Pick of the Week Podcast
Show Notes
We’re back in 2016, with slightly less coughing, and way less comic book collections! Comics didn’t stop, so we’re back on the horse, and only getting slightly derailed by minutiae and historical asides. Saddle up and ride that horse with us, won’t you?
Running Time: 00:57:24
Pick of the Week:
00:01:40 – Unfollow #3
Comics:
00:12:15 – Star Wars #14 / Star Wars: Darth Vader #15
00:16:36 – Uncanny X-Men #1
00:19:47 – Paper Girls #4
00:25:38 – The Fade Out #12
00:29:22 – Doctor Strange #4
00:33:41 – Nova #3
00:34:47 – Four Eyes: Hearts of Fire #1
00:36:43 – Black Science #19
00:37:55 – Swamp Thing #1
00:39:12 – The Sheriff of Babylon #2
Conor’s Holiday Adventures:
00:43:10 – Conor tells us what happened to all of his comic books.
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Music:
“The World is Yours”
Nas
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Agree with Unfollow #3. Great surprise to the series. Will continue to keep reading that one.
I’m really glad I went totally digital except for graphic novels (even then I still get some from Comixology) in spring of 2011 when I graduated from college. Right now I’ve got 10 and a half short boxes after 5 years of collecting and that is perfectly manageable for me.
Also, all of my Four Eye’s issues are very beautifully colored and I got them as they came out originally. Was Conor saying they had special releases later in black and white?
I’ve got two versions of the collection — one is in color and one is in black and white.
Last December I sold nearly my entire collection. Over 200 trades, 18 omnibus’ and 50 hardbacks. The only paper I kept are: Batman Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Batman The Long Halloween, Batman Haunted Knight, Superman Red Son, Sleeper V1+2, The Killing Joke hardcover, 3 Daredevil Visionaries volumes (entire Frank Miller run) and the Kirby/Lee/Steranko Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D run.
Not only did I get a ton of money for it, it is one less thing to think of if I move. I don’t regret it, I have over a 2TB of digital comics including complete volumes of almost every Marvel and DC character, from Golden Age no.1’s right up till the present, as well as tons of Image, Dark Horse and EC. I highly recommend, especially if you are donating to a charity.
I enjoyed the Swamp Thing.
I won’t listen to Conor giving away his comic collection. It will depress me. I don’t know why, but it will depress me.
Good news- He kept some special runs of meanig a few key longboxes worth.
I too was ready to skip over that until I heard that he was in fact not an unfeeling emotional butcher.
Positve face emoji!
Conor – how did the charity value your donation? Was it a per book value or a total value? Just wondering how that worked.
They left that up to me. I valued them at $1 each.
Conor, do you happen to recall how far back your Batman run goes? When I started reading comics in ’89 Batman 434 was my first purchase. After an actual comic shop opened in town a year or so later, I eventually bought back-issues back to 401. At times I’ve thought about trying to extend it back to 301. Anyway, it’s funny after all these years to hear you contemplate “collecting” runs of comics.
It’s pretty consistent to 400. I’ve got some in the 300s. I need to go through everything thoroughly at some point.
I had a similar deal with my own collection. I think I was up to 26 long boxes at one point. I went through a spell of moving like every two years there for a while, naturally they always came with me. But moving into my old place in Bushwick BK changed all that. I carried them all up into the apartment, looked at them , and said “never again”.
Sold all of it in bulk, saving only the most cherished, which fit into 4 longs. I love comic books…my back, not so much.
The second issue’s a couple weeks out, but I thought Josh & Conor could use a War Corner bump and Aftershock’s “Dreaming Eagles” #1 by Garth Ennis & Simon Coleby turned out to be fantastic start to a tale about the Tuskegee Airmen.
2 thoughts:
1) I’m amazed the majority of floppy books are worth anything. Who buys them? Between trades, hardcovers, and digital, I don’t understand who actually goes and buys anything published since the 80s. Would love to hear anyone with an answer to this one…
2) Conor, what about floppys of one-shots or limited series you liked but you’re sure will never be reprinted? Did you keep a small pile of those? For me, for example, “Laser Eraser/AxelPressbutton”, “2001 Nights”, “Timespirits” are in that pile of books at the end of my bookshelf that I always end up keeping because I like to re-read and they are literally irreplaceable. Meanwhile, the stuff you kept, like Avengers or Batman runs, I figure are better in trades or digital?
No, I kept no one-shots. Keeping the series runs isn’t about readability, it is about keeping the single issue artifacts that mean something to me.
Conor-
congratulations on being mostly free.
how many of your comics were signed?
that’s my big hang up now.
I sold off half my collection in ’00 (8 long boxes including the entire Marvel Star Wars run (sad nostalgia face emoticon),
but from going to SDCC since 1990, easily half of the comics I have left are signed by writers and artists.
It just seems almost disrespectful to toss those ones out or send them to a possible fate of being someone’s arts and crafts project or a kid’s placemat.
and selling them appears to be a negative on the time vs reward continuum.
i guess it’s that kinda closed loop thinking though that keeps them piled in my closet.
eeyore.
“how many of your comics were signed?”
Oh, god, I have no way of knowing. More than a few? I got a lot of comics signed at shows in junior high and high school.
understandable. not knowing.
it’s a hundred plus signed issues easy sitting around here.
each time i think of doing something with them, i just imagine things like the high school me receiving my signed copy of Gotham by Gaslight back from Mike Mignola smiling and saying, “Thanks. In 25 years I’m just gonna toss this in a thrift store.”
a guilty imagination. it’s my burden.
Hi Connor, I could really connect to your story. I had to make a decision some years ago (how strange, it was around the time my first son was born :-)). At that point, I had more than 25.000 comics, which were mostly gathering dust in a storage facility a few miles from my home. In the end I decided I would keep some and sell most of my collection.Well, kinda, anyway….I can also really relate to the strange feeling when making the decision to let go of the collection, in any which way you do it. For me it felt like the end of a period in my life. The mind says “why keep the books, you never re-read them and you probably never will”, but the heart just can’t let go…….it was a proces that took quite a few years to finally let go of my “treasures”.
Concerning the stuff I kept:
1. Some other series, I replaced the issues with Marvel masterworks en DC Archive Editions (Silver and Bronze Age Marvel) or omnibuses (for example Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night). These I put in a bookcase in our living room (my wife actually was cool with that, because they add a lot of color to the room. The original issues I sold
2. I kept some around 10 long boxes with some of the series I really loved and some which were not readily available in other formats. For example: Marvel: Master of Kung Fu, Alien Legion, Sisterhood of Steel. DC: Vigilante, Jonah Hex, Checkmate, Atari Force, Mike Grells Green Arrow. Independent: The original Vailiant series, Grendel, Mage. And of course classics such as Batman Year One, Killing Joke, Long Bow Hunters, Secret Wars (the real one, with the Beyonder), Crisis on Infinite Earths.
3. I got some comics in e-format and I took a subscription to Marvel Unlimited on my iPad.
4. All the signed books and sketches made by artist, I kept.
To sell the other stuff, i went to a lot of conventions. To be honest, I loved to do that! I went there with three friends and we always had a blast going to a con together, even if we didn’t sell a lot of stuff on that given day. But it was also great to see people who bought the books get really excited about it, just the way I was when I bought books during conventions. It was like spreading the gospel of comicdom :-)!!!
Good luck getting your books to California!!
Regards,
Dennis.