11:11:00.005+01:00

Well, after a little longer than 18 months, I'm happy to say I finally managed to complete the entire Tales of Suspense series. As always the last 3 issues took a while, but I'm happy they've come home to roost.

I can clearly remember when I started collecting TOS as I also wrote a little blog-entry about it Check it out here At that time I'd bought 38 of the 60 issues and needed 22 more. The final ones I needed were :

Tales of Suspense #44
Tales of Suspense #50 (First appearance of the Mandarin)
Tales of Suspense #57 (First appearance of Hawkeye)

Feel free to click on the thumbnails to see a bigger scan.

For the cover-fans I made a little video showcasing ALL the Tales of Suspense books from #99 down to #39

Enjoy and as always, you can click through to my youtube channel to see the much larger video in HD.

Grey day

2009-10-16T13:40:00.012+02:00

Why is it that most of of my rants and raves seem to center about that most lovable of Green Giants, your friendly neighborhood Hulk. I've already bored you how I completed Hulk #102 - #570 and how I'm very close in completing the Hulk run of Tales to Astonish...but the real mother-lode are of course the first 6 Silver Age Issues.

I bought issue #3 about two months ago from my good friend Andy Nutella at Golden Age Collectibles and that sparked me on to get the other 5. Being early Silver Age they are alas not that easy to find or really affordable, so I had to move some things around. Especially issue #1 was a pain in the neck. It's by far the hardest Silver Age key to track down. I'm in the middle of trading one of my original art pages and soon the deal should be done.
It's not as expensive yet as Amazing Fantasy #15 or Fantastic Four #1 but it's far far rarer. The reason for this is of course that it didn't sell so well when Hulk #1 was released in May 1962.

In the first issue, the Hulk was gray because Stan Lee wanted a color that did not suggest any particular ethnic group. Stan Goldberg the colorist had problems with the grey (or gray) coloring, resulting in different shades of gray, and even green. After seeing the first published issue, Lee chose to change the skin color to green.

The original series was canceled with issue #6 (March 1963) due to low sales.A bit surprising as Marvel had put the top team on the book. Stan Lee had written each story, with Jack Kirby penciling the first five issues and Steve Ditko penciling and inking the sixth. Still the character didn't appeal to kids and the book was no more.

Stan Lee, never one to doubt himself, was convinced the Hulk was a viable character and the character immediately guest-starred in most of the more popular comics and months later became a founding member of the Avengers.

A year and a half after the series was canceled, the Hulk became one of two features in Tales to Astonish in issue #60 (Oct. 1964).Kirby and Lee realized their character had found an audience in college-age readers. Stan has always stated he wrote the Hulk for a more mature reader and not for the kiddies that wanted a monster-mash-up.
In fact the real "star" of the book has more often than not been Bruce Banner and not the Hulk.

Would that the original series had simply continued, for those first six issues represent some of the most amazing comics to come out of the Silver Age. During the initial run, the Hulk played as more of a Mr. Hyde to Bruce Banner's Dr. Jekyll, and Banner's noble struggle to control his darker side drove a powerful tale of regret and redemption, gorgeously illustrated by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. As with Mr. Hyde, the Hulk possessed much of his alter ego's intellect, and actively schemed against his better half to ensure his survival.

It was only later that the Hulk was "dumbed down" a sad predicament that took almost 25 years and Peter David to rectify. Peter David also turned the Hulk back to his original grey colour during his 12-year tenure on the book.So there you have it, a nice little grey-to-green and back again history lesson. Only thing that remains now are the scans of the 6 books I just picked up.
If you want more info (and visuals !!) on the Hulk books and Tales to Astonish in particular then feel free to visit my Youtube channel as I have a new video up on this very subject (and watch it in HD). Chromiumcomics Youtube Channel

Is print doomed ?

2009-08-01T17:56:00.007+02:00

Lately I've been toying more and more with this question, is the written word becoming a dinosaur ? Newspapers and magazines are folding left and right, people prefer to use the internet to get their news and info...even when they have to pay for it.

And this kindle thingy is getting more and more popular, we can expect cheap Chinese knockoffs in a few years time and this could be the turning point for a lot of people. Reading books, magazines and yes comics in digital (and portable form) with only a select few "connoisseurs" still going after the paper version.

You might think I'm exaggerating but it's a fact that more and more people are turning to digital comics. It used to be mainly because of the price, people didn't want to pay for the issues so they turned to the warez sits and trackers to get their weekly dose, but what's happened the last few months is that people are in fact now paying for the privilege and in fact prefer the digital version to the printed one. I even know somebody who uses his Iphone to read his comics... I call him Hawkeye because that screen is T-I-N-y ...but then again I'm getting old.

But still, even when we're talking digital instead of print, it's still reading...which is fast becoming a dying art.

I didn't start this topic just to go on a tirade, being a print lover, but because I've noticed that my Youtube channel is getting more hits than my blog...a LOT more hits.
I've never really did a lot of advertising for 'nuff said, because I feel it's more like a person diary of my collecting habits and would only interest a small number of people... it's not exactly earth-shattering now is it. So I get on average about 750 hits per month..which is a lot more than I ever expected... I don't even know 75 people in total.

Now about a year ago I started posting a few videos about my collection on Youtube, first as a bit of a laugh, but then for some reason I started getting something called "subscribers". Subbies are people that actually go to the trouble of registering with your channel so they get notified every time I post a new video. At first I had two subscribers, both were long-time friends, but then I got more of them, followed by at least 50 mails a week about my collection and my videos.
As I'm writing this, I have over 60 subscribers now and the pressure is killing me.
Because I now feel I just have to post at least a video per month because all those nice people actually took the time to put my dinky little channel on their menu...

In short, my Youtube channel is getting a lot more hits and visitors than my blog...which I don't really mind, but it does pose the question is it mainly because of the medium or something else ? It's a lot easier to just follow some nice pictures on a screen than it is to actually read the words to a story/opinion and comics are of course a visual medium, so it makes sense.
But on the other hand, if everybody stops reading where does that leave comic books ?

Anyway, using the "if you can't beat them..." credo I just posted a new video on my channel. After completing my Strange Tales collection a few weeks ago I decided to yet again start a new series. Trouble is that I'm almost done...but then I remembered that even though I completed the Hulk series I always glanced over the first 6 issues that were ever published. In 1962 (before Spider-man !!) Marvel tried to launch an Incredible Hulk series, alas it wasn't popular and the series was canceled after #6... but those 6 comics remain the first 6 Hulk books ever and are very collectible. So in short I decided to go after these as well. Meanwhile here are some of my favorite (and key) issues of everyone's favorite Mean Green Machine.

Enjoy the video (but do keep reading)

The New World

2009-07-14T09:13:00.010+02:00

As some of you know I've spent the last few weeks gallivanting all over the US of A and had a splendid time.Met up with some old and dear friends, a lot I'd never met in person before and geeked out over a lot of comic books.

I also got to visit a lot of US comic shops and got to rifle through Superworld's warehouse and pick out some nice books.

I flew into Boston on July 2nd and spent the next few days at a friend's Summer house in New Hampshire, enjoying watersports, BBQ's, campfires and a lot of drinking. I celebrated my birthday and Independence Day and had a real relaxing time...but the best was yet to come.
After a few days I went back to Boston and met up with some of my New England friends and co-collectors. There were also two Southern boys that flew in to join us and geek out for a while.

We spent the first day eating and drinking and playing with all the high grade funny books from one of my friend's collection.
This fella, let's call him Nik, also acted as our local tour guy and drove us to the local comic book hotspots. I had also planned to pick some of those massive Treasury editions as these are way too large to send through the mail and picking them up in person was the only viable solution.
Alas NONE of the comic book stores I visited during this trip had any in stock, but Nik did and he graciously gave me a bunch of them from his personal collection.

First Comic book store I visited was Bedrock Comics and I must say that I was very impressed, as my first visit to a LCS I could have done much worse (which I later did) as this was a very nicely laid out store with a lot of back issues. Most people are under the impression that most US comic book stores are a veritable treasure trove for Golden and Silver Age books, truth is that most stores have a whole bunch of trades, a nice selection of moderns and almost no or few older back issues. But this store did but we really didn't have the time to go digging through the boxes. Still I bought my son a nice Flash action figure (the kid's a DC fan....go figure *sigh*)

Next on the tour was Ted Van Liew's warehouse. Ted is the owner/operator of Superworld comics (http://www.superworldcomics.com), one of the East Coast's bigger dealers and probably one of the nicest and coolest dealers I have ever met.He was nice enough to open up his warehouse for us and In fact I'm pretty sure despite his years of dealing and his massive inventory Ted is still more fan/collector than dealer. I spent more time yapping with him about books, original art and the hobby itself than I did going through all the boxes. Still I managed to find some SA and GA Batman books, including a Golden Age Joker cover that was one my want-list. The rest of the day was spent eating and drinking (again) and I got to spend some time with Paul who is the man responsible for bringing those cool Superhero glasses to the market (http://www.toontumblers.com)

Our tour guide had to get back to the real world the next day but my friend Andrew from Golden Age Collectibles (http://www.golden-age-collectibles.com) stepped us to the plate and true to the previous metaphor took us to Fenway Park, the oldest Major League Baseball stadium in the US where We had a blast.
After dropping of the two Southern boys at the airport Andrew and I went to one of hos favorite comic book stores, Webhead Enterprises in Wakefield MA.
Again a very nice store, massive inventory of back issues and I was happy to find three books that were on my want-list. Score ! I also picked up a few more action figures for my kids (yeah...DC again).

Andy also gave me the addresses of another few comic stores, as I was still looking for more Treasuries and wanted to find a Supergirl action figure for my daughter.So the next day I took the train into Boston center and proceeded to walk a little over 4 miles visiting all the shops that were on my list.

First went down to Cambridge, went to The Million Year Picnic , nothing from my list, no treasuries, no Supergirl figure.
Then WALKED to Kenmore and the Comicopia store...They didn't have a single book older than 6 months and no Supergirl action figure...but the owner was super nice, I didn't spend a dime and told him I was looking for that figure for my little girl and he gave me a free Supergirl sticker and a free Supergirl comic he had left from FCBD, he also called two other shops to find out if they had any Supergirl AFs...but nothing.
Really sweet guy, I wished he had anything I wanted so I could spend some cash with him.

As I had walked that far, I walked a little longer to Newbury comics and bought one of Paul's Captain America Toon Tumblers there for my buddy and again no backissues and no Supergirl, but I did get sweet Poison Ivy action figure which she will like as well.

I was so hot from the 3 hours of walking in the sun I walked into a nice cool Apple store and enjoyed the AC for 15 minutes and tried one of the new Mac books to read my mail.

You may have noticed that there are no scans of the books, what I did this time was make a quick movie featuring all the comics I brought back from the US and put it up on my youtube channel. Here it is, of course if you click on it you will be take to the channel where you can watch it in HD, which as always is the best way to see more detail.

I had a blast during the Boston part of my trip and would like to thank my friends from the bottom of my heart for making it possible.

Nik : I want to thank you for opening up your lovely house for us,letting us hang in your basement and playing with your toys.Also thanks for the Treasuries and driving me all over the Boston area, I really appreciated it, plus you taught me a whole new batch of cuss-words which I can use in traffic when I get home.

Dick Pontoon : thanks for getting me 38 lbs of supplies and driving me all over the place, giving me the revelation that life is short (after said drives) and I need to fully enjoy while I can. Give my regards to your car ; "Christine"

GACollectibles : Andy I was a pleasure to meet you and a blast to hang out.
I enjoyed your stories and am looking forward to hearing the point to most of them some day. Thanks not only for taking us to Fenway Park and driving me to those comic book stores, but mostly because you volunteered to ride in Pontoon's car so I didn't have to anymore. Sorry she ate your keys

Silverandbronze : Paul good yapping to you about all things important and fun, we only met up the one day but had a cool time.

And then last by not means least... my buddies from down South.
Arex after all those years of mails and PMs I was great to finally meet and be on the receiving end of one of those bear-hugs. Happy to say my ribs are only sprained and not cracked as we first feared. I was good to finally thank you for taking care of my books all those years. Keep on rocking coach.

DrWatson : Thanks for the doughnuts
It was a pleasure hanging out with you Jim, picking up the little nuggets of "Ancient Tennessee Wisdom". You were smaller than I expected but your sense of smell makes up for that...just work on your sense of fashion (think green, think shoes) and I'm sure you'll be alright.

Strange Days

2009-06-07T18:01:00.003+02:00

Most people I know who start collection series or long runs almost always go for the "big" titles, Spider-man, X-men, Fantastic Four etc...Typically the very last titles to be collected are series like Tales To Astonish and Strange Tales.

I have to plead guilty as well as both are the very last Marvel Superhero titles I still need to collect/complete. Although I should say "needed" as I just completed the Super-hero run of Strange Tales.

A nice benefit of collecting these titles is that they are cheap compared to the flagship titles. You can buy books that were on the stand at the same time as Spider-man #1 for a fraction of the price and most of the Silver Age books have very cool retro covers. Stories and art may not always be of a high quality, but let's be honest, a lot of "bigger" Silver Age books aren't exactly works of art either.

The reason why I never really got into collecting Strange Tales before was mainly because I didn't really know the series, and like all things, unknown is unloved. Sure I knew that it was fabled for the first Dr Strange stories where Ditko did amazing work and that Steranko did some wonderful things with Nick Fury and SHIELD, but still it remained on the back burner and I only starting collecting them because there was almost nothing else left to collect. But let's make it loud and clear...I was wrong. This is a wonderful series and I should have started on it much, much earlier.

Strange Tales ran 168 issues, from June 1951 to May 1968. It began as a horror anthology in the vain of the very popular EC line of comics, but with the 1954 imposition of the Comics Code, which prohibited graphic horror, it became a more sci-fi oriented comic seemingly featuring a different monster every month.

The anthology switched to superheroes in the very early 60's, retaining the sci-fi, suspense and monsters as backup features for a time. Strange Tales' first superhero, in 12- to 14-page stories, was the Fantastic Four's Human Torch, Johnny Storm, beginning in #101 (Oct. 1962).

But the real magic started with #110...with the introduction of sorcerer Doctor Strange, by Stan Lee Steve Ditko. So this means that Strange Tales #110 is one of the major Marvel key books...first Dr Strange, maybe the only key book where the most important character doesn't even appear on the cover. Very humble beginnings for the Sorcerer Supreme. For many people these issues were Ditko's best work.

Here's Marvel's most understated KEY book ...Strange Tales #110 First Dr Strange.

But there's more...Another giant of comicdom would use Strange Tales as a launching pad, The Human Torch had already been replaced in #135 (Aug. 1965) by Nick Fury, agent of SHIELD.The 12-page feature was initially by Lee and Kirby but soon was taken over writer-penciler-colorist Jim Steranko, under whom it became one of the
ultimate works of the Silver Age. Steranko introduced or popularized in comics such art movements of the day as psychedelia and pop art.

Issue #168 was the last issue in the then series,Dr Strange got his own mag, continuing the numbering (Dr Strange #169) and Steranko took Nick Fury to dizzy heights in the self-named series.

This was the fastest series I ever put together,took me only a few months,but I was pretty lucky. Got all the Fury books from the same seller and most of the #101 - 152 books I got from an original owner collection.
Still needed 9 books missing, the #101 & #102 I won on eBay and the others I managed to snag at Heritage. Alas I don't have all of them in hand at the moment, but I'll pick them up next month when I'm in the US.

Think outside the box

2009-04-25T12:04:00.009+02:00

Getting comics halfway across the globe is both an exciting and a maddening experience. Sure you enjoy the anticipation of waiting and hoping this will be the day your little box of treasures arrive. But at the same time you get disappointed if it doesn't arrive on the expected date and you hope and pray it arrives at all...preferably intact.

But as I'm geographically challenged there is no way around, this and my gargantuan yearly shipping bill are the darker sides of collection, but once the box arrives, everything is right in the world again and I temporarily forget all the woes and focus instead on the wonders.

The last 2 weeks I was on pins and needles as I was expecting a rather important package and because of all the non-working days due to Easter, it was stuck in transit somewhere. To make matters worse, it got stuck in customs as well. My friendly neighborhood customs official opened the box, even though the value was below the import-duty threshold. Once he opened and inspected the box he came to the conclusion I didn't have to pay duty or tax and all forms were filled in correctly. But I still had to pay $15 to get my box back, because he had inspected it and all inspected packages carry a $15.00 cost... I have given up trying to understand the logic in all of this.

But once the package was finally delivered I focused on the contents and got that stupid grin again. This time the box wasn't as filled as previous boxes, but it did hold some key books.

I made yet another video showing all the goodies, let me know if you get tired of all these vids and want me to post pics again. I filmed it this time as I seem to get a lot more reaction to vids than to pics, I guess that's Youtube for you.

Here goes...

If you really don't care for videos and want to see which keys I'm talking about (yeah go ahead and spoil the surprise) you can click HERE to see a pic of the two keys (but the vid is cooler)

Oh and as always you can check out the videos in higher resolution directly through my Youtube page Chromiumcomics Youtube page

Downsizing

2009-04-15T10:07:00.012+02:00

Downsizing, thinning the herd, retrenchment... call it what you like it's never any fun when you have to cut back. But that's exactly what I've been doing for the past 6 months. Now I'm not talking about buying less funny books...oh no, I'm glad it hasn't come to that, I'm talking about getting rid of a large part of my collection as it was literally growing over my head.

When the collection went over 10.000 books I knew I had to do something. My main aim was to get it down to 7500 which I did. Most went without remorse, but some were harder to say goodbye to.

First of all I started selling most of my books that weren't Marvel or DC (or written by Alan Moore). This wasn't hard to do as I have absolutely no love for Image, Malibu, Top Cow,Dark Horse, Avatar, Bongo, IDW, Wildstorm and what have you.
I did keep about half my Vertigo books though.

The second time I went through the collection I got rid of all my post 1985 DCs and most of the Marvels from 1990 through to 2000. Of course I kept the books that were part of a complete series, but series that started or appeared only in this era were gone, gone, gone. This was even easier to do that getting rid of all the indies as most Marvel books from the 90's really sucked. Some might disagree, but then some people think Rob Liefeld,Whilce Portacio,Michael Turner and Tod McFarlane are great artists....which I don't.
No, the biggest problem getting rid of these books was not the emotional value, but to get people to actually buy them, even at the stupidly-low prices I was selling them for.

And then I got stuck at about 8000 books, still 500 over my target.
So I dug in and went through the collection a third time. This time I pulled series which I did enjoy but knew I would probably never re-read and weren't part of a larger series. These were in fact a little harder to part with, but I know that the people who bought them will enjoy them as well.

Series like : Silver Surfer (80s-90's), The New Mutants, Xmen Hidden years, Batman Brave and Bold (70's), The Flash (70's-80's) and West Coast Avengers. Selling these put me well under 7500 books and a much trimmer collection.

What can I say...I'm a Silver and Bronze-age fan who thinks comics stopped in 1985 with Secret Wars.

And to celebrate how spiffy my collection now looks I made this video. No more crowded shelves, no more stray books and boxes, all sorted, graded and taken care of.
Enjoy.

I know it's pretty small, but by clicking on the rectangle next to the HD button you can watch it in full screen mode and make out the details.

Jolly Green Giant

2009-04-07T17:20:00.007+02:00

Well after what seems like forever I managed to complete my Incredible Hulk series.. but not really. I took me over a year to get the very last issue I needed, not that it's that rare but I was never in the right place at the right time. But this week I managed to snag Incredible Hulk #180 and that was all she wrote.

Here's a little scan, the grade isn't anything to write home about, but it's good enough for now. A nice little extra bonus is that the book was signed by Herb Trimpe.

Now Hulk #180 is an odd little book, mainly because it has the very first Wolverine in it, but it's not considered to be Wolverine's first appearance. And that's why the next issue is about 10X to 15X as expensive as this book. Hulk #181 is THE bronze age key and widely accepted as the "first Wolverine".

But then there's this :

Yes, that's the very last panel of issue #180 ... still so sure that #181 is the first appearance of everyone's favorite mutant ?
Now I know I won't convince anyone as most people use these three arguments to "overlook" issue #180. Feel free to subscribe to some/all/none of them.

1) ”Wolverine’s appearance in #180 is a teaser/advertisement for the next issue. He’s not a part of the story in that issue.”
2)”You don’t see much of Wolverine in #180. #181 is the real introduction of the character where we learn what he’s about.”
3)”It’s not considered a full first appearance if it’s a one-panel cameo at the very end of the issue...those don't count”

What I am sure about is that issue #180 won't be skyrocketing in value. A lot of people who firmly believe that #180 is the key have been investing in this book with the hope that some day the world would catch up and that this book would be way up there value-wise with #181. Never going to happen, every year the gap between the two books is getting bigger and bigger.

But enough about these two books... at the very start I mentioned that I completed the Incredible Hulk series...but not really. Well there's a reason for that. The Incredible Hulk starts with issue #102 (1968) and my run continues until #586 (or Hulk V3 #112 ....stupid Marvel)... that's 485 issues + the annuals. But there's more. Before the start of the series, Hulk starred in Tales to Astonish from issue #60 (Oct. 1964) through to issue #101 (and then continued in Incredible Hulk #102... first issue of the new series). So I need to get those issues as well...someday
But wait, there's more still. Before the Tales to Astonish run there was a short-lived Incredible Hulk series in 1962 which only lasted 6 issues... So I need to get those as well...and Hulk #1 isn't exactly cheap.

But at the moment I'm glad I managed to complete this series, and with some luck I should be able to complete a few other large series this year. Stay Tuned

Goodie Bag

2009-02-27T13:41:00.002+01:00

Well for those who thought I'd fallen of the face of the earth, no such luck. I've still been buying and even selling a bit, but all my purchases of the last 3 months have been safely stored in the good old US of A.

But not anymore as I received another of those glorious Priority boxes with all my stuff...alas no video this time, but I did make a group picture and will discuss some of the books in more detail.

Here's a group-shot of the 15 books, just click on it for a larger view.

Now, from the pic you can see that it's all Silver Age or keys and yes some of those books are duplicates. I find that now when my collection is near completion, there are a number of books I like buy in multiple copies. Don't ask me why, I just do. On the one had I buy them to trade or to resell, but to be honest I hardly ever take the effort of listing stuff anymore...if someone wants a book I have multiple copies of, sure I'll sell them, but "push" them on an auction site or large market ? Naah, maybe tomorrow.

First bunch are the JIMs. Thor has always been of the less popular Marvel Heroes, but I've always like him, especially the Kirby issues. Once I finished my Thor series, I decided to go for the older Journey into Mystery books. First Thor of course was in JIM #83 and the series went on till issue #125. With these three issues I'm getting close in completing the series as well. Bought a very nice copy of #83 last year and with these three in the bank I now only need issues #84,#91,#92 & #93 ... which I should get this year.
Again click on the thumbnails for a bigger pic

The three Fantastic Four books are upgrades, I completed the entire series from #1 - #525 about two years ago (or is it 3 already ?) and wanted to get higher graded copies of some of the issues when all was finished. And you can't go wrong with those classic 48/49 issues...first Silver Surfer, first Galactus..what's not to miss. Plus I've always loved the cover to #49...very hard to get a decent looking copy due to the black inks.

More to come later.

Read all about it

2009-01-16T23:20:00.007+01:00

You know we internet aficionados have it easy in this day and age when we want to talk about our comic books. It doesn't matter where you live or how socially inept you are, you will easily find someone who shares your viewpoint on a certain book, character or storyline.

Finding someone to argue with about those particular subjects is even easier. We have chat-room, internet forums, newsgroups and the really weird can even start their own blog to ram their views down the world's throat.

Back in the day the only medium available to fans was the letters column in the back of the comics. Most of the comics had one or two pages of "letters of comments". In the beginning these were just your standard "I hate" or "I love" letters but slowly reader participation increased and it became a valid means for creators to get feedback from their adoring (or not so adoring) fans. And let's not forget it was THE place for comic fans to "meet" likeminded people. You have to remember that at the time, they were publishing full addresses and fans started writing each other.

When people ask me why I stubbornly read my Silver Age comics (and not keep them slabbed) instead of the reprints that I also own, I point them to the letters pages, the ads, the editorials..for me they are an integral part of the whole comic book experience and they give me a very cool wormhole into the past and into the mindset of your average comic reader of the 60's.
But what really gets my rocks off is when I stumble onto an old fan-letter written by a fan/kid who later turned into a Marvel/DC mainstay. A lot of famous artists, editors and writers got their first taste of comic publishing when their letter was printed in "Avengers Assemble!" (Avengers), "Letters to the Living Legend," (Captain America), "Spider's Web" (Amazing Spider-Man), or "X-Mail," (Uncanny X-Men).

This week I was reading the first 20 or so issues of Fantastic Four and I was pleasantly surprised how many "names" were scattered all over the letters pages and I thought I'd share a few with you.

Uncanny X-men and Legion of Super-heroes legend, the late great Dave Cockrum was a very avid comic fan and letterhack back at the very beginning of the Marvel Age.
Dave was a young sailor in the US navy and wrote a lot of letters to Amazing Spider-man, Avengers and Fantastic Four.

In fact Dave met and married his first wife through the letter page of Fantastic Four #34. She read the letter and became interested because he was a sailor and a comic fan. Dave and her exchanged letters, met up and got married !

Anyway here's a scan of an earlier letter Dave Cockrum sent in to Fantastic Four #22 from January 1964. Don't you just love it how Dave criticizes the inking on the X-men books.
Enjoy !

Cancel Christmas ?

2008-12-25T10:30:00.002+01:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that I like to give myself presents... and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Especially at Xmas time I really like to indulge myself and buy something "really nice". Last year I bought my JIM 83 and my Batman 11. The year before that my ASM #1 and in 2005 my present of choice was Fantastic Four #1. So what's the big book I'm giving myself this year ?

Well to be honest there isn't going to be one... and no art page either. The main reason is that I haven't been able to find anything that :

A) fits in the budget.
B) Is a grail or close-to-a-grail.
C) Is of acceptable condition to me.

The budget-clause is a given, I'm looking for something around the $1250 range...which should get me a good selection. But it's clause B that's giving me the problem... there isn't really that much out there anymore. Top of the list is a nice Tales of Suspense #39 in 3.0/3.5 with at least Off-white pages, next up is a very nice looking X-men #1 in 4.0/4.5 again with the same pages...and then there's.. well to be honest that's it really.
Sure I could take the money and buy 4-5 books from my want list and complete a series...but that wouldn't be the same. My Xmas present should be one single knockout book which I normally only can afford around Xmas. So I guess it's not going to happen this year

But all is not lost, for once I did manage to get into the Xmas present thanks to a cool gift I got from my German friend and fellow collector Rudy. And here's me wearing it in all its monochrome beauty (and I'm not talking about the hat)
Just click the pic for a higher res version and Merry Xmas to all and thanks for reading my blog from time to time :)

The postman always rings twice

2008-12-22T11:05:00.009+01:00

It's been a while since I made and posted a video. But seeing as my previous one just broke the 5000 unique views barrier (I can't believe 5000 people actually watched it) and it's almost Xmas I thought I'd give it another go. it's a bit silly and a lot geeky, but you comic fans know the great feeling when books you bought finally arrive.

As I'm geographically challenged it sometimes takes months before I get my hands on the books I bought as I tend to have a bunch of them shipped together to keep the postage in check. Yesterday two boxes arrived at once and...well watch the vid and let me know what you think. Couldn't find the trademark white surgical gloves this time, so I'm doing it all ,gulp... barehanded

If you want to watch the video in a higher resolution, which I thoroughly recommend, you can click on THIS LINK. Makes it easier to make out all the details.

You complete me

2008-11-21T18:42:00.003+01:00

Well about 6 weeks I announced that I had just started collecting Daredevil and would try to finish #1 - #100 in a relative short time. As usual I went overboard and went completely Colonel Kurtz about the whole thing. After 6 weeks I can proudly (?) say that I only need 3 more issues to complete the entire run. I pestered and hounded everyone I knew to sell me the books and I'm sure it won't take that long until I get the 3 remaining books and I can read them back to back.

Here's a pic of issue #1.
I just love the old-school costume which I think was designed by Bill Everett and Jack Kirby. The red one is more dramatic and probably more iconic, but this one just plains rocks..even though his bum looks big in it (the stuff I notice when I read comic books...)

Anyway with a little luck I'll be able to complete this series before the end of the year. 2008 hasn't been my best year for completing series/runs. Of course the previous years were the salad years as was able to complete all the A-series. This year original art took most of my focus, time and not to mention money. But I've grown a little sour on art as the prices continue to soar into the stratosphere. So 2009 will hopefully see my return to the fold and will reap completed series galore.

I'm not sure, but the only series I think I completed this year was Captain America.
But I did start collecting a few other series/runs that I hoped to complete this year. Alas it was not to be, but I'm very close to some of them and maybe just maybe I can pull another rabbit out of the hat before the end of the year.

Here's a little breakdown

Tales of Suspense - need 7 more issues to complete the series

Incredible Hulk - need one more book to complete the series

Journey into Mystery - need 10 more books to complete the series

And then of course there are the smaller runs I'm working on, but more about those in a later update.

My box of orphans

2008-10-30T17:36:00.003+01:00

Loyal readers of my rambunctious rambling (yes I'm channeling Stan Lee again) already know that it's all about the complete picture for me. The alfa and omega of my collection (and my collecting) is to complete series or very large runs. In fact I pride myself on doing exactly that ; starting with a single issue and then work my way up (down ?) to the very first issues. I hate stray books, books I own accidentally. Got them as freebies, got them when buying a larger collection or stupidly bought them on a whim. And even though I hardly ever look at them...I know they are there, waiting in the night and defacing my otherwise perfect collection of books that "belong"

So what I normally do is give them away as freebies myself. Lots of people I know are very happy to get a single issue of a series, as a means of introduction or simply just to own another comic. I never bother to sell these as I can't be arsed really to set up an auction for a single book...besides who would bid on it ?

It's safe to say that I've almost completely purged my collection of these misfits, put them out to pasture, sold them down the river...basically got rid of them. Except for one single box. The box of orphans I call them, books I can't really give away (honestly because some of them are worth a fair amount of coin and others because they're basically cool). So there they sit, snugly between my Avengers and Fantastic Four series.

While I was dusting my comics cabinet (yes I turn into a woman twice a year for 20 minutes) I pulled the box and took a look. Much to my delight I was able to take out another few books to put (hide !) in my "freebie" box..but at the end of the day a fair amount remained and I thought it maybe would be an interesting read to see what lurks inside my darkest of secret possessions.
So I pulled about half the books and maybe you'll see a book you've never seen before or heard of...

Ok the first batch

There are some oddball books in there like "The Impossible Man Summer Vacation Spectacular" from 1990. No idea when I bought this, but as I didn't buy comics from 1986 through to 2000 I must have picked up up somewhere probably for the cool Doom cover... From the period where Marvel did special Summer books to cash in some more, gotta love the 90's.

More interesting is the "Logan's run #6" in FINE from 1976. It's a $10.00 for the sole reason that it has a backup story featuring Thanos in his first solo story (shortly after his cameo in Iron Man #55. Loved the TV series and I picked this one and #5 at a local con about 5 years ago for about 50 cents each. Still haven't read them

The 'Marvel Triple Action #2" from 1972 is a killer book which reprints Fantastic Four #58 where Doom steals the power cosmic from the Silver Surfer (hey just like the second FF movie). Very precious book to me as one of the few Marvels that I picked up as a kid (I think in 1976 when I was living in England) and still have today. A book I'll never sell...but have no idea where to put either. And just look at that fantastic cover

While writing this I tossed the Black Panther #2099 in the freebie box as well, paid full cover for this about three years ago...I blame alcohol.

"New Mutants #87" is the only New Mutants book I own and luckily it's the only one you should own. It's a $20 - $25 book in this condition. Picked up a new mutants run years ago and this book was in there twice. Kept the best copy sold the rest.
Edit : Just saw a little blemish on the back cover...it's a NM- . . . crap.

Another book I picked up in England is "Moon Knight #1" from 1980 ...a few years ago I bought the entire series, read and sold it again. This one remained and will probably end up as a freebie as well. Cheap Batman clone

And saving the best for last... "Captain Marvel #1" from 1968 in VG+. I got this book as a freebie with a purchase a few years ago. Ashamed to say I don't remember who sent it to me and I really should as I just looked it up and it's a $30.00 book

Well this was quite fun for me, I'm off to read the Captain Marvel #1 and maybe, just maybe I'll have a stab at the Logan's run books as well.

Next time I'll dig out another batch of "orphans"

be well.

Truth or Dare

2008-10-16T21:38:00.004+02:00

Sometimes the life of the collector is filled with obstacles, the books you are looking for aren't showing up.Or worse, they do become available but you can't afford them. Stuff gets lost in the mail and those NM comics you just bought turn out to be VGs.
But sometimes there is a nice problem to have ; where do I go next ?

In the beginning it's easy...you have nothing and you want everything. But then you come to a point where you have almost everything you want or can afford.
One avenue to take of course it to stop collecting (yeah right) and the other is to look in places previously disregarded. And this time I looked at Daredevil. It might sound strange, but before this month I had never bought a single DD comic, and the only ones I had ever read was the Frank Miller run in those Marvel trades. I'm ashamed to admit that I own the Marvel Masterwork reprinting the first ten issues, but have never taken it out of the plastic wrapper...and honestly I don't know why.

I can't be because I don't like the series as it's totally unknown to me. Even after watching the movie I had no desire whatsoever to start collecting the title at all. But about a month ago somebody sent me a bunch of comics and included a free Silver Age Daredevil comic. Now because I'm a bit weird when this happens I normally give the comic away as I only want complete series or long arcs and single comics frighten the life out of me. The other option is to actively start collecting the series. So I sat down and read the book...and liked it. I then took a look at some of the covers in the run and liked them even more. So I've now decided to start collecting Daredevil.

I'm shooting for Daredevil #1 - #100 and I'll see how long it will take me. Once I have all of them I'll read them back to back and hopefully enjoy them.
What's the worse that can happen ? If it's really not my cup of tea I'll just sell them on and hopefully make someone else happy in getting the complete Silver Age Daredevil without having to do all the work.

Reader copy

2008-09-22T13:16:00.005+02:00

With all this collecting who has time to read anymore ? Well I must admit that the collecting/searching/buying/cataloging/grading/bagging/boarding part of the hobby sucks a lot of time away from the actual reading. Ad to this the hours a day I spend online, talking about..well comic books and you might think I don't read at all. Even though I don't get to read as much as I'd like I do try my best...which isn't always good enough.

When (non-comic) people visit me and see my collection the first question always is "Have you read everything" (the second question is invariably : "how much i this worth"). And then I have to shamefully admit I might have read about 20% of my books...but hey 20% of 10.000 comics is still no mean feat and I know plenty of collectors who have huge collection and have hardly read a book.
When I started collecting comic books about 6 years ago I got slapped around with two old adages...one was that I wouldn't continue buying new comics AND back issues at the same time (this turned out to be true) and the other one was that the more you turned into a collector the less you became a reader.
Alas the second one looked to be true as well, it's a lot easier to buy 100 comics online than it is to sit down and find the time to read them...and after all the 12 -15 hours you would spend (remember backissues take more time to read than modern books...because of the (better?) words-to-picture ratio) reading them, could very well be used to search for some more books (and then discussing these books with fellow collectors who haven't read them either)

But a few years ago I decided to try and fight the power and rediscover my inner-reader. I set myself a task of reading about 10 comics a week, or 500 a year. I will take me the better part of 10 years to read everything, but it's a start and I have managed to stick to it. Now there are weeks when I don't reach the magical number, but that only means that I need to take it up a notch the next week. The best part is that due to my manic collecting of complete series I now get to read entire Marvel runs from start to finish and last month I finished reading Avengers #1 - #503.

Now I did cheat a little as I started reading Avengers in the Summer of 2005...but that was just the Silver Age and I stopped at #40 or something.
You can read my reviews in the archives section in the right column (July/September/November of 2005). So about two years later I picked up where I left off and this time I didn't throw the towel. It was a very eventful ride, read a lot of great books, skimmed through some crap and generally had a good time.
No way that I'll review all 450+ books I read, but I do have a few observations...

Observation #1 : Things really picked up for the SA books with the arrival of The Vision in #57...stories got a lot more involved and layered.

Observation #2 : Runs which had Captain America AND Hawkeye in the lineup were alsmost all excellent

Observation #3 : Hank Pym was a sucky little suck in any of his incarnations all throughout the series

Observation #4 : Splitting the team in the middle to creat the West Coast Avengers killed the book for a long time

Observation #5 : The George Perez/Kurt Busiek modern Ultron run is as good as *any* of the classis Bronze Age and Silver Age arcs

In short I loved this series.pure superhero fun all the way, maybe not as brilliant or complicated as the Fantastic Four and maybe less intense and moving than Amazing Spider-man...but pure comic book fun.

More Triumph than Torment

2008-08-04T13:19:00.011+02:00

I've talked about "grails" in the past.The item you want more than anything else, the secret sweetheart of your collector's heart.
The item you haven't bought yet, but would the minute you won the lottery...if you could find it that is. You see even if you can afford your grail, your not always sure to find it, especially when we're talking original art.

I know most of you also have a grail or grails even...me I have a grails list (groan). It's a list I've compiled over the years, filled with pieces I just HAVE to own. It used to be a top-10 but then I fell in love with Wally Wood's EC work and now want a piece of that as well (but that's for another blog entry). The list is easy ; there is no time limit it has to be filled one day. The item which is at #1 is the item I'm pining for the most, but that doesn't mean it's the most expensive or the hardest to find, it's just the piece I want the most and spend the most time hunting down.

Now with all my buying, why is there still "a list" ? Well good question, I can afford some items which are on the list right now, but I added a twist. I put a maximum price I'm willing to pay next to each item and I stick to it. Of course I use realistic prices, but I don't want to pay over market or more than I think the page or book is worth. Trouble is that at that particular price more people want it and I end up not getting it more than not. But I guess that's why it's a grail. If it was easy it wouldn't be on the list.

Now comic book grails mostly come down to a perfect mix of price and availability and if both pan out you buy the book. But original art ? Oh boy that's a whole different kettle of fish. The biggest problem is of course that original art pages are one-of-a-kind and if you want a certain page, well good luck.
First it has to exist, then if it did survive then you need to find out who's got it. And even if you do track down the seller let's hope he is willing to sell it...at a price you can live with. But even if you broaden your scope and your grail is "a page" out of that book or "a page" featuring "those characters" from "that artist" it's still can be very difficult. Good luck if you want a Frank Miller Dark Knight page or a Watchmen page...there are rarely any for sale.

When I started collecting original art (exactly a year ago today !) My grand plan was to someday own a Dr Doom page from all of the great Silver and Bronze age artists. In fact I don't usually collect anything newer than 1985, but I made one exception...Mike Mignola.
All my favorite artists are from the 60's and the 70's, some from the 80's but almost none newer than that. I am and always will be a Silver and Bronze Age collector. But Mignola, boy now there's a talent. Alan Moore once described Mignola's work as "German expressionism meets Jack Kirby" and I completely understand what he means. Mignola is one of my top-5 favorite artists of all time and my all-out champion of the last 25 years. So the plan was to also include a Mike Mignola Dr Doom page.

The trouble was that Mignola didn't exactly leave a large body of work when he was still at Marvel in those pre-Hellboy days. In fact the only Doom he did was in that fantastic Graphic Novel he did together with Roger stern "Doctor Strange & Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment". This was one of the stories that made me the Doom fanatic I am today. It's just the perfect story, Doom gets closure concerning his mother's soul and Dr. Strange is forced to look at Doom in a new light. So the hunt was on to get one of the pages from this book...and not any page, oh no. I wanted a page with Doom on it (of course).

So I searched high and low and talked to a lot of people, figuring, this book is fairly recent (1990) and most Mignola fans will be after Hellboy art, so this should be easy. Well if it had been easy it wouldn't have ended up on my grails list. In fact there are only about 10 pages that I know about in collector's hands (where are the others ?) And nobody was interested in selling or trading. The more I searched the more bad news I got, not only weren't any for sale, worse still there were a bunch of other collectors actively searching for the same pages.

But last week my quest came to an end, I was lucky enough to stumble on this page for sale and my offer was accepted. The wait was long and hard,(especially the last week when the page was in the mail) But I'm now the proud owner of page #73 of one of the best Doom books out there and my grails list is now down to 10 entries.

But after all this you still haven't seen the page ? Well I'm still working on a decent scan as this page is HUGE, the same format as an early Silver Age page (twice-up) and I need to affix some of the speech bubbles that are coming loose. But in the meantime here is a link to a larger scan of the page and a scan of the original (published) color page. Enjoy !

Annual Report

2008-07-16T17:29:00.000+02:00

As a kid I used to love comic annuals, they were often double-sized (at least) and were chock full of "extra" material that the monthly series lacked the space to publish. All this for just a little more money, too bad they only came once a year.

Originally they were nothing more than reprint vehicles, a good way to sell the same stories to a new public (or to the same public who were fooled or just had to get everything Marvel/DC published). What also was very profitable to the publishers is that they have to pay the artists as under the work-for-hire regime all the art and all the rights belonged to the company to reprint ad infinitum.

But after a while common sense prevailed and most annuals got new longer single stories and multiple stories in a single annual. There still was the odd reprint, but at least for much of the 60's and 70's the balance was perfect between new stories, epilogues to stories published in the regular comics and reprints of older stories now unavailable (or too expensive) for the everyday comic reader. Also popular among the extras were biographical information on featured characters, full-page pin-ups of characters and "back-up" stories.

Later annuals often featured stories with greater importance to the characters featured than in the monthly publication, reflecting the "special" status of their once-yearly publication. Annuals also sometimes featured the finale of a multi-issue storyline running in the monthly series and became unmissable.

The publishers started seeing dollar signs when they realized that if a regular story concluded in the annual, everybody was forded to buy the annual.
But the publishers smelled even more money and they wanted Joe Collector to buy ALL annuals. Now annual were usually released in the summer of the year,and became more and more unified and thus the much maligned crossover storyline came to be. Marvel and DC thought it a good idea in bringing many of the characters in continuities together for a single overall event.Sounds like a good idea on paper right ? Well not quite, this meant that writers and artists were very restricted in what they could do as everything had to "gel" and each issue had to end on a cliffhanger so the public was forced to buy all of them. A lot of the stories in the annuals of the mid 80's through to the 90's seem very convoluted and are oft riddled with inconsistencies. Artists had to draw characters they were uncomfortable with or unaccustomed too so the art was lacking too.

Annuals started to die out in the late 90's due to the near-collapse of the comic book industry in the wake of the speculator boom. After the recession, they were reinstated but sparingly but by no means as regularly as before the "bust", when numbered series of annuals had reached the teens or twenties, indicating over a decade of regular publication. But the good news is that if and when an annual hits the stands (ok, the comic book shop) it's never a bunch of reprints anymore or part of a crossover...it's a proper annual again.

I bought the pictured annuals a few weeks ago, all from the early 60's and all cross-over free (but some do have the odd reprint)

FF Annual #2 from 1964 has that iconic Dr Doom cover and is a key book because Doom's origins were finally revealed here, more than two years after his first appearance.
Annual #4 & #5 started using the wording "King Size Special" instead of Annual, but #6 uses both "Kings Size Special" and "Annual"... Marvel was always experimenting during the Silver Age. But don't you just love those (Kirby) covers ?

I still need #1 & #3...but I'm working on it.

The ones that get away...

2008-07-06T20:53:00.004+02:00

The old adage "lose some, win some" seems to have been invented for online auctions. It's the nature of the best, nobody expects to win all the stuff they bid on (thank god) but now and then you can get lucky. I'll ramble on a bit today about the other side of the coin, the stuff I didn't win and which in hindsight should have turned out differently.

Like a lot of online-buyers I'm guilty on lowballing a lot of auctions. You see an item for sale that you wouldn't mind owning and you bid (or snipe) a really low amount. Very well knowing you have 99,9% of losing, but hey you might get lucky, everybody else might forget about it, some freak electrical storm might render all PCs (except yours) inoperative and you end up winning a $500 for $62.86 (the 0,01% at work). Ok, I know this never happens...I know people that bid on 100s of auctions each week using this method and I've never heard of somebody getting a super deal this way, sure you might get books way below market value if you are tenacious enough, but that's about it.

No, what I would like to talk about is missing something you really wanted (you really, really wanted) by a few dollars and not being able to put it out of your mind for weeks. (if I only had bid more, if I only had...). I work with "want-lists". One for my comic collection and one for my original art collection and try not to buy anything that isn't on one of those lists and I have a set rule, I only offer/bid/pay a certain percentage of guide and always stick to it. If I don't get it then the only reason is that it went for more than I was willing to part with, and I'm fine with that.
But I also have a few "grail" pieces, books or art that I just NEED to have (just like air, water and Cadbury Cream Eggs) or my life will have been a wasted one. Once I have a chance to go for one of these pieces, I throw all caution to the wind, lock all my common sense in a little velvet box and let emotion take over and bid, bid, bid.

But sometimes there are higher forces at work and you still don't get what need.

Probably at the top of my comics grail list is a nice low-grade Amazing Fantasy #15. I traded my copy last year and the wound just won't stop bleeding and then only thing that will make me healthy again is a new copy. Alas prices have shot up at 15% for low grade copies (even higher for mid graders), which means the $2500 copy will now almost cost you $3000. So finding the perfect book at the right price is getting harder and harder.

All my key books have been bought under the same circumstance, I go for lower graded CGC'ed books that look better than the technical grade. What I mean by this is that I go for books that have defects that don't jump out at you. Books where the main damage is on the back cover and not the front cover, books that take minutes of studying before you catch the blemishes. I'd rather have a 2.5 book with a bigger piece missing from the back (or from the first page) than a 3.0 book with three little pieces missing from the front cover.

These are not easy to find books, especially since I'm after off-white to white pages. So check all the major dealers and auctions sites every day. Two weeks ago I thought my quest for the grail had come to an end (sound of clapping coconut shells slowly fading) as I saw a 2.5 Amazing Fantasy with OW/W pages up for sale. Front cover looked a lot better than the grade, almost no Marvel chipping and a little moisture damage on the back cover, my ideal book.
The seller wanted $3000 which was a bit steep, so I took a chance and offered a lowball offer of $2200 (yes, I am a cheap bastard sometimes). Less than an hour later he countered with an asking price of $2800..I went to sleep thinking about the offer and when I woke up the seller had sent me a second offer of $2600. Now in hindsight I should have taken it, it was a decent price for a rare book, but I was thinking that the seller probably wanted to sell it fast judging by the speed of his counteroffers so I re-counteroffered (is that even a word ?) with $2400...Now I was pretty sure the seller would split the difference and come back to me with $2500...well he doesn't and counters with $2550. So my turn again and this time I offer $2500, now I was sure he would go for this price, if you follow the back-and-forth on this you see it leading to this price. Trouble is that it was getting later, so I went to bed, expecting an acceptance of my offer when I woke up. No such luck, sometime during the night the seller got back to me with $2525...read it again $2525 ??? What a weird price. So I wake up and see I have a few emails, the first one is his $2525 offer, I said to myself, "ok, I'll accept it, don't want to fight over $25" and then I saw a second mail, sent three hours after the first one...retracting his offer of $2525...and then a third mail saying the item was sold for $2600...WTF ?
Looks like while he was waiting for my reaction to the $2525 (I was sleeping !) somebody else offered him $2600 and he took it...Aaaaaaargh.
Now if he had accepted the $2500 the auction would have ended and we would have set up the deal...or if I had decided not to sleep that night I would have been mine for a lousy $25 more.

Moral of the story, don't try and squeeze the lemon until there is no juice left anymore...oh and don't go to bed...ever

Dead but not forgotten

2008-06-01T10:57:00.009+02:00

Has it really almost been three months ? Wow this is the longest time I've dragged my heels on this here blog. No excuses, life and work always take precedence and the last few months have been busy, stressful and quite hectic so the times where I did fine myself with some free time I didn't particularly feel like working on my blog.

Another reason is that I'm not buying that many comic books anymore. After buying like a Duracell Bunny for the last 6 years, things are slowing down.
Not that I'm getting tired of the whole thing,but when I started collecting there were about 10.000 books I wanted and now there are less than 50.
As my collection is nearing completion I find myself gravitating towards original art more and more. And as OA costs a whole lot more than most comic books I need to prioritize. If I have to choose between buying 500 books or a nice piece of OA, well let's just say they OA has been winning big for the last year.

But never fear, I do plan to complete my series and this is exactly the reason for this particular blog entry. My Captain America series is now complete !
The very last issue I needed was issue #111 from 1968, a classic Steranko issue and weirdly enough it featured this panel :

Cap was apparently killed battling those evil evil Hydra minions in this issue (he wasn't really dead).
The strange thing is that I only started collecting Captain America when he was "killed" again last year...so I got in to the game very late, but at least I managed to complete #100 (first issue) to #400 in about a year. Some weird symmetry going on here...

Collecting Cap was an absolute thrill, most issues are affordable, sport excellent covers and a host of comic superstars have given their best when when working on the title.
Not all runs are entertaining, some are downright dull or stupid, I never cared for the "black-suited" Cap that turned into US agent, but I think that Captain America is Marvel's biggest iconic character next to Spider-Man. Sure Wolverine and all the X-people are a lot more popular than good ole' Cap, but the costume, the origin, the symbolism...it's all just perfect and he is the only Marvel (Timely) character from the 1940's who's still very popular and very recognisable.

So to celebrate a little, here is the intro to the Marvel 1960's Captain America cartoon. Enjoy

When Tony and Steve shared a book...

2008-03-06T13:16:00.008+01:00

Loyal readers of my blog will know that I’m all about completing series and runs.
The most joy I get out of the whole comics-hobby is when I’m able to start with a single book of a certain series and then go out and complete the entire series issue by issue. Is it the thrill of the hunt or a deep-rooted psychological quirk that makes me do this?

I honestly don’t know and I’ll be the first to admit that I often buy books I know I’ll never read just to get the series complete. But once I do complete a quest I get a nice warm feeling all over. Trouble is that it fades away fast.

So once a series is complete I move over to another series and so on. I’ve been using the same system for about six years now (when I first started collecting funny books) and at any given time I’m working on three different series which makes it easier than to just concentrate on one single title. It broadens my scope and I get to find more books at one and the same dealer thus saving on shipping.

I do cheat a little however, once I get a series down to 5 or less missing issues I’m “allowed” to start a new series. And last month I got some more Caps in and I managed to get my want list down to a single issue. So at the moment I only need Captain America #111 to complete #100 to #400 and of course I’ve already started on a new series.

I chose Tales of Suspense this time. Having already completed Iron Man #1 - #400 and the entire Cap series, it’s a logical choice as both series continued from TOS #39 - #99.
But it’s also a rather stupid choice timing-wise. With the buzz of the new Iron Man movie coming out (trailers look fantastic) interest in anything Iron Man have soared. TOS has long been a sleeper title due to the relative popularity of Iron Man, but things are changing fast and most TOS and Iron Man books have increased in value/cost the last 3 months or so...just when I decide to have a go at the run and now want Tos #39 - #99 and got off to a good start, need 22 more issues.

But I’m also still gunning for

JIM #83 – JIM #125( need 14 more issues)
Hulk #102 - #550 (need 34 more issues)
Captain America #100 - #400 (need one more issue)

I'm hoping to complete all of the above this year so I can start on Batman #1 - #400, but I'm buying to much Original Art of late to drop some serious coin on that series alas.

And for cover fans, here are a few of the TOS books I got in this week. Enjoy

Keys leaving Home

2008-02-29T18:47:00.008+01:00

First of all my apologies to The Beatles for the that terrible pun on one of their finer songs..but I've been sick and lost a lot of braincells and basically it's a miracle I could come up with that one. And with that you know the reason why it took so long for me to write the end to the previous blog...flue, the human kind. But I'm back now and I hope you are too.

Anyway as stated previously I traded my Amazing Fantasy #15 + my X-men #1 for something else, now what's worth about the same as these two keys ? (And probably worth more to me or I wouldn't have traded) ? Tough one ! Not a lot actually. Sure there are more valuable books, but these (Detective Comics #27, Action #1) are worth about 20 to 50 times as much...and nobody is going to give me that.
I couldn't think of any other Silver Age book (or a combo) either..so don't feel bad. But I never said I traded it for a book right ?
Both books went to a good friend and fellow collector who gave me this in return :

Yes, an original Watchmen page. I feel very privileged and lucky to get my hands on this as they are impossible to get. Not a lot of pages about and those who have them usually hang on to them.
Always wanted a Watchmen page with both Ozymandias and Rorschach, and not a lot of those around. Happy I was able to pick up this page which features 3 of the main protagonists (Ozy, Rorschach and Nite-Owl ). Now this might sound strange and even a bit pretentious, but a Watchmen page is not my grail piece like the AF #15 was. But too much had happened with my copy and it would always bring back some unpleasant memories and obtaining a Watchmen page was a once in a lifetime chance especially for one living so far from the rest of the collecting community.

When I got home with my page the first thing I did was go to my HC shelve and slide out my Absolute Edition of Watchmen. I bought this when it first came out and it had remained unread and still shrink wrapped (hey they go up in value and these command a premium don't you know) as I used my TPB copy to read the story.
I removed the shrinkwrap and opened the oversized HC. I flipped to the page I now owned and a warm sense of joy (or maybe capitalism ?) came over me as I now fully realized that I was the only one in the world who owned of this particular page of this masterwork. I then started reading the series again, probably for the 8th time in the last decade and fell in love with it all over again. Damn fine book, damn fine page.

One is the magic number

2008-02-14T20:46:00.011+01:00

Short and sweet entry this time. Just wanted to share this picture with you. Last week I pulled my Silver Age number 1s for a photo op.
Why I did it I'll explain later, but at the moment I just want you to take a look at the pic and look at the number 1s...and think about when #1 isn't #1. Confused ? Read on.

I put my nine most important (Silver Age) first issues in the picture, but only 6 of them have a #1 on the cover...but I assure you they are all "first issues". So what's up .
Well Fantastic Four #1, Avengers #1 Amazing Spider-man #1, Iron Man #1, X-men #1 and Silver Surfer #1 are self explanatory, but what about Amazing Fantasy #15...why does this Marvel Uber key carry the number #15 ? Well because it was the 15th issue in the series that spotlighted various new heroes/concepts and nobody had any idea that this Spider-man character would stick. Well he did and because of this we are stuck with this strangely numbered issue as the first Spider-man issue.

And what about Hulk #102...In 1964 the Hulk became the backup feature in Tales to Astonish (sharing the book with Giant-Man) and when in 1968 Marvel finally was able to renegotiate their distribution deal they seized the opportunity to expand their monthly titles and gave the Hulk his own book.
Tales to Astonish had run tot #101, so it seemed logical to continue the numbering on the first Hulk issue and so it came to be that the first issue of Hulk V2 was issue #102

Same thing with Captain America. Tales of Suspense had run to issue #99 when in 1968 Marvel could finally give both heroes (Cap and Iron Man) their own books. Cap continued the TOS numbering and started at #100. For some reason they didn't follow this logic with Iron Man and the first Iron Man issue got a #1 on its cover. But it could have easily (and logically) been #100 as well.

But why did I pull the issues and take the pic ? Why now ? Well mainly because this is the last time these books were all in my possession Two of the books in the pic have left my collection. I no longer own Amazing Fantasy #15 or X-men #1. I didn't sell them, I didn't lose them and they didn't get stolen. Nothing like that...I traded them.
To find out why I was prepared to do away with these two super keys, and more importantly what I got in trade...tune in next week

The Golden Path

2008-01-30T16:09:00.003+01:00

I remember a few years ago I was having an online conversation with some (modern) comic fans and someone referred to me as the "Golden Age - Silver Age Collector". Well I objected to this "term of endearment" and corrected him. Mainly because I always considered myself to be a "Silver and Bronze Age" fan and secondly because I didn't even own a single GA book and frankly wasn't interested in this segment of the hobby at all.

But how times change...In the past year or so I've come to appreciate certain Golden Age books or titles and even started collecting them. I have a big fondness for EC pre-code horror (which, frankly are among the best comics ever made)and Shomburg-cover Timely's (even thought most of the Timely interior stories are a little "innocent").

And a few months ago I decided to go with DC's best character and try to collect a full run of Batman books with Joker covers. Maybe one day I'll try and complete the full Batman run from 1940 to 1990, but the Joker covers are a neat way to start.

But this is old news as I blogged about this in the past, but today I received this little beauty. Agreed I already bought another GA Batman/Joker cover in 2007, but this is the first that cost me serious coin. As a Xmas present to myself I went out and bought the very first Joker cover in the Batman series, Batman #11 from 1942...now the oldest book in my collection.

This book has one of my favorite covers of all time, I think it's just fantastic. Batman knocking out the joker with a firm right-handed punch, the magnificent deck-of-cards background and Robin almost out-grinning the Joker himself.
Truly an early GA masterpiece with all the credit going to writer/creator Bill Finger and artist/creator Jerry Robinson. The most work that Bob Kane did on this book was probably sign his name on the cover, if he didn't have Robinson do that for him as well

And to think the original cover art to this book actually still survives to this day.
Here's Heritage's Ben Samuels who discovered the art a few years ago, before it was sold for nearly ...$200.000.

Back in Black

2008-01-04T15:57:00.003+01:00

Don't want to start on a somber note, but I actually started collecting because of the fallout of one of the world's greatest tragedies. The book that got me into collecting was a new (for the time) comic...Amazing Spider-man V2 #36, the all-black WTC cover.

I walked in to a comic shop looking to buy some supplies to bag +- 250 issues from my childhood which I had recently re-discovered when I saw this issue.
The shop,typically, had no supplies at all but I walked in when the owner was opening up his weekly Diamond box with the new issues. The most striking of all was the 9/11 Spider-man book.Of course I had seen some news about this comic on TV, Joe Quesada had been invited on several talk shows to discuss Marvel’s “handling” of the World Trade center disaster within the pages of Amazing Spider-Man.

This J. Michael Straczynski written book, shows Marvel Comics heroes reacting to the tragedy and helping with relief efforts, working side by side with New York fire fighters, cops and relief workers. While the issue itself is part of the regular series, it isn't exactly part of continuity but a stand-alone issue which speaks for itself and was released November 14th 2001.

Now I won't go into the rights or wrongs of this book, many people applauded Marvel for this salute to the "real heroes" but a lot of people didn't.
Somebody described it as "By shoehorning the WTC events into a comic book world populated with flying Norse gods and umpteen ubermen, it cheapens the struggles of the police, firemen, and regular joes who were faced with horror two months ago. I’m sure they would have appreciated having The Thing heaving girders out of the way in the search for survivors." echoing the sentiments of a lot of people.

But to me it had a profound impact. When I left comics in 1985 they were 100% fantasy, totally disconnected to the real world. I missed the grim and gritty 90's, I missed the tackling of social issues. When I left comics Spider-man was still fighting the Beyonder in some Secret War, when I returned he was trying to save people from the aftermath of the Twin Towers destruction. Like everyone with half a brain the 911 tragedy changed me and made me realize we now lived in a different world. Maybe starting reading and collecting comic books again was my way to try and relive "better" and more innocent days.

Once I read #36 I started a pull list, granted I stopped buying new books two years later but it DID get me back into comics. I had three ASMs at the time, the #36 issue, issue #211 from my childhood and...another copy of #36. For some reason I went back to the store and saw they had a copy left and I just had to buy it as well. From that moment on I told myself "I'll now go out and try to collect the entire ASM series" .Three years later I had #1 - #500 complete and almost 10.000 other Marvels. I had become an obsessive and unrelentless collector and swept all my other hobbies aside just for the sake of comics...all because of issue #36.

But it didn't stop there. Normally I can't stand having doubles of issues. I also don't like "loose" issues (I like loose women though...badda-bing), I'm a completist and want to have full runs or, even better, complete series. So single issues don't do anything for me, and why would I want multiple copies of anything ? I just need the one issue to complete the series and I'll always sell the double issues, mainly to get them out of my house..well except ASM v2 #36.
For some reason I can't stop buying this book, it's one of the most expensive modern books, but I just have to pick it up when I see it. I don't go out and actively search for the issue, but when someone is trying to sell me some books or is selling a collection, I always check the "modern section" for this issue.
I'm also not a high grade comic nut, conditions is not that important to me as I collect books to read and crack most of the CGC-slabbed books I buy. But yes I would be crazy enough to one day spend a fortune on getting an ASM #36 V2 in CGC 10.0 Gem Mint.

Now a little info about the pic, I photographed my higher grade issues, in all I have 14 of these. The 9.6 and 9.8 issues are both Direct Editions, while the 9.4 is a newsstand copy. The 9.6 issue is still the old CGC label and doesn't call it the "9/11 story", but the "World Trade Center story".
The other 5 raw issues are NM to NM+ ... but as I'm sure none would get a 9.9 or a 10.0 I'm not going to submit them. Strange thing for me to be talking about grade/condition/value for once..but this is a strange part of my collection.

This little comic book symbolizes a lot of things for me, some bad, some good. It touches me on various levels, I don't really like the art that much, some parts of the story make me cringe (when Doc Doom starts crying..P-lease) but it is one of the first books I would try to save in case some disaster happened to my collection.
What can I say...it's my little black book.

Little Series part 2

2007-11-09T17:51:00.002+01:00

Here is the second part of how my collection is doing at the moment, things are coming to a close, that much is sure,my want list is ever decreasing and if I hadn't recently included Hulk 102 - 199 then it would have fit on a single page. The last series I'm collecting/completing are Batman, and a really small series/run called Weird War Tales.

Let's start with the big one, Batman. Most of you out there know that I'm a hardcore Marvel fan and only occasionally dip into the DC pool, in fact Legion of Superheroes and Batman are the only "core" titles I collect.
Batman is probably the most iconic figure in Superhero-dom, even surpassing Superman and Spider-man, everybody loves Batman, alas like I mentioned in a previous entry not all decades have treated Batman with the deserved respect and some runs are sloppy seconds.
Now when I set out to collect Batman, I decided to collect #200 through to #400 and started in the Summer of 2006, about 14 months or so later I'm almost finished. The Batman run took a little longer to collect than I anticipated due to the fact that I never managed to score a run larger than 10 books and mostly bought book per book.At the moment I need 6 more issues, and none are really expensive or hard to find, I just have to stumble on someone that has more than one for sale, as I'm not going buy these book per book and end up paying $11.00 shipping everytime I find a $5.00 book or something.
Now, in the Spring of this year I also decided to extend the Batman collection a bit as well, I'm still unsure if I'll collect Batman from issue #1 onwards to #199 as that would mean spending anywhere in the region of $75.000 to get all these books. But what I did decide was to go and collect all Joker covers, if I do decide to collect the entire series, I'll already have these and if I don't then I'll have some of the coolest Batman covers from the Golden, Silver and Brozen Age to spruce up my collection.

Here are the three latest Joker covers I bought this month

Now the other DC series I'm collecting is the much less heralded Weird War Tales. This horror-war themed series ran the entire Bronze Age up till 1982 and was one of the series I read as a kid because when I managed to find a store that sold comics, these were always left over...yeah it wasn't a very popular series. But I kinda like it, warts and all. Strange really as I don't care for horror or war comics, but somehow this title does entertain me. Now I'm only collecting a small run this time. I'm going for #75 through to #125, the last 50 books of the series. Mainly because I think the later stories are better and because of the Creature Commandos. Now issue #114 isn't a very good issue at all, art is run of the mill and the script has so much holes you could drive an 18-wheeler through it...but when I bought this book new it was the most coveted book in my possession. Probably because of the totally out of this world cover featuring Adolf Hitler getting freaked out by the Creature Commandos.

After re-reading it as an adult I came to the conclusion that the writer had no idea what he was doing and just tried using shock value to sell books. The books actually feature the CCs performing as circus freaks in a concentration camp (and then liberating it)
But when you are 13 years old, this is a cover that screams "forbidden fruit" and you feel guilty just reading it. And for that very reason all my friends wanted this book, I could have gotten any book in trade for it, even my friend J's Iron Man #150 (classic Dr Doom vs. Iron Man cover) which was our group's "got-to-have-book" (and only J had it). But I didn't cave and held on to my Weird War Tales, and I still have it.
I'm now 9 issues short of getting the run complete, I'm not going after them like I do my other books, but when I run into them I gladly pick them up for a buck or two a piece

Little Series part 1

2007-11-02T16:25:00.002+01:00

What's next after you've completed FF ? What's next after you've completed ASM ? What's next; what's next...Well for some reason something is always just around the corner to tickle my fancy and I hope something always will be. But it has to be something I'm 100% committed to, I could never collect something I'm not passionate about. And that's what I also collect the "little" series.

Now let's get some thing straight first, "little series" isn't really the most fitting name for the following titles, but it's the best I could come up with on the fly.I don't mean it as a disparaging or pejorative title, all of these series are excellent and some are even better (in certain runs) than the "bigger" series I've collected. I chose this particular moniker because I'm not going for the complete run this time. I have no desire to own everything from the first to the final issue, I just picked a certain (long) run to collect/complete and I thought today I would give you an update on how everything is working out so far.

I've confessed my love for old greenskin before, both comic- or original art-wise. There's just something about the Hulk I really like. I started out with the intent to collect Hulk #250 - #550, but this changed to #200 - #550. At the moment I only need three more issues out of the 350 to complete the quest. So I guess I can't really count this as a "little" series any more. A few weeks ago I bought Hulk #102, first issue in the series and like always lost my self control and have now decided to go for #102 - #550 and complete the entire series. Sometimes it's just stronger than me.
Of course this means I'll have to get another copy of that horrible, horrible overrated (but most expensive of all the Bronze Books) Hulk #181. I've owned three copies over the years and was always happy to sell them and buy better books with the money, but nobody said being a completionist would be easy.

Probably the fastest series I have ever (nearly) completed. I started collecting old winghead in March 2007 and now 7 months later I've collected 297 of the 301 books I was after. Meaning for those of you that read playboy during maths class that I just need 4 more issues to complete #100 - #400. I should finish this before the end of the year. From start to finish less than 9 months, I don't know what this says about me , but I'm glad I did it. It might sound strange, but with 300 issues I still consider this to be a "little series". After all there are about 180 more books (after #400) that I don't want/need/collect. So basically this is just a run, a big-ass run, but a run just the same

Ok, this might classify as the closest to a real "little series" possible. JIM counts 125 issues, but only the last 43 issues are of interest to me because Thor "starts" in Journey into Mystery #83 and ends in #125.
When I started collecting Thor last year I started at Thor #126 (which is the first issue in that series) and continued until issue #400. Deep down inside I knew one day I would go for the first 43 issues and this year I made a modest start. Modest because these early Silver Age books aren't exactly cheap. I still need 14 out of the 43 books, and alas the four most expensive ones aren't in my possession yet, but on the bright side, I did manage to get almost 30 books this year.

Stay tuned for Little Series part two..."the DC connection" in a few days time, including rants about Batman, Weird War Tales & Brave and the Bold

Spending Jumps

2007-10-24T13:09:00.004+02:00

Who truly tells the people close to him how much you've spent on your collection ? If you don't then chances are you are feeling guilty about spending too much, or just know that nobody will understand why you just have to pay Xamount of money for a bunch of smelly old books printed on recycled newsprint paper originally aimed at a 10-year old.
And spend is wat the collector does, and I'm certainly am guilty of overindulging myself on a regular basis.

But what I've learned from conversations with other collectors is that almost nobody goes out and spends a large chunck of change out of the blue.
You gradually build up to it...making little spending jumps as it were.

The psychology of this is that you set bounderies for yourself, lines in the sand that you will not, never ever, no siree Bob, cross. Until you do just that and draw another line in the sand, this time just a little further.
I remember when I started collecting around 2002 and I was spending on average about $3.00 per book and was completing the Wolverine series.
Somebody offered me issue #1 of the series for $12.00 and I bought it and felt a little uneasy at spending this amount of money on a book.

My next step was when I bought my copy of Amazing Spider-man #300 for the princely sum of $30.00. I emailed the seller and told him I would take it and went to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night, wondering if I could still get out of the deal. My first case of buyer's remorse.
Once that target was shattered I felt comfortable buying books up to $40.00- $50.00, of course I hadn't yet ventured into that domain called "The Silver Age".

A few months later I bought a copy of Amazing Spider-man #122, one of the uber Bronze-Age keys and I had to cross the $100 line and again it felt uncomfortable and stupid, but again I got over it and drew a new line in the sand. $100 books were now a regular occurrence and for the longest time I stuck to the plan..until Doctor Doom came around messed things up.

I still had no intention of collecting Silver Age (we're talking Spring 2003) but I was and still am a Dr Doom nut and I was offered the opportunity to purchase Fantastic Four #5, first Doc Doom for a little under $300.
It took me all of 5 minutes to decide make another spending jump, but this was a big one, it had now evolved into more than just a hobby. I was deliriously happy with the book (and still am, one of my top-5 favorite books) and oddly enough didn't get the nauseating sensation in my stomach when I woke up the next day. Was I getting immune ?

Sure looked that way,as for the next 6 months or so I was buying sub $500 books left and right (well I was completing the Fantastic Four series and there are some seriously expensive books in there) but I never went over the magical $500 mark. Deep inside I knew that one day I would have to if I wanted to get all the comics that were on my want list, but I kept postponing it until the day where I had complete the entire FF series, save one issue...yes #1 the first Marvel Silver Age book that was ever published.
$500 wasn't going to cut it, and alas neither was $1000, so as a Xmas present to myself I got a nice copy of this holy grail and paid over $1000 for it. The nausea came back and stayed with me for a few days, but this also passed as I was happy as a lark, not only because of getting the book, but also because I had just completed FF #1 - #500.

The next year I completed Amazing Spider-man and again I gave myself a Xmas present, Spider-man #1 and this time the line was crossed at $1500+. This hobby thing was getting out of hand, but the good thing was that there was only one more book that would cause me to raise the bar again and that of course was the key of all keys, Amazing Fantasy #15.

The plan was to purchase this as my 2007 Xmas present, but in the Spring of this year I was offered a copy that fit the bill perfectly and bought it, months ahead of time and not CGC encapsulated/graded like I had always done with my major purchases.
I crossed the $2000 threshold and lived to regret it, what happened to my AF #15 is well documented in an earlier blog entry.

But let's not end on a sad note, on the one hand the line should now never be crossed again, I've jumped as far as possible as AF#15 is the most expensive book to get. Sure I could upgrade some of my books or get a real high grade expensive copy of another book, but that's not the way it works for me. I've reached the end of the line and I don't see myself crossing the $2500 mark for a comic book any time soon.
But then again a few years ago I would have never imagined I could pay more than $30.00 for any book. Live and learn

Silvio !

2007-10-06T13:06:00.002+02:00

Even when I was a kid, I always was more interested in story rather than art, and there were only a handful of artists I would recognise by their style alone...Sal Buscema was always one of those. Don't like everything he did, but when I saw this action page with the typical "Sal Buscema Hulk face" I just had to go for it

Sal Buscema is, of course, the younger brother of John Buscema. He started his career in the mid 1960s, inking his brother's work but pretty much came into his own a few years later.As a successful penciller at Marvel he was one of the fastest pencillers and inkers working there and was one of their top artists for the next 35 years.

Now even though I seem to keep buying Sal Buscema pages, I'm not a googly-eyed fan boy, some of his work I'm really can't get in to. He is one of the very few Silver Age artists who's style evolved to meet the grittier, sharper-edged look of the 90's and not for the better.
Because of his speed, unfortunately he was often overworked and overused and some of his work shows this.
But when Sal loved a project or a character like The Hulk or Captain America he really aced it.

I picked up this latest piece on eBay and like it very much, lots of action, lots of Sal Hulk-love going on and do I really have to rant and rave about the villain in this page ?
I need to check the time lines on this, but isn't the Brood warrior a dead ringer for the famous Aliens from the same-titles movie franchise ? I wonder which came first ?

Oh and the weird title of this entry ? Sal's real name is Silvio

There's a riot going on

2007-09-23T15:22:00.002+02:00

The Summer was quite uneventful when it came to major purchases, in fact I hardly bought anything at all. Normally Summertime is when my spending increases because I'm home from work and get to be on-line more (yes even more) and let's not forget there are bargains to be had during this period.

Lots of people sell off their excess stuff at lower prices because they need money to go visit all the cons. And last but not least, a of of people are on holiday, away from the computer or just outside more and there are less bidders for stuff on eBay. But like I said, I didn't buy a lot of books this Summer, but what I forgot to mention is that I did spend a lot of money this Summer...just not on comics

Ever since the punch in the stomach I got from my AF15 splitting I have taken a step back from collecting, this happens to me about once a year and never seems to last, but this time it lasted three months.
I just wasn't interested in hunting down books or looking at auctions. And I certainly wasn't about to spend even more money, not knowing what my AF15's fate was. So I turned to the side-street of comic collecting and picked up where I left about four years ago. I started buying original art again.

Back in 2003 I bought a John Buscema page with Doom/Superman/Spider-man and a Dave Cockrum Cover recreation of X-men 145 (Doom holding Storm). I was planning to collect Silver and Bronze Age pages featuring the good Doctor, with the crowning piece a nice Kirby Doom-FF battle page.
But at the time I was also very busy completing the Marvel Superhero titles and you can only stretch a dollar that much. I did check eBay every week for a nice vintage Doom page, but the pickings were slim and when I did spot something I liked it was a bit too expensive for me.

The art collecting kinda drifted to the background, but has now resurfaced. The sad news is that due to the increase in price (even in the last few years) a Kirby FF/Doom page will probably be out of my league for a while....we're talking $5000 just for a starter page. The good news is that I've decided not to concentrate on Doom and only Doom any more.
I'm going for published Marvel Superhero art up till around 1985 with the emphasis on Doom, Captain America and Hulk pages.
But if I find a page from a later date which I like (a Sean Phillips Zombie Doom ) I won't turn it down.

I've bought a few pages this month to start me off, and this is the first one I'd like to share.

It's a Sal Buscema splash, majestically showing Captain America going fist-first into a full blown race-riot.
Can't get more dramatic than this.

I decided not to frame my art, but to keep it in a special portfolio, secured next to the comic page with some info attached.

Torn Apart

2007-08-30T16:45:00.002+02:00

Sometimes as a collector you have some bad luck, books gets lost in the mail, you just a miss a super bargain by seconds, someone overcharges you for a book that turns out to be lower grade than you paid for...or you just do something stupid or have bad judgment.

A lot of people bag and board books, comic on board, then insert in bag and then tape the bag shut..safe and sound. Trouble is after a while you need to take the book out and you experience "tape pull" The tape which seems to have a mind of its own gets stuck to the comic while your halfway taking it out and it it won't come off..only way is to pry it loose and take a piece of the cover with it. Your VF+ $350 book is now a $150 FINE book or worse.

I've always been careful and don't even use tape to close my bags, I read the expensive books flat on a table and always use Mylar for the good books...and yet it seems I'm not immune to bad luck.
My most expensive book, the pride an joy of my collection has taken a big knock. My Amazing Fantasy #15 has separated from the cover :(
After only a few months in my possession, I've managed to lower the value by about $1000 and to be honest I didn't really do anything.
I got the book and HAD to read it, most people say I'm crazy to read 45 year old expensive books when I have the reprint, but nothing beats the feeling of opening up a comic some boy bought off the stands all those
years ago and I won't stop doing it.

Anyway, I carefully took the book out of the mylar/fullboard, put it flat on the table and very carefully read it. Now at the time the book had a three inch spine tear, but both staples were still secured and it graded out at 3.0. Once I finished reading (I only read the 8-page Spider-man story, not the two other stories) I put it back in the collection.
Fast forward three months later, I open the book again and to my shock the cover has split in two and has separated from the book itself...I felt sick in my stomach. I talked to some people and then explained that by reading and opening the book I had put some minimal stress on the fibers that still were holding the book together, chances were that the book hadn't been opened in decades and that the paper fibers were nothing more than hardened dust by now. This sudden stress caused them to break down and make the cover separate from the book.

A nice and logical explanation, but I was still screwed. I did the math and found out the book was now a 1.8/2.0 which a better change of getting a 1.8...meaning a $1000 loss in value
So I'm getting the book restored, I got some advice from my buddy Kenny who is training to be a comic restorer with Matt Nelson, arguably the best restoration expert out there.
I sent my book to Kenny and he took it with him to work on while visiting Matt in Texas. Both had a long and hard look at my book and told me some good news, with the proper work the book would again be whole and grade out at 4.5 to 5.5...

I'm going for moderate restoration including solvent and wet wash the cover, wash all interior wraps.and repair all the bent interior corners. and then repair spine, fix tears and other minor things.
If I get lucky the book will get a 5.0 and I should break even (purchase price + resto price = selling price), a 4.5 will mean a small loss, a 5.5 a small profit.
But you never know, the book might look so good that I decide to keep it after all. When he accident happened, I was so sick of the book I couldn't even look at it any more and it my love for collecting took a large blow.

Just like the book my heart got torn apart haven't bought any keys or expensive books since it happened, but Kenny's enthusiasm and his firm belief he'll make the book pretty and presentable again has given me a positive outlook again.
I should have more news in a month or so when the book is finished. Once all work is done, I'm sending it in to CGC and then wait anxiously until I know the grade.

Broke-Bag Mountain

2007-06-25T00:35:00.002+02:00

Many a time I have championed the lowly Mbag, it was truly the people's mail carrier, the cheapest way to get a crapload of comics to faraway places. Sure it took a very long time and was always delayed, but it arrived every time and it arrived in perect shape for little money. Alas, not more... in their infinite wisdom, the USPS has decided to cancel all Surface shipping and thus the Mbag.

Well that's not quite true, the M-bag is still out there, but it's not the grimm and gritty version, it's gone upscale. The Mbag is now the Air Mbag and that's not all that's changed.
I used to pay between $25.00 and $40.00 to have about 100 comics shipped from Anywhere, USA to my doorstep, well last week my first (Air) Mbag took flight and again it was filled with about 100 comics, and it cost me $106. And then I had a moment of clarity

I've reached the point of saturation...no more $1.00 books for me, no more sub $5.00 for me even. Also almost no more slabbed books.
Shipping has always been a major thorn in my side, I'm out about $1000 per year on shipping alone, but with the recent price hike it's become too much.
And with the surface M-bag gone the way of the dodo as well, hard times are here for the European collector who wants to get big collection going.

I guess I have to count myself lucky that I started collecting 5 years ago and not now, I've had close to 10.000 comics shipped to me from the US, the bulk (the cheaper books) via M-bag. And even if sometimes they took over 3 months to arrive, they always did arrive and in perfect shape. The new Mbag is about 2 to 3X the shipping price and frankly I don't think I would start from scratch again today and I'm happy I don't have to.

Basic economy is now that it's impossible to to get any comic shipped for less than a $1.00 a piece, and that first comic will cost you $10.50 at least. And just pray that Amazon or Milehigh has that heavy hardcover you want in stock as they can still ship it for about $10.00, otherwise prepare to pay about $25.00 - $50.00 to have it shipped to Europe.

Luckily (well not really lucky, but you know what I mean) the only books still on my want list are all more expensive books. If you buy a $1000 book it isn't really that important if you pay $20.00 or $30.00 shipping...but I sure wouldn't buy a full run of Rom at 50 cents a piece anymore...

Yeah, I'm bitter....but it's been a rough week comic-wise and I needed to vent. I always figured I would go broke collecting comics, never thought it would be the shipping though.

Unchained !

2007-06-16T14:42:00.002+02:00

60 days....done and gone. This is the day the shackles come off. Sixty days ago I made myself a promise, after spending way too much in a very short time, to not only cut down on spending, but also not to buy anything for the next 2 months. While I was in the middle of my "down-time", I got overexcited and proclaimed, I'd not only do the 60 days, but extend it to 80 days, to have the first day of being able to buy comics again to coincide with my birthday. Well it was a nice idea, but enough is enough. I officially declare "buying-time" is here again.

The first week was pretty hard, but it got easier along the way. Some obstacles were thrown at me, a few dealers had interesting sales, one collector friend was dumping a large amount of Silver Age on the market and there was a virtual comic con that I attended, but I held on. The last weeks were the easier, in fact apathy set in. At one point I wasn't even interested in following discussions on comic boards any more, along with the thrill of the hunt of finding/buying new books, some of my interest inthe hobby waned as well. I even started wondering if the whole thing was still that important to me.
Happily when the final date approached so did my passion and the last few days of waiting were pure hell as there were so many things I was interested in buying again.

So did I really not buy anything ? Well....no (sorry), but I did stick by the rules. During that virtual Comiccon I bought a couple of dollar books, that's all I spent, a dollar per book (and they were all from my want-list).
This was one exception that I had made to the rule, very cheap books that were on the want-list were okay. The other rule was that if I found a treasure for a really low low (stupidly low) price I could buy it. Alas no Action #1's for $100 came my way.

With less than a week to go I also bought some other stuff, but I arranged so that I didn't have to pay before today (in fact I still have a few days before I have to pay). I haven't received the books, (they haven't even been sent) and haven't paid for them...I just kinda pre-ordered them, so I don't think I cheated. Of course your mileage may vary, and if you think I did break the rules, don't hesitate in letting me know.

I pre-ordered an Absolute Edition from Amazon Germany which was heavily discounted and I should get it next week or something. The other item I pre-ordered was a CGC 9.8 of Amazing Spider-man V2 #36 (the 911 issue). It's the book that brought me back into the hobby (I bought it in a shop and the next day I decided I had to have the complete Amazing Spider-man series) and the only comic that I keep buying multiple issues

I have about 10 now,6 raw NM copies 2 CGC 9.4s, 1 CGC 9.6 and soon a CGC 9.8. It's also the only comic book I would be stupid enough to buy as a perfect "Gem Mint" CGC 10.0 one day.

So what next ? Well, I don't have any plans at all to buy expensive books for the moment, I'll try to leave my Golden Age Batman run for next year.
For now I would be content if I could complete the following runs :

Captain America #100 - #400 (need about 50 books)
Hulk #200 - #500+ (8 more books to go)
Batman #200 - #300 (9 more books)

And of course a couple of smaller series...but more on those later

Send me a dream

2007-05-26T15:58:00.002+02:00

Well it's been a while, but I decided to put some distance between me and my collection for a while, not that I'm not interested anymore, but as I'm still in a no-spend-zone, there's no need to make it harder on myself by looking a books I'm not allowed to buy anyway. The good part about shelving the collector part of me is that the reader in me has more time now.
Oh and I've passed the 35-day mark and am now halfway my self-imposed ban.Theoretically I've 25 days left to go, but I think I'll try and hold out a little longer till July 4th which is my birthday.Would be nice to celebrate my birthday with the purchase of some books again :)

Anyway, the white whale of my collection, the book which took me longest to find was not an expensive book at all..it wasn't even an old book.It was released during that age of overprinting we remember as "the nineties" and it was put out by one of the big two. It's not a key book, nothing specials happens, it isn't a variant or a recalled issue. It's a bog-standard comic book and it still took me 4 years to find it.

I'm taking about Sandman Mystery Theater #29. The final issue I needed to complete the, in my view second best DC/Vertigo, series.
As most of you know I've been busy completing most Marvel series for the past 5 years and I waited over 9 months to buy an FF#1 and over six months for an ASM #1.
Were these books eluding me ? Certainly not, you can buy one every day if you want, but I was looking for a low to mid-grade book that presented better than the grade on both occasions...so I needed to be patient.
Same for my AF #15...

But the only book I have never seen on eBay, never in any dealer store and never offered on this board was Sandman Mystery Theater #29...
Most other books in the series are on perpetual discount on Mile High for about $1.00 - $2.00...but this book has been on my want-list from day 1 and stayed there for ever
I ordered it twice from Mile High and both times they didn't have it in stock...but it was on the website
I saw it on eBay a few times but lumped together with at least 20 other books from the series and I really didn't want to spend $50.00 just to get a single book that had zero demand and was worth $2.00 at most.
Finally 3 months ago I got a tip from a friendly collector that it was on the Newkadia website. Much to my surprise he was right, they had a NM copy for $3.00 which I bought right away, they also offered a discount . Only catch (there's always a catch) was that they had a minimum order of $25.00. So I was forced to buy some other books from my want list which were overpriced.

So why was this book so important to me ? Well mainly because the series is just so damn good. It has nothing at all to do with the more famous Gaiman Sandman universe, which also released by Vertigo put the other Sandman title (Mystery Theater) completely in its shadow and did more harm than good sales-wise because of the name-association.
It's not the kind of book you'd pick up on a whim in a comic shop and there was only one TPB (with just 4 issues) available for over 10 years. A book that truly slipped under the radar.

Before I start hyping it, it must warn you that it isn't for everyone, the art isn't pretty...it fits perfectly with the "pulp noir" theme of the book but it's understated, a rather dull color pallet, lots of line-work and small panels. Plus the book has some VERY adult content. Explicit language, very graphic and shocking scenes with lots of misery and poverty.
But it does make me want to jump in a timemachine and head for New York in the 30's. Rarely has a city been so celebrated and so authentically replicated as in this series. If you like New York as a city, as a cultural icon you'll get a lot of enjoyment from the series as well.

The Sandman (the original one, not Gaiman's Morpheus) is one of the original heroes of the Golden Age. This series retells the adventures of Wesley Dodds a millionaire-vigilante whose main weapons are a gun that fires sleeping gas and his brain..Unlike most other superheroes, the Sandman possesses no superhuman powers and relies on his detective skills and gas gun. He does have strange prophesying dreams (the only link with the 'other' Sandman) which torment him and make him go out at night and fight for justice.

But Dodds isn't your typical superhero, he's rather small and somewhat overweight, plus he's pushing 40. His sidekick/love interest is Dian Belmont, a New York socialite who's also pushing middle age, doesn't have a double D-cup or can kick bad-guy ass but is a smart and charming "real world" woman who actually helps the hero solve the case. There are no supervillains, just really evil crooks, deranged rapists, serial killers and corrupt businessmen.

You don't really need to collect the entire series (but you know how it is with me) to enjoy the stories. Each arc consists of 4 issues, with a typical slow start ending in a blistering climax. It's more fun to read all 70 issues in order , but it's not really necessary which is a rarity for a Vertigo series.

So give it a try, visit 1930's New York from the newly erected skyscrapers to the seedy underbelly where the Sandman prowls, I'm sure you'll enjoy the ride in the wonderfully mature and intelligent comic book.
Oh and yes I'm aware that Vertigo put out a revamped SMT mini during the first months of 2007...I did read it, but didn't like it at all. In the mini Wesley and Dian are in their late 70's and the Sandman mantle is passed on to a 20-something war-photographer, action man. They took the Sandman out of the Golden Age, out of NYC...and it doesn't feel right.

Slated for cancellation

2007-05-02T14:39:00.002+02:00

When I finished collecting the Amazing Spider-man series a few months ago, the most asked question I got (apart from "how much did it cost") was "Will you be getting Amazing Fantasy #15". At that time I couldn't really answer it because well, in my mind I had completed the task and more importantly AF15 was and is the most expensive Marvel book.

But after a few months I decided to see if I could swing it, I knew it was going to be expensive, but I planned on not buying too many books this year and maybe, just maybe I would then be able to get an AF15 at Christmas, just like the Christmases before when I got Avengers #1, FF#1 and finally ASM #1 respectively.

Next to the price, availability was a problem too, not too many of these books around, Spider-man #1 isn't that common, but there are at least 3x the amount of that book floating around compared to Amazing Fantasy #15.

A third problem was the condition of the book. I've always tried to buy expensive books that look better than the given grade. Maybe hard to understand, but let me give you an example. A book can look like a VG (4.0) but has a water stain on the back cover that takes the book down to a GOOD (2.0). The water stain is there, it lowers the grade, but it's a defect that isn't too bad aesthetically and it's on the back cover. Trouble is that a lot of low and mid-grade copies of AF#15 have Marvel chipping ("A bindery (trimming/cutting) defect that causes a series of chips and tears at the top, bottom, and right edge of the cover. This is caused where the cutting blade of an industrial paper trimmer becomes dull. Dubbed "Marvel chipping" because it can occur quite often with that company's comics from the late 50s and early 60s")
And as Marvel chipping is considered a factory defect it doesn't factor in to the grade of mid-grade books. Thus you can buy a 4.0 book that looks like a 2.0...quite the opposite of what I want.

Take a look at this AF with the very common Marvel chipping...

So things didn't look to good, but I had originally planned to start looking for a nice one around Winter 2007 with the intent of getting one as a Xmas present to myself...but an opportunity arose and I couldn't turn it down.

I got this copy from a fellow collector by accident really (no seriously, read on). He never put the AF15 on sale, but I was close to buying his Hulk #1...we went back and forth for a while and I told him I didn't really want to buy it as it would mean taking money out of my AF15 kitty...2 minutes later he told me he had an AF15 as well and if I was interested he would sell it to me.
Ten minutes later I had bought it...It was exactly the book I wanted, a 3.0 that looked better than the grade, almost no Marvel chipping and a fair price. Granted it was more money than I had ever spent on a comic book,and it was half a year too early but this is THE Marvel key after all. For me it's still FF#1...but for most comic collectors the first appearance of Spider-man is the holy grail

And to think the Amazing Fantasy series was slated for cancellation and issue #15 was the final one. Because it was the final issue, nobody really cared what was going to be in it. With nothing to lose, publisher Martin Goodman allowed Stan Lee to experiment with a new kind of superhero — one who would be a teenager, but not a sidekick, and who would have everyman doubts, neuroses and money problems...
This "far-out" idea proved to be golden and gave birth to Marvel's flagship title...Amazing Spider-man...which only started a long (especially for the fans who had a taste of Spidey in AF15 and wanted to read more) 6 months after Amazing Fantasy #15 was issued, sold a boatload of copies and got the most letters from readers in years.
Now let's just hope the success of the the third Spider-man movie that came out this week will make my copy of AF#15 even more valuable

Golden Years

2007-04-25T18:27:00.002+02:00

About three weeks ago, I went into unchartered territory, I boldly went where I had never gone before..I crossed a bridge I never thought I would cross...I went to the Golden Age of comic books.

Wikipedia describes the Golden Age of comic books as " a period in the history of American comic books, generally thought as lasting from the 1930s until the mid-1950s during which comic books enjoyed a surge of popularity, the archetype of the superhero was created and defined, and many of the most famous superheroes debuted."
It was also the period where a number of books sold over a million copies per issue, a feet never repeated during the last 50 years.Every kid was reading comic books, which is alas also the weak point of Golden Age comics.
You see, they really were a kid's medium...Most stories are very childish and simple, art is weak and static most of the time and they were simply regarded as throwaway literature to keep kids busy for a while.
As I'm nearing the completion of my Silver Age collection, I have often thought about going back even further in time and start collecting Golden Age books...despite of what I just wrote.
You see the covers of Golden Age books are generally the best of all ages. Most of them are wonderful, dynamic, colourful and show a real artistry. Then even more than now, the cover was everything as it was a means to get the punter to buy the book.
A lot of collectors I know agree with me about the quality of the stories and (interior) art of most GA books, but they persist in collecting GA because of those magnificent covers and hardly take any notice of the contents of the book. But I just couldn't do it, I've always been more partial to story than to art, so I needed something extra.

Of all the GA books I've read over the years (as reprints) two series stood out, Pre-Code EC (Horror) Comics and Batman comics. Both were just written a little better than their contemporaries, art was a little more dynamic and characterization was well thought out. So if I went Golden Age, it would have to be through one of these books.
As I've nearly completed Batman #200 - #400 it seems the more logical approach to go with that title. Trouble is that as a completionist I HAVE to get all the issues and most Silver Age Batman books (from #100 to around #200) just suck, which is the reason I decided to start my Batman run with #200, the tail-end of the Silver Age and continue into those wonderful Bronze Age Bat books.
The other drawback was money-wise. Even if I did bite the bullet and collect #100 - #200, I would also have to dig down and get Batman #1 - #99...
Granted most of those issues are better than the Silver Age run, but Batman #1 in VG is at least $10.000...which I don't see me handing over just yet.

So what to do, what to do ? In the end I came to a decision, I'm going to start collecting Golden Age books as well, Golden Age Batman books, but only the ones that have a Joker cover appearance. I feel it would make for a nice collection as well to have Batman #200 - #400 complete + all the preceding books that have Joker covers. The first Batman issue with a Joker cover is Batman #11 from 1942.
Still a lot of expensive books in that bunch, but feasible over time.
Concluding,here's a scan of the first Golden Age book I have ever bought, it's Batman #37 from 1945, the oldest book in my collection, a very cool Joker cover and hopefully the start of whole new adventure in comic collecting.

Oh and I haven't gone back on my word about not buying books for a while, this book and the ones in the upcoming blog entries were all bought during that week of madness I had a while ago.
I'm at day #10 of not-buying-comics-for-60-days and it hasn't been that hard to be honest. Let's see if I last the whole two months

Out of Control

2007-04-18T19:52:00.002+02:00

This is the kind of Blog entry I don't really like to make, but right now it's pretty necessary.
Lately I've been feeling like a comet rocketing out of control, having fun along the way but knowing, deep down, that the trip has to end. What the hell am I talking about ? Well let's just say that I've spent nearly $3000 the last two weeks on comic books

I haven't made any "stupid" buys, most books have been from my want-list, it's just that there has been so much I wanted that came up for sale and I just couldn't say no and bought most, if not all, of it. I've been trying to work with a rather comfortable monthly budget,I go over each month, but never by this much. It was just one of those weeks, I was home from work, cruising the comic-forums and eBay like an addict and before you knew it I was whipping out my credit card again, and again...and again.

I haven't gotten myself in debt, and I haven't spent money that wasn't mine to spend o r was meant for something else, I've just spent way too much in a short time on something, important as it may be to me, is still just a hobby.
So enough is enough..I decided a few days ago that I'm going cold turkey and will try not to buy anything until at least June 15th. That gives me two months of solitude, two months of getting this monkey off my back and two months to get my budget back on track.
Now I won't make any promises I can't make, if I happen to run into an Action #1 for $1000, I'll buy it, no doubt about it, but let's just say that bar any "incredible-once-in-a-lifetime-deals" I'm not currently buying...well not anything over $50.00.
Today was day #3 of the self-imposed ban and I haven't gone to eBay or other dens of sin in the entire time. Here's to the next 60 days

Cracking a CGC case ...on video

2007-04-07T17:59:00.003+02:00

Ok, I'm going all multimedia on y'all this time...I'vv been asked a lot how come I like CGC comics so much (comics encased in a slab) when I profess to being an collector AND a reader...well the truth is that I liberate most of the comics I buy "slabbed". And trust me it's the best feeling in the world.

Anyway the question that inevitably follows is how I do it. People seem to think it's dangerous or something. Well it isn't, if you're careful and sober you can do it in under two minutes. And just to put my money where my mouth is... here is one I did earlier :

And for the killjoys that don't want to watch the video...here's a starter guide

1) insert a medium sized screwdriver between the slab halves in the middle of the right long edge (only about 1/4 to 1/2 inch in...no where near the level of the comic itself) and push it upward as close to the corner as possible.

2) Turn the screwdriver counter-clockwise until the corner pops/cracks (this will leave VISIBLE evidence of tampering).

3) Once the corner is open, the long edge and the top edge will be open as well.
repeat the procedure for the top left corner.

4) Both corners will now be visibly cracked open. Remove the inner housing. If you want to play it really safe, crack open three corners

5) With a sharp knife or scissor, very carefully cut across the shield approx. 1/4 inch above the comic, being extra careful NOT to exert pressure on the surface of the comic's top edge by pressing on the holder over that point.

7) Smell, read and enjoy the comic

8) Put it into Mylar + a fullback for safekeeping

Oh my God, they killed Kenny's books

2007-04-04T15:39:00.002+02:00

Collecting Silver and Bronze age books in a tiny, remote country isn't always that easy..in fact it's pretty hard. There are no dealers with any stock, no comic shops that sell back issues older than the 90's, no cons...and most important, almost no other collectors. Now I don't want go off on a tangent and lament about my poor poor situation, but I thought it important to state it up front.

So my only option is to buy overseas..America that is, the US of A, the home of the superhero comic book. After half a decade on various comic boards I've build up a large network of friends and contacts and I've imported over 8000 comic books this way. Thanks to these people my collection is ever growing and I don't feel all isolated on my island of Franco-Belgian style.
Comics collectors like to build their collection, that's a give,but what I have noticed is that also like to help others build their collection as well, sometimes being geographically challenged has helped rather than hindered me, lots of people have given me sweet sweet deals, partly because they know they are helping and partly because they know there's only a small chance I'll immoderately (flip) sell the book they gave me a huge discount on.Nothing is more frustrating than selling a book to somebody and giving them a break and then watching them sell the same book for a lot more only a short time later. I'm not saying that I'm Saint Chromium or anything, but there's just nobody for me to sell to. Nobody here wants the stuff, most US collectors won't buy from some collector in some miniature country (and why would they when they have all the books they'll ever need close by) and shipping to the US is so expensive that nobody would even bother.

And so the "s"-word has fallen...shipping, the great barrier, the black hole that just keeps sucking money. The good news is that US shipping prices are among the cheapest in the world. The bad news is that it's still a lot of money. I used to keep data on shipping costs...just for fun, calculating how much I was spending on shipping alone. I stopped doing this in 2005....when I reached $5000...I couldn't believe I had spend the same amount a nice VG/FINE copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 would set me back on stamps...stamps, brown paper and boxes. I just don't want to know anymore how much I've spend on top of that 5K the last two years. If you're looking for me, I'll be next to the ostrich, burying my head in sand.

And next to the cost, there's also the stress, will the books arrive ? And if they arrive, will they arrive in good shape ? Will my $500 NM book be turned into a $120 FINE book because some bored postal employees decided to play "package-frisbee" during their lunch our ? Yes I can insure the books, but that's another lose-lose situation. As long as I import my used comics (back issues are second-hand) as literature, customs leave me alone. If I declare that I'm not a business and these books are for me and me alone...it's all golden and they float through, but once I insure them they have to take another avenue and tax, tax and tax me until I bleed out of all orifices. If I have a $600 book delivered to my house insured, I pay roughly $200 in tax (33%) each and every time. Meaning that even if I lose one book in three it would still be cheaper than to have them sent insured.Lucky for me 99% of all packages have arrived, big package, small ones, cheap books, high dollar books, all have arrived almost always in perfect shape.

Three months ago I would have proudly put 100%, yes even 5 years of importing box after box of comics from overseas, each and every package had arrived..but somehow I knew this kind of luck couldn't not last forever...you can't beat the odds.
So my first "loss" happened a few months ago and it was a very strange one. And this is how we get to Kenny from this topic's title (not that Kenny is strange hehe).
Kenny is one of the good guys, an eternal optimist, proud father and family man and a really BIG comic book fan, interested in all ages, all publishers, all types of books and even in the fringe side like restoration detection..in short the perfect comic-buddy and a very reliable source to deal with. Kenny had some books for sale that I wanted and we quickly made a deal, a deal being the optimum word as he gave me a very healthy discount. We traded some info and he sent me the package. It never arrived. Kenny was very sorry and offered to refund me the money, which he was under no obligation to do, but he did it anyway, coz that's the kind of person Kenny is. Now I didn't want Kenny to suffer any monetary loss because the post office dropped the ball this time,so we agreed that he would send m some replacement books for roughly the same amount. We both were happy and package #2 was sent....it never arrived.

At this point we both agreed that something fishy was going on, the first package not arriving could have been karma finally kicking me in the nuts for always having gotten my packages, too bad it happened on Kenny's deal...but that's Karma for you. But the only two packages out of 100's in 5 years that went missing, coming from the same town ? And sent close to each other ? Coincidence ?? We didn't think so.
We started looking at what could have happened and decided that somewhere en route from me to him somebody was swiping international packages... We wrapped our brain around all of this and then suddenly one of the packages turned up....the second one....and it was returned to Kenny and it looked like this :

The postal label read that it was never picked up (by me) and was then returned to sender...which is impossible. I assure you that I claim my packages each and every time, I get the xmas feeling every time I see a you-were-not-at-home-so-please-pick-the-package-up-at-the-PO slip in my mailbox.
No way any note was left, my mailbox is large and built-in into my house, so the elements can't touch anything and I'm the only one that gets the mail (my wife knows I love mail, so she leaves it to me )

Dunno what happened, maybe it was delivered to the wrong house (and a slip left) and that person saw it was not for them and never bothered to pick it up
Pretty sure it wasn't delivered in my neighborhood, as I'm the only one to receive (large volumes of US packages) and both my neighbors have at times accepted packages for me and then brought them round when I got home from work.

This is what the books looked like :

Box #1 is still somewhere in limbo...address on the label was correct (mine) but I think that the first box was delivered to the wrong address and the people just kept it. Second box was again delivered to the wrong address, but nobody was home and the postman left a slip to come pick it up at the post office. The people at that address probably knew that wouldn't get it at the PO, so never bothered to pick it up and it was returned to Kenny (after somebody used it as a chair for a few weeks) Just for the record, I'm not angry at Kenny at all.... this was in fact the make-good box he sent me...he still is a friend and we can laugh (a little) at this misadventure...oh remember how I said that Kenny was also interested in restoring books ? Well today he told me he sent me another package with the books that were returned and this is what he did to them :

Never change Kenny, you are one hell of a guy...now let's hope box #3 arrives

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

2007-03-15T16:51:00.002+01:00

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

2007-03-06T16:57:00.002+01:00

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

Gothic

2007-02-21T00:51:00.002+01:00

Remember about half a year ago I decided to make a side-step into late Silver and Bronze DC and try and collect a Batman run ?
Well it's been working out quite well for me and I'm making nice progress. I'm with issue #200 and ending the run at #350, at the moment I'm about 15 books short..So it should happen before the Summer

The really fun part has been, the lack of pressure...I've never had to actively seek Batman books out, I just bought a few when I was dealing on other books. When somebody had one or more books that I needed for
one of my Silver Age marvel runs, I always asked them if he didn't have any Batmans I was looking for...
Nice and easy way to collect.

I never dreamed it would be so easy, seeing as the start of the run is nearly 40 years old, but it was. Most books were very reasonably priced and easy to obtain. Of course once I get down to 4 or 5 issues left, I'll have
to let go of this free-flowing collecting vibe and actually start actively looking for the last books...

Anyway, I got no less than 22 issues the last two weeks..from various sources. I included some of the better cover scans to see what you are missing if you never got into Bronze Batman.

This is batman #227 and is the only difficult book to get out of the run, reason is the fantastic cover by Neal Adams. Adams went back to September 1939 and swiped the cover to Detective #31 and made his own
homage. Both covers have a wonderful gothic tone and thanks to the fact that the cover to Batman #227 is considered the best overal DC Bronze Age cover prices have gone out the window.
Guide for a VF/NM is about $44.00....You wont even be able you get a decent FINE for that price. Expect to pay about $200 for any copy that's even close to NM...it's a much loved book

Friends of Ol' Marvel

2007-02-15T15:37:00.003+01:00

If you are a Marvel Comics collector of the 1960's or 1970's then you know Marvel was always trying to get a lot of fan participation through the form of fan clubs.
The first one was the historic Merry Marvel Marching Society (M.M.M.S) started in 1965.
Later; in 1969 "Marvelmania" debuted, always more of a business than a labour of love for Marvel fans, it never really took off. Only 6 issues of the Marvelmania magazine were published and a lot of the merchandise advertised in the catalogs never came to fruition.

Probably the best thing about Marvelmania were the gorgeous posters. This merchandise and others could only be purchased by members . Now for some reason (availability, lack of interest, high price?) not a lot of them were sold and now some of these are very rare and very expensive.
Check out this link on eBay Steranko Captain America Marvelmania
If you read this more than three months from now, the link will be dead, let me just say The 1970 Steranko Captain America Marvelmania poster went for....$710.00

But probably the most loved and best known Marvel fan club was FOOM. Created by both Stan Lee and Jim Steranko, another talented artist at Marvel, it made its official debut in 1973. Readers already knew what FOOM stood for because it was the title of the popular magazine which had been in circulation for several months. Ads went out declaring that it was the "Ultimate" fan club for just $2.50.
FOOM lasted until the late 70's and was a huge success.
The FOOM magazine was a lot of fun, a fellow collector gave me a few issues a while ago and they are a great reading...Fan participation was very important and Marvel (Steranko and Lee) went all out to convey a spirit of community, of belonging even. I can imagine if you were a kid in the 70's, picking up a few Marvel comics every month, FOOM really made you feel at home.
A four-issue subscription was US$3. An additional dollar bought a club membership I.D. card, six decals, and a poster. Running 22 quarterly issues (Feb. 1973 - Fall 1978) FOOM touched the heart of many a young Marvel fans and a lot of today's creators were FOOM members as a kid and remember it fondly.

FOOM also went the poster way and made available 12 different posters. Classic covers with art by Buscema, Steranko, Colan, Windsor-Smith, Kirby, Romita, Severin & more. Truly a delight to behold.

Now Marvel learned a valuable lesson with the failure of Marvelmania and made sure there were enough posters to go round and that the price was reasonable. But again you had to be a FOOM member to be able to buy them (mail-order only). Now the FOOM merchandise isn't as expensive as the Marvelmania stuff, but prices have been creeping up during the last decade as supplies dwindle. I always wanted the FOOM posters, but I only wanted a full set of all 12 images and I wanted them to be in NM - MINT condition, unused.
A nice bit of trivia is that the full set of FOOM posters can be seen in the later "Mister Glass" gallery scenes of the movie "Unbreakable" starring Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson.

Last week I managed to find just that and now have them here in my comics room. They look as if they came of the press yesterday rather than 37 years ago and I'm hesitant to flatten them and put them on the wall somewhere. They would make a very nice impact on the comics room...but it also would be like destroying a bit of history...

To be concluded.

Zut alors!

2007-02-04T12:16:00.001+01:00

Remember about a month ago I purchased my very first Captain America and was pleasantly surprised by the Kirby signature ? Well I enjoyed that book so much I decided to start collecting the series as well....yeah I know yet another Marvel series to complete

Anyway I've decided to go for #100 (first issue in series) through to #300...nice chunk of books. I'm already setting up deals to buy the later issues in larger quantities to save on shipping and am seeking out nice mid-grade copies of the first 50 or so issues.I was lucky to find these early Silver Age ones in decent shape and at a good price

Now #107 is clearly the pick of the bunch and one of the best Cap books ever IMHO.
Jack and Stan collaborated on a mere 10 issues of the Captain America series (issues 100 through 112, with the exception of Jim Steranko's work on issues 110 and 111), but those 10 issues are pure dynamite. #107 is a brilliant story, with a twist worthy of a Christopher Nolan or a M. Night. Shama-lama-ding-dong (whatever) movie.
Kirby's raw pencil-driven artistic powers were never better and keep perfect pace with Lee's intense and driven narrative.
The issue's focus is on Steve Rogers, who, having been frozen in suspended animation for 20 years, is still trying to cope emotionally with the death of his World War II fighting partner, Bucky Barnes. Cap's turmoil is ripe with realism, from the sorrow over his friend's loss to the personal guilt that weighs on his shoulders for having been able to save so many during the war but not his own partner.
And for once the cover perfectly alludes to the story inside and entices you to enter and read.

But I actually started off wanting to write about issue #105...
Ok #105 isn't the masterpiece #107 is, the art is still classic Kirby and the story is decent and action packed, and the cover, action packed as it is, is nothing really special...but it has Batroc ! Yes I admit I'm a closet Batroc fan...

I'm also ready to admit he's more of a comedic character than anything else, that stupid Dali-moustache, no special powers (ok, he knows French-boxing and can leap a bit), his use of Franglais/Frenglish (butchering both languages in one fell swoop)...
But he makes my day when I see him fighting a hero (and most of the time running away when he's about to get beaten) while keeping his own outlandish style.

I can't imagine what Cap must think, in between fighting The Red Skull, The Kree and the Skrulls, he has to put up with this pesky clown..Georges Batroc

Whoever created him (Stan ?)really went all the way this time. The name Batroc the Leaper ("Batroc ze Leapair"),itself is a joke, "Batrock" is the animal order to which frogs belong to...And Americans like to call Frenchmen...Frogs

But Georges wouldn't really be upset by this...in his own words :"Alas, you are too sensitive, mon cher! But, c'est la vie!"

Threesome

2007-01-31T17:16:00.001+01:00

Once again, back is the incredible, the comic animal, the incredible…late, very late “Nuff Said” Blog
I’ve run out of excuses, so I won’t make any for my tardiness, let’s just say once again work and real life got in the way of fun and I didn’t get around to do much writing or even spend time with my collection. I did however not stop buying

First of all, I failed in getting the entire ASM collection done before the end of 2006…I was only two books away…but it wasn’t meant to be.
It’s not necessary a bad thing, it gives me some more time to find decent and affordable copies of #14 & #20. Believe me when I tell you that I’ve spent a few minutes of every single day during the last 6 weeks to find a VG to FINE copy of #14 for a fair price, all to no avail.

In the meantime here are the three ASMs I picked up before the deadline :

A nice surprise

2006-12-18T14:14:00.001+01:00

It's been a month, I know...sorry but my calendar is broken
Anyway, on to bigger and better things. I finally found some time to check out the books I have bought the last few weeks. Alas no Spider-mans at the moment (why do we
say Spider-MANS and not Spider-men, when talking about multiple books ??) because, well I want the right copy, not the right now copy. Trying to complete the series before the end of the year is really working against me, as I feel I almost have to grab the very first available book.

So what did the mailman bring this time :

From the need-these-to-complete-a-series collection

Hulk #254,#255,#256,#257,#261,#262,#265,#269,#271,#272,#311 (need 1 more book to complete #240 - #540)
Rom #70 & #37 (series complete)
Batman #280,#219,#218 (still need a lot of books)
Miracleman #22,#17 (need one more book to complete the series)
What If ? #1 #8,#17,#18,#20,#23(still need a lot of books)
Silver Surfer #4 (finally ! series complete)

But then I got carried away, like I always do and also bought a nice bunch of Silver Age books, which weren't really on my want-list. This of course now means than I'm going to have to start collecting these series as well

Journey Into Mystery #100, #102, #115 - #125. The series changes into Thor with #126, so it's a logical progression that since I've completed Thor I'm starting getting the Thor JIM run (#83 - #125) This is going to be expensive and hurt like hell !!

Now for the last few books I have absolutely no excuse at all...it doesn't continue from or to another series I've completed, I've no emotional attachment to them...nada.In fact to be honest these are the first books of this character I have ever bought...but I just had to get them...

Captain America #100 (first book in series), #106 & #109. So now I've decided to start a Cap #100 - #150 run as well...

Oh, I forgot all about that "nice surprise"...well the Cap books are Kirby books, and I absolutely adore Kirby, so when I was grading the book I couldn't help myself but start reading it...and look what I found on the bottom of the first page

HOLY *SPOON*

Yeah, that's a Jack Kirby signature

Bag #2

2006-11-16T21:03:00.001+01:00

Well, like I promised here's what was in the second M-bag I received last month...
During the early 70's Marvel had a lot of succes with the Marvel Team-Up book (MTU) , which featured Spider-Man and a different guest stars each month. Spidey had the Midas touch at that time and every book that featured everyone's favorite webcrawler was an instant succes. So Marvel decided you can never have enough of a good thing and launched a copy-cat book.

Marvel Two-in-One was a comic book series that featured the Fantastic Four member, the Thing, in a different team-up each issue with a different character, and lasted for 100 issues, from January, 1974, through June, 1983.
Many of the characters paired with the Thing were more obscure superheroes/supervillains, and the series never really attained the popularity of Marvel Team-Up, but for a lot of fans it was the better book.
A reason for this is that there weren't so many rules set in stone as for the Spidey book, using lesser known characters the writers had more freedom to walk away from the beaten path. In MTU a lot of A-list characters teamed up with Spider-man and both had to be victorious and get equal share of the glory...not easy to write.

Now I have to be honest, I own full runs of both Marvel Team Up and Marvel-two-in-one, but I haven't read more than 3 or 4 issues of MTU's 150-book run, (only reason is not enough free time), but I have read a lot of the Two-in-One's and for me the main reason MTiO is better is because of Ben Grimm...
I love Spidey as much as the next guy, but Ben Grimm, often overlooked, is one of Kirby/Lee's most important creations in the Marvel Universe.

During the 50's comic books weren't very good, the implementation of the comic book code and the fear installed by Wertham and the U.S. Senate hearings on the link between comics juvenile delinquency, had all but castrated most publishers and what they brought to the stands were bland, stupid and silly books written to not even upset the most delicate of 5-year olds.
Most Superheroes were lost in limbo and the few that did still have their own book like Superman, Batman and Wonderwoman came across as characters from some far-flung fairy-tale land. Completely out of touch and out of time with the real world.

As wel all know Marvel comics changed all of this with Fantastic Four #1 (1961) a new team for the new age...a team where everyone wasn't perfect, the forerunner of an new breed of superghero. They weren't friends all the time, they had problems, they complained and some were downright miserable...just like real people.
The most "human" of all was the one who looked the least human..Ben Grimm aka The Thing. The everyman, the working class joe, the grumpy man with a heart of gold.

Marvel Two-in-One annual #7 is one of my top-3 comics of all time, it features (silly idea) an intergalactic boxing match, featuring all of Earth's strongest heroes agains The Champion an Elder of the Universe and a huge boxing fan.
Again it's a larger than life story, featuring more superpowered heroes than you can shake a stick at, but in the end, it's the most human of all,Ben Grimm who carries the story and makes for the heartwarming ending..

There's a sentimental reason why I like this book as well, but that's for another time...

It's on..

2006-11-11T16:43:00.001+01:00

Here's a follow-up I didn't think I was going to write this year...My entry concerning the purchase of ASM #1 was one of the most read and reacted-to pieces I've put up (meaning more than 2 people read it). Again only one person chose to comment IN the thread, but I received a lot of mails and pms...
Most were very encouraging and told me to go for it and get the rest of the books. Being a weak-willed person when it comics to collectables I've deceided to go for it.

Now let me be honest, it's not only the people egging me on in the hopes of seeing a trainwreck that convinced me, but I feel I just have to try...it's been a good run, getting a series complete for the last 4 years, so it would be nice to make it 5-in-a-row.

So it's officially on...it's going to be an interesting and expensive 7 final weeks of 2006.
And to put my money where my mouth is...here's what I purchased this week

7 weeks and 5 more to go...

Miller Time

2006-11-04T14:26:00.001+01:00

About a month ago I waxed lyrically about the 70's & 80's Hulks I got in the M-bag and used the cover to issue #258 as a showcase..partly because I remember buying that very book back in 1981, but also because I loved the drama of the cover...The Soviet Super soldiers ganging up on the Hulk and beating the snot (well he IS green) out of him...
Now the cover was drawn by comics giant Frank Miller, around the time of his incredible Daredevil run and just before his legendary Dark Knight days.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the original Miller cover for sale on an original art dealer's website.
And here it is in all it's black and white glory

Oh and before anyone goes jumping to conclusions, I didn't buy it, it's still for sale here and can be yours right now...all you need is $8000