Illustrious

Nothing major this year for me, looking at my records I only bought 6 CGC-graded books for all of 2023. Here's the best 3 out of 6:

One of my fondest memories collecting comics as a kid was buying this off the rack at my local Walden Books as a 10 year old in 1989 during the summer of Bat-Mania. 34 years later, I was finally able to snag another copy:

Finally got my #76 graded, and to my delight it came back the exact grade as my #77 and #78, so now I have the 3.0 trinity:

Issue #24 is my personal favorite TFTC cover because on my 12th birthday in 1991, my parents bought me a copy of Les Daniels book "Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics", and there was a chapter in there on Marvel shifting to horror comics in the Fifties that also had some pictures of E.C. Comics, one of which was TFTC #24. Seeing that zombie cover always stuck with me, and I knew one day I would have to have a copy of that issue for myself. Here's the panel from the book in question:

Marked off another one from my E.C. want-list this week:

Had this on my want-list for a while, finally got one this week:

Got these 2 back from the recent CGC signing:

Nothing I would consider "major" this year since I was still primarily putting most of my money into vintage sports cards, but I think the pendulum will swing back to comics in 2023:

I used to own a slabbed copy of that page as well, I ended up selling it and putting the money toward buying my Cap #3. Looking back at my records, it looks like I won my old copy for $740 on a ComicConnect auction on 09/25/13:

Since I started this thread 7 years ago, I'd thought I'd provide a current update. I had sold my 9.6 copies of #1, #2, and #3 around 2016 and was completely out of the club, but I later picked up a cheap raw copy of #1 about two years ago just to have in my collection. On a whim I included it my latest CGC submission, and today it came back as this: