EastEnd1

Of course I have to take care of the X-Men fans... #381 came with a free Topps X-Men card. Mine turned out to be a Halle Berry Storm...

So the book right on top was a Punisher Vol 3 #3, featuring a Daredevil guest appearance, and polybagged with a "Marvel Knights / Marvel Boy Genesis Edition" free comic. Another great Tim Bradstreet cover on this one, with a pretty cool skull in the background made out to appear as a large moon...

I'm going to jump into the box from May 2000 now. This was one of the rare boxes that actually did arrive pretty damaged... bad crunches on two corners, one of which split wide open! This box I did open at the time to check on the books in case I had to return any damaged ones. But amazingly enough, all the books were fine! Kudos to styrofoam peanuts! So I just taped up the bad corner and put the box in storage with the rest of them... until now...

I'm still waiting for another order of books to come back from CGC, but what I think I'm going to do is skip ahead of those boxes and just start showing the latest group of boxes I've opened with the books just in their raw "out of the box" condition. Some of them will ultimately be sent in for grading, and I'll re-post those books down the road when they're graded. I'll also post a lot more books from each box as I've come to learn that there are a lot of varied tastes in the modern age and one thing I was pretty good at when I was ordering was variety... my interests were all over the place, and all genres and publishers wound up in the boxes. So hopefully there should be something coming for everyone. And if you do have very specific collecting tastes, maybe some of these "other" books I'll be posting will catch your interest and get you thinking about trying something different. The modern age was/is definitely very rich in diverse material!

I haven't come across any Scooby-Doos yet, but if there were any new Scooby -Doo series that came out during the period I wasn't opening boxes, I definitely would have ordered at least the first issues. Scooby-Doo takes me right back to my grammar school days and would have been very nostalgic for me. Will keep an eye out and post any I come across!

That was a great sale... I picked up quite a few Crippen's at what seemed like high prices at the time, but now bargains by today's standards. Can't say the same is likely to happen with the Promise books.

From my recent anecdotal experience, it does feel like upward price movement is starting to return. This is the time of year though when prices do tend to increase, so it's still to be seen if the trend has staying power. Overall though, I too am optimistic and am in the market trying to buy the key books that are high on my list.

Hey, nice to meet a fellow Westfielder! Fun to compare notes on our experiences... looks like they line up pretty well. And before I say much more, if there are other Westfield alums with stories to tell, definitely feel free to post them here... no derail concerns at all... more like color commentary! I'd forgotten about the original art on the catalog covers. Definitely drove me to order a few comics as well. It's true that getting the order from Westfield each month was like opening Christmas presents and I almost felt the same when I got the new catalog each month... was a lot of fun to page through and see what was coming out in the coming months. Again, there was no internet so getting forward looking info wasn't as easy back then. I think I threw all those catalogs out after I completed my order, but I'll see if I can track one down and try to post it. I'm pretty sure I have some of my old order forms that even pre-date these boxes, that maybe I can show as well. I also had "Mary" as my customer service rep... so funny you remember her name. I've just been reading it on the receipts I've found as I open these boxes. Don't think I had a need to talk to her more than two or three times. Thanks for the stories...

Cool nostalgia. I noticed that there were a lot of variant covers for this title, but this was the only one I ordered. The Westfield order form would list all the different variant covers, and maybe at the beginning of the trend I was ordering a lot of them. But by this time, I'd come to the conclusion that they were all just a scam to extract more money from my wallet... though I always did appreciate that they could be worth more money in the long run. Think I just decided that I'd focus my money-making efforts on the older books rather than the variants.

I'm a boomer and have always found Captain America boring. Though I'm also a Superman guy, so what do I know

And that's it for now... next up, March 2001!

And what better way to close out a box than a pretty Uncanny X-Men cover...

Something about the lines on this Daredevil cover really caught my eye...

Another great George Perez cover on this Avengers... again, Perez is my favorite all-time Avengers artist...

And of course, no box is complete without your mainstream Marvel superhero titles... here's the Amazing Spider-Man that was right on top...

And for those of you that prefer the regular old Spawn, we've got that too from June 1998...

Spawn was super-hot at the time, and looks like I was buying Spawn spin-off books too...

I had to go hunting for the title of this comic... it's Battle Chasers #1 with a pretty nifty Joe Maduriera cover. I was ordering at least one copy of just about every Image first issue at this time...

Now I had no idea who this character was... but that is one heck of a modern GGA cover ! You know it's good girl art because of the angel's wings (bet you were too distracted to notice those weren't you!).

This one was kind of cool... a fairly hard to find Cartoon Network promotional comic...

June 1998 also brought us the first appearance of the Black Flash...

We'll kick things off with this great Captain America "Skrull" cover...

Good evening folks... time to take a peek into the June 1998 box. It was a larger order, with Westfield packing the comics side-by-side in a larger box, and it yielded a bigger group of 9.8 books.

Sure thing... I'll try to take a few more pictures of that with the next box I open. There will be a few more intervening boxes that I've already photographed before then though. It's kind of what I've been showing... the comics are centered in the box with styrofoam peanuts all around and on top, but there's a few more details I can show.

Ah, much better... now I understand what you were getting at!