Ian_Levine

On 7/13/2023 at 11:35 AM, Ian_Levine said:

Was it really so terrible to post on the world's greatest comic forum to try to find the last twelve comics that I needed to complete the entire DC Collection ?? You're treating that as an abuse of the forum back in 2003 and 2004

When I was seven years old, my interest in comics first began way way back in 1960, several years before I properly started my DC collection. My very first initial interest in comics was a British children’s comic called “Buster”, which came out weekly. It was a black and white newspaper style comic, and it contained a weekly comic strip inside, all about “Maxwell Hawke Ghost Hunter”, which utterly fascinated me at the impressionable age of just seven years. It was fascinating and dark and gothic, with this rugged heroic man, teamed up with his beautiful assistant Jill Adair, who would fight all of the supernatural ghosts, demons and surreal creatures, from out of the dark shadows of the most creative imagination, and they would always find a solution and a logical explanation for the hauntings, by the end of the serial, and expose the fraud that had been so cunningly perpetrated. But this was truly dark and atmospheric and chilling, full of creepy old gothic haunted mansions, riddled with cobwebs and secret passages leading to danger. I can remember a bed, which flipped over to plunge its occupant onto deadly long sharp spikes, and a secret chamber of giant eyes behind a rotting old curtain. I used to collect this comic strip each and every week, and I used to purchase the comic, cut it up into bits, and stick down all the panels into an old school exercise book, with glue, so that I could keep and treasure my own personal collection of them, never stopping to realise that by doing this, I was irrevocably damaging the value of the original comics. In the 1970s, longing to see them again, I went to the British Newspaper Library in Collingwood, where I paid to photocopy them. You weren't allowed to photocopy more than ten pages, so I made at least twenty trips back and forth, then bound them into one huge volume which I still have. Looking at the artwork brings on waves of nostalgia.

NOW TV and HBO Max have created the most AMAZING three part series about eighty five years of DC comics. full of video interviews with legends who are now dead. It's the best program about comics I have ever seen in my life

https://www.nowtv.com/gb/watch/playback/vod/A5EK3JXxfMHsPgYK8UXpw

On 7/15/2023 at 7:21 PM, buttock said:

Ian, in your quest do you feel that there is a series that was more difficult than any other?  Not necessarily individual issues, but overall as an entire run, which one was the most difficult to find.  Thanks. 

The hardest is a full set of Adventure Comics starting with New Comics, then New Adventure. But then, surprisingly, it's Game Time, and Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children.

Then the Dirtminator promo comic is in a league of its own, way rarer than Supergear.

On 7/13/2023 at 6:15 AM, Aman619 said:

First to find the last dozen books he needed. And now cause hes being talked about again. Read the entire thread from way back then for a little more insight as to why you are reading some less than lauditory posts and labeling them 'antagonistic'.. 

Was it really so terrible to post on the world's greatest comic forum to try to find the last twelve comics that I needed to complete the entire DC Collection ?? You're treating that as an abuse of the forum back in 2003 and 2004

On 7/9/2023 at 4:07 PM, Frisco Larson said:

You are most welcome! We've never met, but I've known Jerome for over 30 years, and he's always spoken so well of you. It sounded like you were able to help him fill in some issues he needed by selling him your under copies. I'm not sure to what level he ever thanked you, but I CAN say that I could hear gratitude in his voice when he mentioned your dealings with one another. I can also say that I got to enjoy a few of the books he got from you, most notably the copy of Detective #27 that came from you! It was one of the few opportunities I had to examine a raw copy at my leisure and that's always a pretty good day when that happens! As you probably know, he sold his collection as well and from what he discussed with me, was left with similar feelings as you spoke of. 

   I'd also like to mention that I've enjoyed the few pics I've seen of your collection! To see the first 10 Actions and Detectives lined up in a row is just an amazing sight!!! Plus, of course, all of the other comics you had surrounding them! I'm sure it's a bittersweet thing to look at those pictures, but I for one can tell you that I'd love to see any other comic pics you'd care to share, whenever you'd care to share them!!! Thanks again for sharing all that you have!!!  

Jerome Wenker is a truly lovely guy and I did indeed help him with a hell of a lot of comics. I think I gave him the only other copy of The Dirtminator known to man.

This chapter is from my personal autobiography written in 2016

CHAPTER THREE - COMIC BOOKS

It was around this time, commencing for me in the year of 1960, that my interest in DC comic books grew and blossomed. Already, a pattern of collecting all sorts of things was certainly emerging in my life. By the eventual year of 2004, I had finally managed to achieve a lifetime quest that had taken me fifty years of hard work to even come close to finalising. Over the course of my lifetime, I managed to assemble a collection of absolutely every single DC comic that had ever been printed, right from the very first one in February 1935, all the way up to that date in 2004, when I could officially declare that the collection was complete, and indeed the collection continued onwards, and was constantly updated all the way up to February of 2015, when my involvement finally ceased, and so, in other words, a complete total finite and absolute collected presentation of eighty years worth of DC comics, which comprised the whole entire complete set.

My interest in comics first began way way back when I was seven years old in 1960,  several years before I properly started my DC collection. My very first initial interest in comics was a British children’s comic called “Buster”, which came out weekly.  It was a black and white newspaper style comic, and it contained a weekly comic strip inside, all about “Maxwell Hawke Ghost Hunter”, which utterly fascinated me at the impressionable age of just seven years. It was fascinating and dark and gothic, with this rugged heroic man, teamed up with his beautiful assistant Jill Adair, who would fight all of the supernatural ghosts, demons and surreal creatures, from out of the dark shadows of the most creative imagination, and they would always find a solution and a logical explanation for the hauntings, by the end of the serial, and expose the fraud that had been so cunningly perpetrated, not unike those Scooby Doo plots that came along so many years later.  But this was truly dark and atmospheric and chilling, full of creepy old gothic haunted mansions, riddled with cobwebs and secret passages leading to danger. I can remember a bed, which flipped over to plunge its occupant onto deadly long sharp spikes, and a secret chamber of giant eyes behind a rotting old curtain. I used to collect this comic strip each and every week, and I used to purchase the comic, cut it up into bits, and stick down all the panels into an old school exercise book, with glue, so that I could keep and treasure my own personal collection of them,  never stopping to realise that by doing this, I was irrevocably damaging the value of the original comics.  It was definitely this strong interest in “Maxwell Hawke” that would eventually lead to my interest in the Justice League of America.

At the tender age of eight years old, my Aunty Rita took me down to Blackpool’s famous sea shore, and at the end of the North Pier there was a newsagent and sweetshop that had an old traditional comic book rack, basically on a solid stand like a short red tripod, you then would turn the five sided display in a full circle, and all of its five sides were full from top to bottom, all containing just American comic books.  What caught my eye was the front cover of Justice League of America number seven, “The Cosmic Funhouse”. It really looked fascinating to me. These superheroes were all looking back at their own images, which were all twisted and distorted like in a funhouse mirror.  I eagerly bought it with what little pocket money I had, and must have subsequently read it ten times, over and over. I was hooked for life.

For the next couple of years, I searched high and low for all of the “Justice League of America” comics that I could possibly locate anywhere and everywhere.  I found most of them by my dogged persistence, and what I did was to sacrilegiously remove all of the covers, and glue all of the comics together like a book.  I then made a cardboard binder around them all, and made a sort of collage for the cover by cutting up pieces of all the original glossy front covers, rendering them of course forever worthless, but nevertheless it was a fascinating hobby for an eight year old boy.

By 1964, I thought that I should start collecting properly, and I was by now kicking myself for sticking all of the old ones together. And so I started seriously searching for any comic books that I could find, feverishly wanting complete copies of the ones which I had previously stupidly cut up, and also the older ones, the holy grails, which I had missed out on finding in the period before first discovering their unique magic, and their wonder, and their artistic brilliance. So I reckon that from about the releases of Justice League of America numbers 29 or 30 onwards, I was keeping all of the original comics with their original proper covers. I can remember when their first 80 Page Giant came out, which collected together in one volume, three of the earliest JLA adventures, and how excited I was by this.  By doing whatever research that a young boy could muster, during this period where there was obviously no such thing as internet access, which was over thirty years away in the future, and no easy way of finding out such things, I did eventually discover that the Justice League had started in the pages of another comic called The Brave and the Bold. There were three issues  - numbers 28, 29 and 30, and then by popular demand it was rewarded with its own dedicated comic, starting out with Justice League of America issue number one. If I remember correctly, the first two of the Brave and the Bolds and Justice League Number Five, were all repeated in this 80 Page Giant. I was so excited to be able to read these much longed for earlier stories, I simply couldn’t believe my luck.

Anyway, I carried on searching for these comics, but as a child of twelve years old, what could I really do. It was finally in the year of 1972, that I came down to London on a visit.  At that time I was already DJ’ing on the Northern Soul scene, and I started looking for certain record stores like Record Corner, a famous shop that was specialising in soul music, that sold all of the newer records I needed. It was whilst on this particular trip to London, that I discovered a huge comic book shop in Wardour Street, called “Dark They Were And Golden Eyed”, where I met a friendly young guy, a hippie type with long black hair, called Mike Lake. He was really helpful and also he was particularly very interested that I was so enjoying those Justice League comics, and he assured me that he had a special treat just for me. He unlocked a door and took me downstairs to the shop’s dank and dingy cellar, where there was an entire pile of rough condition and slightly tatty comics from the three Brave and the Bolds, and from JLA issue number one, all the way up to number thirty, with almost none missing.  He was willing to sell them to me for quite a reasonable price, as they weren’t in particularly great condition. I was so excited that I bought them all, and so I went back to Blackpool with a full set of Justice Leagues, and now indeed I could replace the ones which I had originally glued together into my own personal volumes.

There were resulting problems of course, in that most 1960s American comics had come over to England to be nationally distributed over here, but unfortunately some issues had not been. I knew that Justice League comics numbered 25, 26, and 27 hadn’t, and so my collection jumped from number 24 to number 28, but nevertheless I had a full set apart from those three titles, and of course I set out to find copies of them, which was not easy, not by a long shot.

As the 1970s went on, I started collecting all of the other DC comics in earnest, fascinated by Adventure Comics,  Action Comics and Detective Comics, with JLA always being my favourite of course, and inevitably I had always set my heart on getting hold of the early Justice Society of America comics,  which was the precursor of the Justice Leagues from the Golden Age, the 1940s, but at that time I had no hope of ever getting hold of them. I then met a guy called Alan Austin, who had a little basement comic shop in Hackney called Fantasy Unlimited, and he asked me for a wants list of all of the DC comics that I still wanted, and so I went back to Blackpool, and made out my own cards, for every DC title which I had ever seen, using my treasured comic reference book to trace back to when the numbering started, and I put down every number on the cards, say from Numbers one to two hundred and then crossed off all the numbers which I already had in my collection, and then I gave him the cards of the numbers which I wanted and he said that he would try and find them for me.  And, my goodness, how he did indeed.

The next time that I came down to London, I went in to see Alan Austin, and he had already found quite a number of comics from the 1950s and 1960s that were on my wants list, and this was very exciting for me. They were very affordable at this time, only costing £1 or £2 each and it was wonderful. I learned that he died of cancer last year, which made me very sad indeed.

I had stayed in touch with Mike Lake, from Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, and he had told me that he would obtain for me, a copy of every single new American DC comic that got printed, and that I could buy them directly from him, to ensure that I wouldn’t miss out on any titles in the future. He soon left Dark They Were, and he went privately into a new business all on his own, forming a new little fledgling company called Titan Distributors, and in order to do this, he hired himself a little warehouse in Acton, in West London, down a well known road called Askew Road. I used to go down there, because I think I had learnt to drive by this time, and he was importing these fantastic comics directly from America, and he kept a copy of each and every new DC comic, just especially just for me.

A short while after that, Mike went on to open his own comic book shop. He took Titan Distributors to the next level, taking on business partners, and opening up his very first ever shop, in Denmark Street, a street which was known to all and sundry as Tin Pan Alley, near Centrepoint, right smack dab in the middle of central London, and he called it “Forbidden Planet”, named after the famous 1950s sci-fi film classic. He still kept on putting aside the mint newly arrived comics for me, because the ones which they displayed on their shelves, had nasty sticky permanent yellow stickers on every single one of them, which would not peel off, and of course he kept mine in mint condition. What really fascinated me the most about it all, is that he bought in a few second hand comics that were rare, and the shop displayed them up on the main entrance wall above the counter, each one protected in a plastic bag, especially mounted for display, and Mike actually had obtained one of the earliest Detective Comics, number 37, which was an early Batman issue.  Batman had already started in that title ten issues earlier with number 27, and so this was a comic from about 1939.  Anyway, he let me have it for £25 which was a big bargain at that time.

He also obtained for me, three of the treasured All Star Comics containing the legendary Justice Society of America. They were a bit tatty, but then again they were only priced between £10, and £20 each, which was way underpriced, and all because they were in rough condition. I took these home with an unimaginable thrill, and I gleefully crossed them off my list. I felt by now as if my comic collection was really growing in stature.

By 1975, my parents had decided that it was about time for me to move out of their house in Blackpool, and give them some independence, and  so they bought me a little flat in Lindsey Court, adjacent to the night club they owned, The Lemon Tree Club, at Squires Gate corner.  They got me a carpenter to come along, who worked for my Dad, to help me with whatever I needed, and I built two huge cupboards just for my comics, and I put them all into order – all of the JLA in order, all of the Detective Comics, all of the Action Comics, all of the Flash and Green Lanterns etc etc.

And then in 1979 I sold up my little flat in Blackpool, and with my father’s help, bought a small house in North Acton, purchased off two close friends of mine, and once again, whilst doing the house up, I had a two massively huge special cupboards built, this time, from floor to ceiling, as I had already run out of room for my existing comic collection.  And once again, they were all stacked up neatly, and in complete numerical order.

This continued onwards until 1984, when I moved into my current home, a huge three story house in Acton in West London.  In this instance, a spare bedroom had its whole entire wall dedicated to the comics, as they were overflowing by then. I had still been collecting all of the new comics weekly, and by this time, I pretty much had a full run from 1956 right up to 1985. I continued to collect meticulously, all the way up until the year of 1987, when I just inexplicably seemed to lose interest in them, and from then onwards, I didn’t buy any further DC Comics for quite a long period of time. By the year of 1987, I possessed virtually every DC comic from 1956 up to that current date. I was then missing most of the early Golden Age comics, despite buying anything that I could have grabbed with both hands, from Forbidden Planet, every time sporadically that I saw a Golden Age comic, but I hadn’t really yet found an effective way of searching around the world for them.  The internet was still a long long way off, and it wasn’t easy to find any successful sources, not in England. The world back in the 1980s seemed to be a much bigger place, than it is these days, where you can easily access anything that you want. In those days it was just a pipe dream.

So back in 1987, I just totally stopped cold, and I didn’t then purchase another DC Comic until the year of 2001. I was desperately short of money back then, as I had been buying lots of rare Northern Soul records and Doctor Who film prints. At that point, I hadn’t actually even looked at my comic collection for some years, they were all locked up and gathering dust, and so I rang up my old friend Mike Lake, and I asked him if he knew anyone that wanted to buy some old rare comics. He introduced me to a friend of his called Jonathan Browne, a young guy who owned his own comic shop in Richmond, called “They Walk Among Us”. He came over and sat with me, with the Overstreet Price Guide, and he willingly spent two thousand pounds with me, to buy a large number of my comics. He purchased the entire run off me of the House of Mystery and House of Secrets comics. I refused to sell the Justice Society All Star comics,  but I did sell him the Detective number 37 comic, and some early golden age Action and other early Detective Comics.

Unfortunately, taking all of these comics out of their cupboards, just to look through them with Jonathan, had peaked my interest all over again, an interest that had been lying dormant for several years, and so, for the next couple of days, after he’d left with boxes of my precious old treasures, I started to mentally beat myself up. Day after day, I kept looking through my collection again, and of course, I couldn’t bear to face up to the fact that I’d just sold so many of them. I felt like I had sold off my heritage. But then, in a completely unexpected twist of fate, and altogether quite ridiculously, I went back to him, and of course I ended up buying them all back at a much higher price, about fifty percent higher than what he had paid me for them. It was a very silly and very unexpected move for me.

I decided that, because I already possessed half of the DC comics which had ever been made, I could complete the whole set, if I was to really put my mind to it. That was the point when I then made up my mind that, forty years after I first started buying DC Comics, and a full thirty years after I had originally commenced collecting in earnest, that I would once again try to make an effort to fill in all of the missing gaps in my collection. Consequently, once again, I started to research, and constructed a detailed list, and I decided to go through them all, and try to fill in the gaps. The initial problem at this time was that I hadn’t bought any new comics between 1987 and 2001, and so I had fifteen years of newer comics to catch up on, which I would need, to fill in all of the missing modern ones as well as all of the vintage classics.

Firstly I got myself an Overstreet Guide, which lists all of the titles and prices of, supposedly, all the USA comic books ever made. From studying that guide, I was able to discern the titles of all of the ones which I was missing. It turned out that some of the comics which were made in the 1990s had ridiculously small print runs, and so these were just as rare in their own way as the early Golden Age comics. One in particular was called Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children and was a thirty issue series. Only issues one to ten were common,  but from issue number eleven onwards, they were incredibly rare and hard to find. To this very day, putting together a full set of Beautiful Stories is almost as difficult as getting a full set of Action Comics together. But I did it.  By sheer willpower and determination I found a way to do it. I kept scouring around the world, becoming very well known and quite notorious in the process. I went on a number of American websites and was posting on the CGC Members Board and various other comic sites, making myself known to everyone in the industry that I was trying to fill in every DC there had ever been, in order to achieve a hundred percent complete collection.

A woman who was one of the heirs to Pepsi Cola, called Christine Farrell,  had attempted herself to achieve a full collection of all of the DC comics, and she was claiming it to be complete. She had a rare comics supplier called Joe Verenault, buying most of her rare comics as her personal supplier, and when I started asking him questions about some of the more rare and obscure DC titles, he of course checked with her, and she had no clue of the existence of some of them. So with my burning almost compulsive need to always be the best, I compiled a very complete list and I believe that my collection that I ended up with, was the only ever full and complete collection in the entire world. On top of that, it had become the official collection that was recognised by DC Comics themselves. Plus Christine had never ever obtained any of the thousands of promotional comics. Many of these are ridiculously rare and impossible to locate. Of course, I myself was fascinated by these. There was a promotional comic called Supergear, which portrayed Superman with a pair of skis, which was made illegally by a small company, and DC had violently objected to this, and forced them to remove all of their copies and insisted that they destroy them all.  There are apparently only four known copies of these now surviving in the whole world, and I had obtained one of these.  As well as this, “Silly Putty”, the kids toy had made a DC comic called Silly Putty Man – there were two different rectangular shaped comics of that title. There was also a Black and Decker promotional comic to promote one of their vacuum cleaners, called “The Dirtminator”,  based on the Terminator, and was simply the most obscure and rare special promotional comic of all time. And there was also Twisted Metal,  a Sony Playstation game, for which the game’s own fanbase refused to believe the rumours that this promotional comic ever existed. These promotional comics were amongst the rarest in the world and I managed to get almost every single promotional DC comic ever made. I meticulously found out information, and nowhere else had anybody ever listed them all, nobody had even come close.  Studying the supposedly reliable Overstreet Guide, I realized that it had well over three hundred DC promotional comics missing from its own listings. And so eventually,  DC themselves came to me for information on these comics, as I had now become the world’s leading expert on them.

Anyway, in trying to intensely rebuild my collection, after the year 2001, my old friend Mike Lake introduced me to one of Britain’s leading comic experts, a guy who coincidentally had close ties to several members of my family, and he went by the name of Paul Sassienie, and he is also one of Britain’s leading comic book dealers. He had written a fascinating book called “The Comic Book, A History”. Paul runs a business called Comic Biz, and firstly, he knew that I had a number of Golden Ages missing, which he helped me with, and secondly, at almost no profit to himself, he started selling me all of the new DC comics, because he imported them directly from America. He made sure that I missed nothing between the years of 2001 and 2015. The only big chunks that I was now really missing were from those fifteen years between 1987 and 2001,  which I was painstakingly trying to find, by searching through the many comic fairs, trying to find affordable copies to complete all of the gaps.

I met Harley Yee, a jolly plump American Chinese guy with a great sense of humour.  I went on to become great friends with him and he would spend time with me whenever he was over from Michigan on his many frequent visits. There was a regular comic convention in Russell Square that we would go to, with Harley flying in once every couple of months. He always seemed to find a great bargain for me, on comics that I was missing.  Harley could sell snow to the Eskimos. He truly was the most persuasive consummate salesman. With him, I started upgrading my tattier uglier comics.  And where I had really tatty comics or poorly restored ones, I would trade with him, for extra money of course, and I would upgrade my collection to those of much higher condition.

Back to Paul Sassienie, he was going along on business to the San Diego Comic Con, where all of the main comic dealers congregated once each year.  And I now needed to find the money to buy some of the important comics missing from my oustandingly proud collection. And the only way that I could possibly achieve this, was to quickly sell off all of my rare Northern Soul records, which I still bitterly regret doing to this day,  and with all of the money that I could raise from doing this, I gave it all to Paul Sassienie, in cash, and he came back with some amazing comics for me, including the very first ever DC comic from 1935, New Fun issue number one, and some of the early Action Comics, and Wonder Woman issue number one, and Adventure Comic issue number 247 which was a key issue. He filled in oh so many gaps in my collection just with that one single trip.

Harley Yee then found me an Action Comics issue number one, the world’s most valuable comic. It was rather a poor condition brittle copy, but the front cover looked quite fantastic, considering the quality of the interior pages. I remember that it cost thirty thousand dollars, which was a serious bargain. I took it out of the CGC slab which it was sealed in, and I put it in with my own collection. I was never very happy with it though, and a couple of years later, Harley was going to San Diego, and whilst there he did a deal with somebody for a most beautiful restored copy. He took my first brittle copy, and he sold it for a small profit at $35,000 and I had to find him an additional $65,000. It was the absolute bargain of the century, because by then, the full amount of $95,000 was what it had cost me in total, by trading up, for a comic worth circa $250,000.

My beautiful copy of the legendary Detective Comics number 27 was another story altogether. The world’s second most valuable comic contained the first ever appearance of the Batman. I desperately needed to find this holy grail, and somehow, someway I had to find a way to be able to afford it. I had amassed over the years a total of 132 original Doctor Who film prints. These were positive copies of the actual BBC telerecordings, having been struck from the original negatives,  all in original sixteen millimetre metal film cans. I eventually located my copy of Detective 27 at the right price, and I shipped all of my 132 film prints to an American film collector called Steven Sigal, who didn’t actually pay me directly for them, but instead he bought the Detective 27 on my behalf. The inside pages were pristine and white, but the cover contained a nasty rip, and so I sent it to the wonderful Matt Nelson who restored the comic to look almost as new as if it had just been printed yesterday.

Wherever I could, I would buy whatever I could afford. I also bought some wonderful comics restored by the legendary Susan Cicconi, including my Superman number one, and also my All Star Comics numbers three and eight. She was one of the greatest comic restorers of all time. And she was the one who trained Matt Nelson. My New Fun issue number five that she had restored, looked just breathtaking, most particularly for a title where almost all of the copies of the first six issues looked like old rags. Her restoration of that particular 1935 comic was simply the best which I had ever witnessed.

So by the year of 2004, I had whittled the list down to just twelve comics missing, before the collection could be officially declared to be complete. All of the comic dealers around the world knew of my quest. I took a big colour advert in some of the main comic trade magazines, and one by one I started to get the list down to the very last two, which were New Adventure Comics numbers 26 and 27, which I guess would make them the rarest of all of the DC comics. After so much publicity, I soon found a number 27 which just left number 26 to locate. Finally word of my quest resulted in someone coming forward at last. In the hot summer of 2004, Harley Yee collected this last comic for me, from that year’s San Diego Comic Con, and after that convention, he came back to London, bringing my last treasured prize with him.

The collection was complete at last.

On a searingly hot July day in 2004, I went over to my friend Jonathan Browne’s comic shop in Richmond, “They Walk Among Us”, and we staged an amazing historic photo. I brought with me all of the rarest and most valuable DC comics in existence, and we displayed them all on his racks, and I knelt down in front of them all, with my arms outstretched, my shirt soaked from the ninety degree heat.

But the story doesn’t end there. I had taken a partner in the comics, my friend John Barton, mainly because I could no longer afford the thousand pounds a month, needed just to keep up to date with the new comics each and every week, and this was very necessary to keep the entire collection whole and complete. To be brutally honest, completing the collection had utterly wiped me out financially, turning every other asset I had ever acquired during my lifetime, into a trade of some kind or other, in order to reach this once in a lifetime unique goal. The plan was to officially sell the comics to John Barton, but for far far less than their actual value, and for a mere small fraction of what they had actually cost me over the previous forty years, so that I could free up some of the money which I had tied up in them, but on the condition that we would still keep them in my house, for the entire rest of my life. The idea behind this was that they would all become his upon the event of my death, which I still hoped would be a long way off.

But then, in the year of 2010, on DC’s own 75th Birthday, the company decided to create the most massive, massive monolith of a picture book, showing off their seventy five years of magic. Printed by the Rolls Royce of book manufacturers, Taschen Books, this book was bigger than a suitcase. The most perfect prestigious book of all time.

Thanks to the most wonderful DC Comics executive, Steve Korte, who had been in awe of my collection for such a long time, all of the comics photographed inside this book were taken from my personal treasured collection. The book was written by the former chief of DC Comics, Paul Levitz, and I received the most amazing top “thankyou” in the book’s credits.

Taschen had sent over a brilliant photographer from Germany, who made three different three-day trips, flying over purely to photograph my comics. I had Jonathan Browne come in to help us, to handle the fragile comic interiors for me, while I was downstairs in the vaults, pulling out the titles which they had requested, ready to be photographed. In total, they photographed about three thousand comics from my collection. This book became a legend in the field of comic collecting, and gave my collection a pedigree, which was equalled only by the legendary Mile High collection in its fame and notoriety.

However, the final ending to all of this, is not a particularly joyful one. After fifty years of my collecting these amazing and breathtaking comics, DC became almost embarrassed by their rich history, and they heartlessly and cruelly cancelled all of their long running lines and they went back to number one for each of their major titles, with a complete restart, ignoring tradition, and seventy five years of accumulated story history. After running beautifully undisturbed for well over seventy years,  Action Comics ended its run at number 904 and started again at number one.

This was sickening to me. I questioned and doubted that which I had spent my entire life building up. And so I handed over the collection to its co-owner John Barton, and gave him permission for the entire collection to be auctioned off at last, something which he had been nagging me for years to allow him to do. And therefore, after many many years of stubbornly resisting such an eventuality, I finally caved in and allowed them to be sold. As things stand right now, the entire collection has all totally gone from out of my house, not a single comic left, apart from a few duplicates, all to be held safely by Sotherby’s Auction House. The eventual outcome has yet to be learned, but as I haven’t owned them since 2008, I have now become somewhat emotionally detached from them. My Mother will never forgive me for letting them go, but what’s done is done, sadly. And to be brutally honest, I feel cheated by DC itself, and consider that their callous act of crapping all over their lifelong dedicated fans was the very cause of the events that have finally finished me off. And so with a heavy heart, reluctantly I went back to collecting my beloved Northern Soul and watching my beloved Doctor Who, and I purposefully put my comic collecting days behind me, after taking up such a huge fifty year chunk of my life.

Having said all of that, I do still unreservedly and utterly adore all of those early Justice League Of America comics. Especially those written and drawn by Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky. I still get goosebumps at the very memory of the wonderful “Crisis On Earth One”. These comics would always always be the very quintessence and epitome of my own Silver Age youth.