tomo

I hear you. The best thing I've ever found at a yard sale was a SPJO #153 with mustaches and beards for everyone! My mom also found an Avengers #143 with every conceivable coupon or mail order subscription form cut out of it. I've definitely had better luck with estate sales than garage sales.

I've been building a Superman Silver Age collection for the last couple of years, and I've noticed that I'm getting a lot more competition recently when a nice string of VF-ish 12 cent books go up on eBay. Thankfully, most of the keys I already have, so now it's just filling in the in-between issues. Previously, I could snag a nice run of 7.0-8.0 books for VG guide pricing, now it looks like they're creeping up into the fine pricing range. It's an anecdotal tale, with a sample size of one, but that's been my experience over the last 6-8 months or so.

My wife was at an art show over the weekend, and there was a couple of vendors at an adjacent show that had some comic books for sale. I found this for $5. It's beat to heck, but complete with the cover still attached. I've never had the chance to own a copy of this book yet, so I snatched it up. It now proudly has a place in my collection right next to my equally beat to heck, (and equally loved) copy of Avengers #8, with the first appearance of the greatest Avengers villain of all time...Kang!

I have a copy, but not as in as nice a condition as yours. Sharp copy!

When I first decided to focus my rambling collection hoard, the Superman Flash races were the first set I tried to complete. My sister at the time worked for a framing company and did a killer job setting these up for display! I love the stories that these covers tell in a linear fashion with the starting line with Superman #199, all the way to the finish line with World's Finest #199.

New to the boards, so this estate sale find was from right around the holidays. It was for a resale shop that the original owner had passed away, and the heirs were getting rid of his inventory with an estate sale. I guess his shop started out as a camera shop, but morphed into anything he wanted to sell over the years, which included comics. All in all, over three floors of fun items to look through. I could see from the pics ahead of time that there were some Famous First Editions in the mix, which I didn't have any of. So that's what I headed out for. Was 43rd in line, and saw a couple of other "comic book guys" in line ahead of me, so was sure that it was going to be slim pickings by the time I got in. Boy was I wrong... I did manage to get a complete collection of Famous First Editions in VF/NM to NM condition, as there was a ton of these. Also picked up some other Treasury sized books included the Supes/Spider-Man and Howard the Duck, although their condition was Fine at best. Missed the Superman/Muhammad Ali book by seconds as it was snatched from the table just as I got there. Also got three copies of Lois Lane #106 (although only one was in decent shape, maybe 6.5), a couple of early Punishers mags (Preview #2 and Super Action #1), a few Batman giant-sized from the late 60's, and a slew of Lois Lane reader copies to fill in holes. That there, I would have been happy with, but in searching through the 3rd floor after I had been there from over 2 hours I found an untouched box of comics. What was inside made my year!! I'm a Superman collector, and had been looking to complete my run of Adventure Comics featuring Supergirl. Right there on top was issue #381...and behind it was 382, 383, 384, etc.. I couldn't believe my luck when there was every issue of the Supergirl run (#381-424). They weren't stored in bags and backers, so condition ranged from F to VF, but what a find!! And to make it even better, there was also complete runs of the Black Orchid and Spectre issues that followed. I managed to find an empty longbox and had it filled with these comics, plus a Superman marionette puppet and blow up punching bag in their original boxes. When I went to check out, the guy looked at my box and said "how about a $100?" Sounded good to me!!