MY SPECULATOR HELL

I think I've thrown them out now.

- buying two copies of Batman #497 (AKA the issue where Bane breaks his back)
- buying Valiant back issues at the height of their craziness (though I didn't buy any of the EXPENSIVE ones) (I think I dropped $20 for Rai #0, though)
- buying every Image title (though that wasn't so much speculation as it was a sign of my forthcoming dementia)
- tracking the Overstreet value of my books in a typewritten form I created & AUTOMATICALLY DOUBLING the value of any books I had signed by creators (Claremont, Byrne, etc.), and TRIPLING the value of my copy of X-Men #143 signed by both Byrne and Terry Austin
- being book anal about mintness, though I often stacked my own collection & rarely boarded

Money made: -$immeasurable

I also confess to being a Grade A twerp and passing up the opportunity to snag a SLEW of Silver Age books my local shop stumbled upon in the early 90s (just before Silver Age books became very pricey), because, you know, the new issue of _Brigade_ waits for no man.

- For some reason I missed out on 1602 #3 and I don't really care. I have the rest, though.

- I had too many one night stands during my one year in England.

- I recently snuck into my neighbor's apartment and put saran wrap over his toilet seat.

_ I hate the smell of children.

I bought Youngblood 1 but that was a kind of "How rub will this be?"* impulse, though I'd be a liar if I didn't think I could sell it on again.

Vermont's confessions are considerably less shameful than ours. Hmmm.

*it was very rub. Hassan Kussein!!**

**actually that bit could have been good.

I'm ashamed to say I don't knwo exactly where within my comics it is...

- poor comic storage habits (see above)
- tearing out the back-up stories in various 80s DC books and restapling them as their own comic unit
- opening the little envelope of tattoos that came in my 1st copy of Amazing Spider-Man #238 (1st Hobgoblin)
- dropping a chunk of tuna fish on my copy of Secret Wars II #2

And speaking of that, on the speculator tip, I CONFESS TO:
- buying a minter copy of ASM #238 to replace the banged-up copy I owned
- seeing the following entry in an Overstreet Price Guide:
SECRET WARS II
2 ... $1.00 (NM) ... $.75 (VF) ... $.50 (F) ... $.35 (VG/G) ... $2984.92 (STAINED WITH TUNA FISH)

hahahahahahahaaaa

Unfortunately, baseball cards were taking care of my speculatory impulses. Now that I won't talk about.

I do know people who made lots of money selling their comics in the early 90s, but they were the kids who'd been super-anal about it in school and had barely read the things they kept sealed up in Mylar condoms, and would never have bought a comic they couldn't re-sell.

(My anti-speculator confession: I always remove and throw away any bags back issues come in, because I hate fuddling with them when reading comics. Between that, insufficient closet space, and moving back and forth across the country, I have a bunch of double-digit X-Men and Avengers that are pretty much folded in half. Had I known the Essentials collections would come out, I would have sold them when they were still in sellable condition.)

However I still have the FF #48-50 that I traded for in 1983. Anybody want to buy them?

And in terms of my best comics purchase, it's probably this one: I once traded a bunch of Star Wars cards for UNCANNY X-MEN 105-108, 117, 124, 132-134 and 138. There were a couple of other old Marvel things in there, but the X-Men stuff was the main attraction. This would have been in 1980 or 1981, my first year in high school, if you can believe that.