Comics will be worthless in 1 year

[Bonds25]

LMAO! Keep 'em coming!

[snizzenfixit]

LMAO! Keep 'em coming!

 

Hehe, can't think of any more right off hand. I suppose I could make some up but truth is stranger than fiction so they probably wouldn't be as good. I will think on it and try to remember some others over the next days. I am sure there are more. Life with Tyler is not exactly normal but it is NOT boring either.

 

Phil

 

 

[keithdagen]

NAME: Keith Dagen (original board handle, huh?)

 

AGE: 28 years old, rapidly approaching 29.

 

FIRST MINTAGE: Houston, TX

 

CONDITION:

 

There is a recent pic of me in the Water Cooler, posing with a deer I shot, but for the squeamish, I'm the guy on the left.

 

 

CURRENTLY SLABBED: Dallas, TX, where I have lived for 26 of my 28 years, not including 4 years attending Harding University in Searcy, AR. Go Dallas Stars

 

MARITAL STATUS: Single again, married at age 23 and at age 26, my wife decided to trade up (in her opinion).

 

OCCUPATION: General Ledger Manager for one of the largest cities in Texas, fully licensed as a Ceritified Public Accountant. For grins, I passed the CPA exam all four parts on the first try.

 

HOBBIES: Main interest in that northern board, with really cool coins like:

 

 

Secondary hobbies include reading anything Star Wars, books and comics, as well as playing my guitar below. I am a huge Ozzy Osbourne fan, as well as other hard rock bands of the 70's and 80's.

 

 

FIRST COMIC PURCHASED: Star Wars Giant Size #1, at one point had X-Men from Uncanny 141 to 300 and all related mutants in that time frame, Spidey from 238 to about 340, Cerebus from 2 to about 225, all Groo books, most of the GI Joes and Transformers, and still have full runs of Bone and Star Wars (Marvel and Dark Horse)

 

LIFE'S TOO SHORT: Because of the experiences I went through during my divorce, I spend a lot of time in activities at my local church. My main focus is a Divorce Recovery ministry, which I facilitate with a partner each week. I also enjoy volunteering with kids' ministries, including Parent's Nights Out and Youth Camps here in Texas.

[snizzenfixit]

For those that do not know, the coin pictured above is toned. Toned coins are sought after by many collectors. So just because the coin looks "Dirty" does not make it less collectible. Ummm by the way Keith ... The guy standing next to you? If he had a little darker skin? He could pass as Freddy Fender's brother ... Eddy Fender.

 

Phil

 

 

[keithdagen]

If you ever visit the boards across the street, the guy in the pic is HartlandMan, when I met him.

 

And I spent a lot of time magic-markering that Franklin.

[snizzenfixit]

If you ever visit the boards across the street,

 

Ohhhhh, that is not likely to happen any time soon. I lurked over there a couple of times and I got really scared. There are folks over there that can scare me to death with just a single post. Snizzy don't play dat.

 

And I spent a lot of time magic-markering that Franklin.

 

I collect Cameo Proof Franklins myself, but I know a nicely toned MS Frankie when I see it.

 

Phil

 

 

[blowout]

murph is awesome

[murph0]

I agree!!

[keithdagen]

Nice title swap there Murph0

[murph0]

What can I say? Quick thinking pays big dividends

 

Brian

[keithdagen]

I would have waited until the thread had more responses, then made the switch.

[chromium]

My first name is Allan, the rest of my name is some incomprehensible foreign jive I won't subject you to.

I'm 34, married and have a 15 month old son with another on the way. I lay claim to being the first foreigner on this board (Canadians don't really count as foreigners, hehe) and carry the title 'Token Foreigner' with a misplaced sense of pride.

 

My parents lived all over Europe when I was a kid and I got interested in DC and Marvel comics living in England in the 70's. I had the strangest taste in comics back then, because of the roughly 250 that survived, none are now worth more than a few dollars no ASM, no Byrne X-men, no Hulk 181, but plenty of Iron Man,Action Comics, Super Friends, Black Goliath, Champions, Legion of Super-heroes etc

 

When I was 16 my parents settled in Belgium and a few years later I went to University on a boxing scholarship.

I lost all interest in comics and became a record- and CD collector

I majored in English and Dutch and after 4 years I got my degree, I foolishly decided to turn pro-fighter. I lost my first bout and nearly got killed in my second fight. I had blackouts for more than three months afterwards and decided I wasn't cut out to earn my living with my fists and went back to college where I started on another 3 year course, this time majoring in French and History. I received no scholarship this time so during the weekends I worked as a steward on the international trains to various European destinations.

 

At 25 and after 7 years of university I finally made the step into the 'real world' and was hired by a large Belgian internet firm to translate all of their websites from Dutch into English and French. The pay was good and the hours very flexible, but the work was boring, so I went to live in Dublin, Ireland for a year where I worked as an assistant at the Germanic Languages department at Trinity College.

 

On one of my holidays back to Belgium, I met and fell in love with my future wife and moved back.

I now teach languages part time at a local high school, and I am a researcher for a national newspaper, I also work as a translator/PR man for a Belgian chocolate firm that has set up shop near Boston, MA and is trying to conquer America

 

About two years ago a fire destroyed most of the apartment where my wife and I lived and we only got a small portion back from the insurance company, I lost more than 7000 record albums and CDs and my wife lost a lot of family heirlooms. Picking up the pieces wiped us out financially and emotionally, but we carried on (my wife was pregnant at the time of the fire, luckily nobody was home when it occurred). I was at an all time low, because not only was my home gone and all the souvenirs and memories from my entire life spent all over Europe, my prized music collection was destroyed, never to be replaced. So in this hour of darkness, I turned to my childhood love; comics.

My mother has always kept the comics I bought as a child when we were living in England, and I rekindled the flame. Maybe I used the collecting as a crutch for not having to think too much about all the bad stuff that happened, but it worked. We bought a new house, are managing financially and during the last 18 months I have bought about 5000 comics. I haven't bought a single CD since the fire, but still have about 3000 albums that the firemen managed to save.

 

I'm one of the few people in the entire country that collects American comics, so I have no other avenue than buying on eBay or from other collectors. The first year I bought mainly modern stuff as I had about 20 years of catching up to do, but the last 6 months I have sold off about 1500 of my modern books and have taken the less-traveled road of collecting Silver and Bronze Marvel. I'm happy I don't suffer from the 'perfection' affliction so I'm quite happy with books in mid-grade (nor could I afford to buy high-grade Silver or Bronze).

I spend about $300 on comics each month (I tell my wife $150), but I will have to cut down as our second child is coming May and we need to renovate the attic into a playroom.

 

This board (and the people) has become quite important to me, as I never get to meet any other comic fan in real life, nobody to share the hobby with or just 'talk funny books'

My job for the chocolate company lets me fly to the US about three times a year, but there is hardly any time to go to a comic shop or a convention.

Having only been collection seriously for about a year I'm still in the 'full-run' faze. I'm mostly in it for the stories, then art, then value and am working full runs of following series ; Amazing Spider-man, Fantastic Four and Incredible Hulk. I just recently managed to complete a full run (all three volumes, all specials, one-shots etc..) of Iron Man, my childhood hero.

 

I hardly buy any new comics at all, but do like most of the Vertigo line and the ABC (Alan Moore) books.

And that's all I have to say about that right now

 

[Guest]

(a) What weight class did you fight in?

 

(b)If you don't mind me asking, what chocolate company? Is it a retail outlet they've set up here? I live in Boston, so I'm extra curious.

[Joanna]

Well, it took me awhile to find this thread. I saw it earlier, then it disappeared. Arch didn't make a big announcement about a fight in the bio thread, and the Murph-worshipping thread was one I didn't remember, so eventually (duh) I figured it out. Okay, so here I am:

 

I was born and raised in a small town in Wisconsin. I loved comics as a kid, especially Supergirl and Lois Lane. Mom made me a Superman costume (it was cooler to wear underwear on the outside, than a dumb skirt) and then made a second one so that when I had a friend over, she'd have one, too. My friend always hated the second Superman costume because the underwear were my brother's cast-offs and they had that "weird" panel in the front.

 

I stopped collecting when I hit my teens and all but forgot about comics until a neighbor/friend of mine reintroduced me. Superman had just died, I saw it on the news, and I had to know how that could happen. He loaned me the Doomsday run, and I saw at once how comics had changed. I was intrigued. I gave him a ride to the comic shop when the next issue came out and within a short time I was hooked, just like when I was a kid. I fell in love with Perez's reboot of Wonder Woman and that became my specialty.

 

Professionally, I've been all over the place. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin/Madison, I moved to LA to work in the film industry. But a film degree didn't mean much here, so I ended up working as a technical illustrator in aerospace (in the proposal department, donut!) for several years. Unfortunatelly, I injured my hands from repetitive motion (drew everything with a mouse, and blew out my right hand. To this day, I use my left hand for all mouse-work, despite being overwhelmingly right-handed).

 

While I had been working as an artist, I'd been training as a voice actress, and when I had to leave the art department permanently, I decided to try voice-over as a career. I did that for several years, doing all sorts of commercial and industrial stuff. Probably the most famous thing I did was a voice on the animated cartoon "Rugrats" (I played a Swedish dog groomer).

 

After awhile my VO career kinda stalled and I hooked up with a friend to write for television. We wrote our spec scripts, schmoozed our way through Hollywood and eventually ended up as staff writers on the show "Weird Science". When that gig got cancelled, my writiing partner wasn't all that interested in continuing, because she wanted to play drums in a band, so we split up and I moved on to other projects. I sort of drifted for awhile, draining my resources, doing occasional VO jobs, writing assignments (that's when I wrote a couple of issues of Secret Files for DC) and so on.

 

Recently, I wrote a distance education course on comedy for Education-To-Go, a very large distributor of on-line classes (around 1700+ schools have access to my class). While waiting for the enrollment to build (it takes awhile for classes to get going) I've been selling off various collections of stuff on ebay.

 

Not counting "Weird Science", I haven't had a day since the 80's, and I'm not about to start now. I hated working in an office (again, with the exception of WS -- an office at Universal Studios is just too much fun to be considered work).

 

I've got a few novels in rough draft form, have written tons of short stories, children's books, etc. but never got any published (never really tried). It's on my to-do list to get a literary agent. And if I can find the time, I'd love to work on the screenplays I have roughed out. I belong to the Screen Actors Guild, AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America, and through the latter, I get to see all the movies for free over the next few months. I can get a friend in free, too -- anyone want to see a movie at a studio?

 

Well, that's about it. I've got a pretty dull life right now, but that can always change.

 

-- Joanna

[chromium]

What weight class did you fight in?

 

during my active years I was a super middleweight,the trouble was that I had to be very careful not to drift into light heavyweight weight-wise. I was always having to slim down as I'm pretty tall and tended to drift into a higher cathegory by just looking at food ,but hey it's 12 years ago and I have only gained 30 lbs since then

 

what chocolate company

 

Glad you asked, this way I don't have to feel like I'm advertising

check out the link Nirvana Chocolates

 

Mmmmmmm yummy

[chromium]

I played a Swedish dog groomer

 

Ilsa Ümlaut ?

[Joanna]

Good lord, you even know the name of my character?

 

Yes, I am Ilsa, the dog broomer.

 

-- Joanna

[chromium]

I play in a national quiz-league, it's like sports for geeks

I think our team had was asked that question a few months ago...

[Joanna]

Wow, I'm a trivia question? That's SO cool!!!!

 

-- Joanna

[Guest]

30 pounds in 12 years removed from being a fighter and working for a chocolate company? I'd say you're doing pretty well

 

I'll keep my eyes peeled for the chocolates. Fine chocolate is one of my indulgences. Is it sold under a different brand name in Belgium? My girlfriend's sister is returning from Belgium within a day or two and she's bringing back a (hopefully) big sampling.