Comics News

Collecting Comics

Comic collecting can be a great hobby or as I have found myself a fanatical desire that can take over your life. There are a myriad of publishers out there that have been producing comics for decades, the main players DC & Marvel have produced hundreds of thousands of comicbook issues and are still churning them out every month. So where to start? most comic collectors come to come collecting through a love of comics, I myself enjoyed the Marvel comics of the glory days of the late sixties early seventies as a child, so when in my early 20s, with a bit of money to hand, I started collecting seriously I Knew what I wanted. Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men all the Marvel mainstays and all the backissues I could get my hands on. What I really wanted was every Marvel comic ever produced, but without a Billion dollar budget, there was no hope. Up to this point I'd been feeding my habit through the weekly Marvel UK issues that were available through most news agents where you could place an order to collect the comic every week. Hence a lot of the British comics of the 1970s & 80s have a name or street & number written on the cover, this in no way devalues the comic it is part of the history of the comic. I was also picking up the odd American issue at jumble sales and fetes (no Car Boot Sales or Ebay in those days) However this was the early 80s and Speciality Comic Shops were opening all over the country. One opened in a nearby city and I immediately placed a monthly order for 12 of my favourite Imported American Marvel Comics, my budget was for ten a month but my hunger for X- Men stories led me to add X-Factor and New Mutants to the list. The New Mutants where to become my all time favourite comic and I eventually collected all 100 issues, but no time to say goodbye as they evolved into X- Force, so began a new collection. My comic budget was stretched to the max but by focusing on X- Men related comics I slowly started to add the back issues to my collection. I was even lucky enough to find good copies of X- Men Issue 5 and 13 at an affordable price sadly Issue 1 is way out of my budget even today, near mint copies of issue 1 can sell at around Eleven Thousand Dollars. I've still got a long way to go. Many early issues have been reprinted for example classic X-Men Comic and Marvel Masterworks Books and special edition facsimile Comics so the stories are affordably there to fill in the gaps in your collection, but for us purists.. Keep buying the Lottery Tickets.