ronvogel

Thanks to those who offered a grade for the X-Men 14 I posted yesterday. Continuing with some books that are hopefully interesting to everyone, I offer up Batman 83:

Hello all - I'm new to these forums but I've been giving more serious thought lately to finally getting some of my better issues graded. I've always been anxious about the process but at least I'm now in the right place to learn more. I've got some decent books to share and possibly submit - I'm hoping to get some opinions on a few of them. Without further ado, X-Men 14...

3.0 - the masthead has been highly damaged by BRB

Hi, my name is Ron. I live in Westchester, NY. I'm new here, but I'm a collector from quite a while ago who has recently been giving thought to grading some of my key issues. I started collecting in the late 70s/early 80s with the Micronauts (Michael Golden artwork was amazing!), buying at Mike's Comic Hut in Queens under the UA Quartet. I bought my copy of ASM #3 from Mike, paying the $125 in installments. In high school, I worked at Comic Book Heaven in Queens Village, earning $40 for a Saturday then spending $50. In college I worked at Starship Excalibur in Providence (RIP Fred Ganczar) and again probably spent more than I earned. Finally as a young man in the mid 90s I helped my buddy Jimmy out at Chameleon Comics running M:tG tournaments. All the while I fed my addiction to graphic media. I "invested" in copies of the new issues and spent when I could on some decent silver and golden age books. By the late 90s I was growing disenchanted with gimmick cover variations and diminishing value to the stories and artwork. Rob Liefeld and the popularity of his plagiarized panels finally did me in and my boxes have sat pretty much untouched since. I'd figured my books would eventually get passed down to my kids, but neither of them have really taken to comic books, even with their love of the MCU movies. So now I start looking at them and wondering if maybe some of these might not be worth grading... but the process has always scared me (moreso with baseball cards, but that's for a different forum...). It's going to happen though - I owe it to my family to get a sense of what these might be worth. I used to pore over each edition of Overstreet, looking for what moved up or down in value. I kept a ledger (long gone) of all my books and where there were gaps in my collections. Now, I'm still a fan of some of the artists from back then - Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson, Frank Miller, Bill Sienckewicz come to mind, but I haven't bought a comic in decades. They just don't live up to my childhood memories.