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FIRST OFFICIAL STOP A SUCCESS
The destination on yesterday's journey was "Comicazi". Slightly offensive name, great comic shop.
I called in advance to ask one question: "Do you have long boxes with back issues?" The answer was yes, so in my opinion, the risk of coming up empty handed was minimal. My main mission was to find some Ultimate Spider-Man issues as well as a couple random comic books I had written down in my notes. When I got there, I was pleasantly surprised to find a really nice place that didn't suffer from any of the problems that have plagued a number of the comic shops I've been to recently. It was clean, not musty. The shelves were well organized. I could tell where the Image TPBs were and where the DC ones were. The new release wall was organized in simple alphabetical order. The inventory was great, too. There were tons of TPBs and plenty of new releases and back issues. One more plus that I never would have noticed if I hadn't been in a wheel chair that day was that this place wasn't cramped. There was plenty of room for two people to walk past each other between walls and shelves. This made my life a lot easier when it came time to go diving into the bins.
For my Ultimate Spider-Man collection, I found 14 issues. There are 15 in the picture below because yesterday I received a package in the mail from midtown comics and I included Ultimate Spider-Man #15 in that order. That way I would know for future reference what I was getting if I ordered any future books from midtown in "NM" condition.
Anyway, here's what I came up with. As usual, please excuse the poorly taken photos, the meds make my hands really shaky so it's tough to take professional photos with iPhone.
I know the picture is horribly blurry, so let me name the issues for you, left to right:
-Ultimate Spider-Man #12 BATTLE ROYAL
-Ultimate Spider-Man #13 CONFESSIONS
-Ultimate Spider-Man #15 CONFRONTATIONS
-Ultimate Spider-Man #20 LIVE
-Ultimate Spider-Man #23 RESPONSIBLE-Ultimate Spider-Man #25 PLASMIDS
2ND Row:-Ultimate Spider-Man #27 ILLEGAL
-Ultimate Spider-Man #28 SIDETRACKED
-Ultimate Spider-Man #29 STOLEN IDENTITY
-Ultimate Spider-Man #31 BLACK VAN
-Ultimate Spider-Man #50 BLACK CAT
-Ultimate Spider-Man #56 HOLLYWOOD PART III
3RD:
-Ultimate Spider-Man #59 HOLLYWOOD PART VI
-Ultimate Spider-Man #60 CARNAGE PART I
-Ultimate Spider-Man #61 CARNAGE PART III should peak briefly about the process that went into purchasing each one of these. I mentioned in one of my first posts that I had been advised that a better way to do this would be to buy a full run from someone selling it online as one complete set. My initial response was that that takes all the fun out of collecting them, and that the cost of doing it also seemed a little high when compared to what I could get it for by scouring comic store boxes and getting them one by one. I realized yesterday that one more benefit to my way of collecting these is condition. The store I went to had bags with massive chunks of the USM run all bagged up together, and given the prices of the bags, I'd be spending a dollar an issue, as opposed to the $2 an issue I was paying to search the long boxes. Why am I willing to pay that extra dollar? Because I get to choose which copy I take. I looked in the bags, and while some of the comics in them were in pretty good condition, some of them had bent corners or bends in the covers. That type of condition would be fine if all I wanted was to read them to get the story and then get rid of them, but I'm collecting these to keep. I love the series. I love the covers. I love the art inside. I have the luxury of patience. It doesn't matter to me how long it takes to collect every issue, so why should I take any shortcuts? The store had more mint(NM grade in comic book terms) condition issues than I could afford, so why would I ever leave there with something flawed?
So I ignored the bags containing massive chunks of the collection for $1 an issue and went to the everything for $2 bins and picked through carefully, keeping only the nicest issues. Rest assured every one of the issues I picked had sharp corners, no scratches or bends on the cover, and no little paint chips or dents.So I now have 24/138 if you count Annuals and the Ultimatum issues.
I found a few other gems in the $2 bins, each of which got me very excited.
On the left is Daredevil(Vol. 2) #15. This one is important because it is in this issue that Kingpin, probably Daredevil's most formidable adversary, is stricken blind(a trait he and Daredevil would now share).
In the center I have Amazing Spider-Man #349. I found this issue by chance. While flipping through the ASMs I noticed a really lame super villain, "The Black Fox", who I had previously only known because he was the burglar who stole Eric O'Grady(The Irredeemable Ant-Man)'s Nintendo Wii after the two had briefly befriended one another. I had no idea that he had ever tangled with A-listers, never mind appeared on a cover with Spider-Man.
BLACK FOX!
On the right is Amazing Spider-Man #400. It's hard to tell in the cover but the grey part is a cardboard flap with spider-man art and the title and number embossed on it. Recently when #700 came out I read in a lot of places that #400 had the most moving story of the milestone 100th issue stories. Here's the cover underneath the odd grey cardboard flap:
Thanks for checking in. Thanks to popular suggestion, I'm planning on adding a checklist somewhere on this page where viewers will be able to look at a complete list of issue names and numbers with check marks next to the issues I've found.. and maybe a little spot for a comment on condition.
black fox, yep paid a big price for stealing o'grady's wii.
ReplyDeleteI just thought of another reason that's hilarious. Fox most likely had plenty of money from holding up the Pawn shop with Eric and could have easily afforded a Wii.
DeleteGood to hear you're back in the hunt.
ReplyDelete