Memory: Comics

Years ago, I was the king of comics. I remember every Wednesday going to the corner stores around town (because not all carried the same titles) to track down the newest comic books. I remember there being some cold, cold nights picking up some comic books over at Gizzy’s, and sometimes trekking ALL the way down to the Circle (this was a big trek for me back in the day) and getting back to have my legs frozen solid. Sometimes they wouldn’t even have the comic I wanted and I walked for nothing. I learned early on to bring some music along and I can honestly say that I was one of those people that even before iPods made it big, I had the tunes playing in my ears while I skipped down the street to pick up my new batch of comics.

The Marvel comics were my faves – Spider-Man and X-Men in particular. I never touched upon the DC Comics – Superman, Batman, etc. Something about them didn’t appeal to me.

I have close to 1000 comics to this date and that was from back in the day. I rarely pick up a comic book these days although sometimes I wonder if it would be cool to get back into a series now and then.

The problem with making money off of comic books is that the market is saturated with them nowadays that if you pick up an issue of Spider-Man, chances are, it will never be rare. There will be tens of thousands printed across the world. Nowadays if you want to make money off of comic books, you either sell it when it’s hot (oh, why didn’t I sell New Mutants #87 when I had the chance!) or you have to buy the rare variant cover editions (only 1000 made!!!) to have it make extreme amounts of money.

But let’s think about something for a moment. Curiosity got to me and I looked up random issues that I owned. A few have hit the $15 mark and that’s only because they introduced a major key character in the series that everyone liked. But what about a random issue?

I present to you an example of Uncanny X-Men #288. Nothing special happened in this issue and it falls in line with how much it is listed for at the moment. It is worth $4USD.

Now, here I’m thinking “That isn’t a lot of cash when I think about.” but if you put it into the context of how much I bought it for, that’s where things get interesting. I paid $1.25USD (according to the price on the book, not including taxes) so if were able to get $4 from someone for the issue, I would have made a profit of 3.2 times the price paid for it.

Triple the price, you say? I’ll take that investment.

Now, I would imagine that the odds of me selling the issue for the listed price of $4 may be a little slim, but to be honest, I haven’t checked. I’ve gone to a few comic conventions in town (one is coming up on October 29th in town here if you want to go) and I looked at some comics I owned and they were in the $1 bin. That was pretty sad considering I lost money on these issues.

Do I care that much about the money? Not really. They provided me with an imagination unbeknownst to many, but only to myself. Perhaps this is where I gathered my quirky personality from. Or my good looks. Chances are, both are true.

So, who knows? Perhaps I’ll sell off my collection one day and make some cash from it. But for now, they’re good sitting in my closet waiting for a good read (from some kid who respects comics. I’m not passing them off to some kid who has chocolate on their hands!)

This memory goes out to Aunt Lois who was the coolest aunt around when she brought me to the comic book store in Kitchener every time I visited. The problem with living up North is the fact that when you go to a comic store down south, you’re in there for a minimum of an hour because you’re overwhelmed with the selection. This is definitely not a problem for yours truly, but the adults may become bored waiting in the car for me. Hey, this randomly brought up another memory of us going to Spanish but Dad, Nanny and my sister waited (hey, was Mom there? I don’t recall…she must have been) in the car for an hour in Sudbury while I went into the store. Man, that must have sucked, but that just goes to show how cool family was.) Anyhow, back to Aunt Lois…she never complained one bit when she waited for me at the comic store and that’s a fond memory I have of her. I really don’t know if she had other things to do, or if she waited in the car for me. Hopefully she had other things to do! Anyhow, here’s to Aunt Lois. Thanks for making my trips to see you exciting. Not that visiting you on your own isn’t excitement enough!