X-Men #1

I'm sure every collector out there has had the chance to buy something they passed on or bought something they shouldn't have. Here's my biggest comic book regret, besides say not cornering the market on Hulk 181s in 1984.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with the X-Men, being a complete nerd I even had a crush on Kitty Pryde. The only title I ever really set completion goals for was X-Men. In '84 when I started collecting Uncanny was in the 180s. At first I set modest goals to start working my way back towards 94 and Giant Size X-men 1. Eventually I started picking up some of the silver age ones with the goal eventually of having 1-20. I'm not sure why I set that arbitrary run as a goal and didn't just finish the the whole damn series. That's one small regret but the big one was when I bought X-men #1. The price of good copies of #1 were already out of my budget range by '88 when I started looking to buy one so I set a more modest goal of just getting any decent copy I could afford. Eventually I found one for $80 that was pretty tattered. And I made an emotional and ultimately not very shrewd decision to buy it. That summer as my dad and I made our usual scouring of comic book stores around the country, I remember very vividly being in a store in Madison, Wisconsin that had a shiny seeming X-men #1 for $100. I knew it was way better than mine but did I really need 2 copies and $100 would have been most of my summer buying budget. I thought about it for a long time and eventually decided not to get it. Of course now in my memory that copy is way better than it probably was in reality but $100 might have gone a lot further in Madison than in San Francisco...

Without any further ado I present my 2.0 X-Men #1. I think the pictures speak to the condition of this book and if memory serves the cover was pretty loose on the staples as well.

Anyone else care to share some of their biggest comic collecting regrets?

To see old comments for this Journal entry, click here. New comments can be added below.