boomtown

Nick Cardy was doing some great stuff for the Teen Titans in the late 60s/early 1970s

Marvel Feature 12 FN $4.00 Tomb of Dracula 52 FN $2.00 Tomb of Dracula 55 FN $2.00 Tomb of Dracula 56 FN/VF $3.00 Tomb of Dracula 57 FN $2.00

That picture frame era of Iron Man was my favorite period for his book .

This was the first book my parents bought for me. It was a 2 part story, and I didn't pick up issue #37 until the mid 1970's, around 10 years later. 30+ years later, while checking out ebay in the early years, I saw the original color separations for the cover on ebay and picked it up. Haven't seen another Avengers color sep since. Around that same time I started collecting original art and one of the 1st pages I saw was my favorite page from this book. I was down at a show in Houston, and little short on cash after picking up a few Mignola Hellboy sketches, so I didn't pick it up. Wasn't concerned, I thought this stuff was all available whenever I decided to get it. I called the dealer back the next week and it had been sold. I haven't ever seen another page from this book in the 20+ years.

Your Tomb of Dracula #10 and Spider-Man 129 are your big dollar books. You have a handful of other Spider-Man books that will do well, along with a bunch of filler stuff that will definitely sell.

Always loved Perez work, so I'm really hoping that safari outfit was the idea of somebody else. It seems to have appeared around the Shooter era, hoping it was him who designed that costume and told Perez to go with it.

Is that some type of whiteout or paint on the bottom right corner photo? That could be a real problem.

Big Wonder Man fan! He's always had some great background stuff that Marvel just never seemed to work with. Should make a great lighthearted heroic/comedy series. And yes, I never thought I would be able to unload these things, sitting untouched for the last 30 years. I ordered 100 of these back in the glut years, and somehow still have all 100.

Would it even have been close if they had stuck with Kubert as the artist?

Yep. Seeing Spider-Man swinging around the city, and the sequence where he was learning how, there was a realization that special effects had finally caught up to the comics. It just felt like the time had arrived finally.

It's always possible, but the other buyer seemed legit. He mentioned he was picking up for himself and a group of collectors to split it up. Didn't really oversell it much, just said it was legit and to get there in the morning so you can get out before things started getting shady. Even the seller seemed ok, he was pretty upfront that the rent had been defaulted and he just needed the books cleared out. I have no doubt that he wanted the stuff gone, more than he wanted to make a killing on the comics.

I talked to a guy from El Paso, TX and he needed a small warehouse cleared of comics in the late 1990s. Wanted $800 for it all to be cleared. I planned on taking a trailer down from San Antonio and he told me I needed a ladder, a dolly and a truck, a 26ft U-Haul. He had a 20x20 building filled, stacked 8 foot high with boxes, everything you could imagine from the late 80s-early 90s, still in distributor boxes. The more I started thinking about it just couldn't get the thought of cases of Magnus 25, 26, 27 etc. out of my mind. I was backing out and he said for an extra $50 he would have a guy there to help me load. I still was backing out and he gave me a guys number that had just loaded up a trailer and left for Colorado. I called the guy and he was very happy with what he had loaded, Marvels, Valiants, Image, DC in unopened cases. I was concerned that he had picked the good stuff clean but he said that it wasn't really possible because of the way it was stacked, it was just too much work to sort and search. So he starts telling me I should get there as early as possible and to get out before it gets dark. He said he was still loading at night and that it wasn't a very nice area. His thought were that the books may have been bought through money laundering. I relayed the info to my friend who was going to go with me and he mentioned you don't want to be that close to Juarez after dark and he backed out. That was my one that got away.