I love this thread, one of my favorite parts of the boards is comic collecting stories from a time when you had to leave the couch to buy your comics.
My favorite collecting memory is saving up $20 bucks in grade school to buy an X- Men back issue ( wish to god I knew which one) at the local comic shop. I was so upset when he told me it had sold, that I left the store without buying anything. Mom stopped at the grocery store on the way home and I remember pouting in back of the car while she shopped.
On the way home she cut through a neighborhood and I saw a guy that looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, sitting on the curb with 2 long boxes and a sign that said comics 50 cents! Was this real? It was like a comic Lemonade stand! I yelled for Mom to stop which she did. She yelled after me as I ran down the street to hurry up the ice cream was melting.
This Copper, Marvel collecting kid had no idea what to buy in these 2 boxes of mostly Bronze and Silver DC’s. I picked the handful of Marvel FF and his 2 Avengers, and then a dozen Justice League, a few Hawkman, Aquaman and then some I thought weird DC stuff: Doom Patrol, Creeper, Deadman and The Spectre…40 books in all!
I collected all through High School (mostly copper and bronze) and then quit when I moved out of the house. I left my collection in storage at my folks house when I moved out, where it sat for 30 years.
I sometime thought about the beatnik guy on the curb with his 50 cent comics and wondered what his story was and if it was just some dream I had as a kid. I remember Mom thought he was a drug addict who needed money. I guess to be fair he did look like Shaggy.
i brought my collection home from my parent’s house this past Christmas and low and behold those 40 comics were still all together in the nastiest yellow bags you’ve ever seen. Among them: pretty darn nice copies of Avengers 8 1st Kang, & 52 Panther Joins, a bunch of the Neal Adams JLA covers, Doom Patrol 99 1st Beast Boy, FF 58, 67 Doom app, 67 HIM, and the 50 cent winner a VG copy of FF 48 1st Galactus and Surfer!
Rediscovering those books brought back so many great collecting memories. Needless to say I am back down the rabbit hole with avengance and loving it.. Thanks 50 cent comic Shaggy wherever you are.
Take these. Thank you
