Black_Adam

That Blue Beetle has a cover that would make anyone want to open it up and read the tale inside. Great pickups!

the link is no long er available..is this rhe shop Kin worked in? Yes To answer an earlier question, I think the first photo I posted was of their first location at 3638 W. 4th Ave (which is less than a block away from the store's current location). The store I remember, and it sounds like others do too, was the one at 4th and Arbutus owned by Ron and Ken (who later opened a store in North Vancouver called Airship Comics that I also frequented). Kin Jee, below, often worked the counter along with a cast of other colorful characters (hippies). Some of my best books came from those boxes behind him! And this is where I usually blew all the cash I collected on my paper route. Boy did I hate when people refused to pay for their monthly subscription early!

My first was The Comicshop on 4th Ave, Vancouver, in 1979 What do I remember most? All the hippies...

Mainly the #3 Here's another hot tip: ASM #129 ASM #129? Too common. I only collect scarce, HTF in good condition Moderns

Gotham Girls comics are getting hot? Thanks for the tip!

I love Harry Lucey's lines. He definitely knew how to throw a curve!

Great pickup and great cover! I hope the story inside is just as good!

This photo makes the thread. I don't know why he's so determined to chose between a Cap #1 and Marvel Comics #1, when he could just grab those Boy Commandos instead. Boy Commandos is more fun than Marvel 1 and it has Kirby art. Cap 1 would probably be the first he grabbed with the BC underneath. Fantastic photo, but just watching him lift that legendary comic (don't bend that spine!) and touch it with his bare hands sends my comic-collecting spidey-sense off the charts! Didn't they protect comics back then? Or was condition not the be-all and end-all for collectors like it is today?

Never even heard of Manhunt, but it looks interesting! Sweet haul!

Sweet book and great cover! I love the thunderstruck expression on the lower left alien's face. I have a hunch it isn't because of the gun aimed right between his eyes, but because he just got his first good gander at his intended victim's knockout headlights!

I thought the exact same thing! I barely spotted the Adventure Comics and it's right up front. By the way, which one did the kid grab? The Three Little Pigs?

Great story! As a side note, if mom was only going to let you get one comic from this rack, which one would you pick? For some reason that Pep Comics seems to grab me...

All great books, but this one's my fave. Severin's Western covers are always loaded with action and always grab me!

I remember reading this right off the rack, and I doubt that comic was anywhere near as nice as this one. Great book!

I always loved that cover. Sweet book!

Beautiful books and great signature placement! They look great across the logos (hate to have anything distract from those fantastic covers), and Berni's autograph is a work of art all on its own! Congrats again on the books. Well worth the wait!

Wrightson's DC horror stuff is crazy good. A master of the macabre, every cover a masterpiece for two bits or less. I also love the black and white magazine stuff he did, but the one work I can't get enough of is Freak Show, so good!

Congrats! Did you read them all too? Or just tag and bag 'em?

My favorite issues of Fantastic Four AND Superman. Great pickups! I love every comic where Supes and the Scarlet Speedster race, but didn't they always end in a tie?

Nice books! Is it just coincidence that all of them have a hot blonde in a red dress on the cover?

Very well said! Especially the bit about comic buying budgets back then (in my case, the Bronze Age). My weekly allowance was 25 cents (raised by single mom with four kids - I was the youngest) and each week, if I could resist the urge to fill a tiny brown paper bag with twenty-five penny candies, I'd buy one comic. And I distinctly remember the day I laid my weekly comic on the counter and the clerk pointed at the price and said, "they're thirty-cents now." I raced back home and begged my mom to raise my allowance, just by five cents. I think I've had easier salary negotiations with employers, but in the end I got the extra nickel and my comic. Thanks Mom!

Love those Weird War Tales covers! Just seeing that logo brings back a ton of cool memories. I always had to hide them (and any Unknown Soldiers) from my older brother and his friends. If they got their hands on them I'd be lucky to get them back in one piece, if at all. And when they asked why I didn't have any war comics I said I did, and offered them a copy of Sad Sack and the Sarge. Does that count as Bronze War?

Beautiful books! Love the layout on that Planet. Which one is Mysta of the Moon? The babe in the bubble?

Thanks for the warm welcome! I plan on doing just that (sharing images) as soon as I finish reading through all the threads on scanning, posting, creating emojis, yoda yada. Hopefully it won't take seven years, like my last post...

Hi all. I’m a long-time lurker and on-again/off-again collector from Canada (West Coast). I figured it was time to introduce myself to the boards, and I apologize in advance if this is (way) too long. I first discovered comics in the mid-seventies when a friend from my Grade 3 class lent me a few issues of Richie Rich. By the first few pages, I was hooked. My favorite stories were ones where he’d have to escape after being zapped by some mad scientist’s shrink ray, or be forced to battle bad guys like Dr. N-R-Gee or the Onion (breath so bad it could melt a bank vault’s steel door!). Soon, my friends and I were trolling every used book shop within bike range and grabbing any comics (Harvey, Charlton, Gold Key, Archie, DC, Marvel) we could get our hands on at half the cover price. We never worried about the condition (they all had blue grease pen prices on the cover), for us a comic was a comic. But then I wandered into one used bookstore and spotted the first issue of John Carter, Warlord of Mars. It was in a plastic bag and the owner of the store, an old lady doing crosswords behind the counter where they hid the good stuff (Penthouse, Swank, etc.) from our prying eyes, actually wanted MORE than the cover price. Three times! Seventy-five cents!! My friends and I couldn't figure it out (we were probably nine years old at the time). How could a used comic be worth more than a brand new one? Then I found out. My dad decided to take us to Disneyland in the summer of 1979. We were driving there, of course, and to keep us quiet he pulled into a bookstore and told us to grab a book to read during the ride. And that was when I found it - The Overstreet Comic Price Guide #9. My dad didn't want to buy it, the book was almost $10! He told me I’d like Kidnapped - the novel, not the Classics Illustrated version - better. Needless to say, I pleaded, annoyed and eventually convinced him to buy me that big, beautiful OSPG. I spent that entire trip going over that book cover to cover, looking for and finding many of the used comics I'd collected (i.e. Swamp Thing #1) inside. But what really captured my attention wasn’t the actual price guide – it was the ads, one in particular. There was a comic store right near where I lived! It was on 4th Avenue and called The Comicshop. I still remember the first time I went through that door, fought my way past all the hippies (by then – 1979 – relics of a bygone era), and climbed the stairs to step into comic-collecting heaven. There were walls of new comics and comic-related paraphernalia lining the store (at that time I thought comics only came on a spinner rack) and in the centre were row after row of used comics, bagged and boarded, more than I’d seen in my life. I spent hours, days, weeks there, standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow collectors sorting through an almost endless array of back issues. It seemed like any comic you were hunting for could be found in one of those rows. And if it wasn’t there, it was on the wall behind the cashier. That’s where they kept the good stuff. I remember seeing old issues of Action and Detective and first issues of Fantastic Four, Hulk, and Spider-Man. The sticker prices staggered me. The Amazing Fantasy #15 was almost $500! At that time I was far more interested in quantity than quality (I remember reading a copy of Richie Rich where he mentioned he had one issue of every comic ever printed and I figured that was a good goal at the time), so I was spending my $2 allowance each week buying as many comics as I could, which often meant sorting through the boxes of coverless comics hidden away underneath the regular back issues in search of bargains. But on my twelfth birthday my dad gave me $20 to spend at The Comicshop and I made a momentous decision; I asked the cashier if I could see some of the comics on the wall behind the counter. I ended up walking out of the store with a 20-year-old copy of X-men #6 (with Sub-Mariner and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants on the cover). My dad couldn’t believe I’d spent the entire $20 on one book. He wasn’t mad, just amazed that one comic could be worth so much. He told me how when he’d been young he’d had comics too, but never saved them like I did. He’d read them cover to cover and then trade them to friends for a nickel a piece, which he’d then use to buy more comics. Dollar signs flashed through my head as I imagined the comics he’d let slip through his nickel-hungry fingers. I whipped out my price guide and asked him to show me which ones he’d had. He didn’t remember. But he did remember his favorite: Captain Marvel. It took me a moment to figure out who he meant, and when I did I grabbed my copy of Shazam #28 and showed it to him. Seeing his old favorite gave him a kick, and he was happy to see I was fond of the same heroes he’d once admired. There was only one problem. I hadn’t bought the comic because of Captain Marvel, I’d bought it because of the other guy on the cover – Black Adam. That’s when I realized all of my favorite comics were ones with villains on the cover, whether it was the dangerous Dr. N-R-Gee or the menacing Magneto. It wasn’t the heroes that had captured my attention, it was the bad guys. I didn’t want to join the Fantastic Four, I wanted to be Galactus! Unfortunately, I never got the chance to devour the universe or even eat a planet. I started discovering other comics (usually under my older brother’s bed), like the Furry Freak Brothers, Harold Hedd and Heavy Metal. Then I discovered girls. Comics were soon forgotten and so was the collection. Luckily, my mom wasn’t one of those mothers who threw their kid’s comics away. Instead, remembering how important they’d once been to a twelve year old boy, she boxed them up and put them away and is a big part of the reason I still have them today. I’ve bought relatively few comics in the decades since, and when I get the urge to read some I tend to pick up reprints of issues (DC Showcase, Marvel Essentials, etc) I once dared to dream of owning. And as the years have passed my collection has grown smaller, not larger. Time, moves, and relationships have led me to trim the bulk of it over the years (on EBay – mainly the new stuff I bought in the early eighties). My goal of matching Richie Rich’s collection (every comic ever printed) is probably out of reach, but my love of those old comics, those classic villains, hasn’t diminished. I still treasure my X-Men #6 (CGC graded it a 9.0 about a decade ago) and many others that I managed to snare in those early years. But times have changed. The Comicshop has moved to a new location, the hippies are gone (replaced by hipsters), and their meager back issue selection almost seems like an afterthought. Online is apparently the place to be, so that’s why I’m introducing myself here. My collecting focus is mainly early appearances of Marvel villains like Magneto, Dr. Doom, U-Foes, etc. I’d love to chase the DC villains too, but a first appearance of the Joker is a little out of my price range. I’m hoping to spot some bargains in the Forum Only Selling area, and while I’d love a sweet deal on a VF/NM copy of Journey to Mystery #85, I’d happily settle for a nice copy of Richie Rich Cash #1!