Sold my collection (sans pedigrees) to Flaming Telepath’s Comicana Direct

[PedigreeMan]

(NOTE: What follows is my usual intense navel gazing post about huge tracts of my life that many people will no doubt find utterly boring. There’s nothing in the following that substantively adds to the very short summary provided in the topic header above. Anyone who comments along the lines of, “Blah blah, too long, can someone summarize?” has been duly notified. Might I suggest going to read some Twitter feeds instead?

 

 

And with that … on with the show!)

 

I loved comic books from the age of 10 until 13. GI Joe and Secret Wars. Transformers and the Squadron Supreme mini. Byrne’s Fantastic Four and Roger Stern’s Avengers and Denny O’Neil’s Iron Man and Mark Gruenwald’s Cap. Miller’s second run on Daredevil that I was too young to appreciate at the time. The New Universe with that one weird title, “Fizzy Force.” Wanting desperately to get into DC’s line of books and searching high and low for every back issue of Crisis AND its crossovers. I figured that was as good a starting place as any. It didn’t take long to mark the last one off my wantlist (Swamp Thing #44 -- barely even a crossover), and I waited for months to read any of it because I wanted everything to be perfect, which for some reason at the time meant waiting until the summer months. I still remember finishing the last book in the pile -- History of the DC Universe #2 -- around 2:30am some hot July night that summer of 1988, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” playing on WVVX and me practically speed reading the book so I could finish it before the song ended. Yeah, I was a weird 13 year old. I attended my first Chicago Comicon that same summer, a con that was marked by a viewing of the very first X-men cartoon (complete with an Australian Wolverine) and a run-in with a man who was (and still is!) my own personal version of Michael Jordan -- Gary “Moondog” Colabuono. I interrupted him during what was probably negotiations for a six figure deal to ask when he was going to be on the “Steve and Johnnie” radio show again. We didn’t chat for more than a minute about this, but I will never forget how kind and gracious he was to that silly 13 year old for those 60 seconds.

 

Yeah, it was a good run from 10 until 13.

 

In October I turned 14, and my attitude towards comic books took a subtle, almost imperceptible shift. I was still buying practically everything that came out week after week, but for some reason the To-Read pile just kept getting higher and higher. Looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, the number of books that I truly looked forward to reading became less and less with each passing month. But I still kept on buying.

 

The next ten years brought the same life changes that most people experience during their teens and early twenties: College, love, moving on and up (and out!), marriage. Nothing spectacular but nothing overly bad, either. I lived life and grew up (somewhat). But through it all I was still buying my weekly comics. The To-Read pile had by then grown to numerous To-Read long boxes (seriously, I don’t think I read more than a dozen issues from 1996 - 1998, a time frame during which I bought thousands of them), but still … I. Kept. On. Buying. There were a number of occasions where I did the math and calculated just how many hundreds of free hours I would have needed to clear the backlog, and a couple of actual instances during this time where I seriously tried to do just that, but in the end it was a losing venture. And yet … every week I found myself back at my LCS picking up a stack of 30+ books, only about 5 of which I cared about and only about 2 or 3 of which I actually read immediately.

 

I got my first “real” job in 1999 and started making some decent scratch for the first time in my life. At that point the training wheels on my collecting habit came off. I bought almost 8,000 books during that one year alone, long box after long box of Marvel and DC back issues stretching back into the 1960s. I was truly on track to “get them all,” and didn’t care who or what I burned in the process. Every book crossed off of the want list (by now occupying a medium sized loose-leaf notebook) brought me one step closer to that goal, and it was that goal that really became the all encompassing force in my life. But I still wasn’t reading any of them! Heck, I don’t even think I took more than 2% of them out of their sleeves to simply flip through them! I was in pure hoarding mode by then, and there was really no end in sight.

 

I’ve always been hesitant to call this imbalance an “addiction,” if only because I never hit what a true addict would call “rock bottom.” From about 2000 until 2008 I did slowly ween myself down on the weekly habit -- going from about 120 books a month down to 35 -- so there was still some semblance of insight and self-control present in my character. I can’t really say what caused this subtle change in habit. During this time I definitely got more into pedigrees, which, by sheer virtue of their cost, prevented me from going as crazy with their purchase as I did with the weekly issues or even with the back issues. I also know that the first round of books that I dropped were ones that I hadn’t enjoyed in many, many years, so there was zero remorse when they were removed from the pull list, and when the locusts didn’t arrive or the sky didn’t fall because I wasn’t collecting X-Force or Thor any more, well, that just made it that much easier to drop other books. I was on my way to restoring balance in life, but it was taking time. And sadly, by the end of 2008, even 35 books a month was too much. Something really needed to change.

 

Then in May of 2009 I decided to do some spring cleaning …

[namisgr]

[BlowUpTheMoon]

Good so far.

[comicparadox]

 

Then in May of 2009 I decided to do some spring cleaning MANNUP…

[TheWatcher]

I'd hate to know how much shipping to the UK is going to be for all those books

[lizards2]

[Pirate]

he used Chuck's shipping service

[PurpleZeke]

Ok, this has my attention!

[Silver Surfer]

I'd hate to know how much shipping to the UK is going to be for all those books

 

Yeah how many are we talking about? 8,000 books in one year!

[999ghosts]

Adding this one to my forum link list...

[dupont2005]

Moar

[thirdgreenham]

Where is this going.....?

 

 

 

[godquest]

I'm In

 

 

 

[Green]

PM sent!

 

(to nick)

[PedigreeMan]

By the spring of 2009 I had accumulated more piles of unsorted, unbagged comic books than ever before. All of the collecting years prior had at least found me assimilating the weekly purchases into the main collection, but even that had gone by the wayside as I essentially fought an inner battle between the fear of quitting and the fear of remaining in the hobby. Two doors in front of me -- one saying, “Do not enter,” the other “No exit” -- and me paralyzed to just barrel through one of them and live with the decision. But by May I had said, “Enough’s enough with this clutter,” and started the long process of at least clearing away the three foot high stacks. (Yeah, I was a junior Edgar Church in training then.) It was something I was used to -- albeit not on that large of a scale -- so I went into it not expecting much; I still expected to be standing in the room with two doors by the end of the ordeal, my attitudes toward the hobby unchanged.. But that month also turned out to be something of a formative one for me. I don’t know if everyone eventually experiences one event in their lives that makes them take a cold, hard look at how they’ve been living, where they’ve been, and where they’re going, but in May of 2009 I certainly did. For the first time in my then 34 years of existence I began to get completely honest with myself, and actually started effectuating some small changes for the better. And all truth be told, the simple organization and clearing of the comic clutter stemmed directly from this newfound energy, but since I was still in baby-steps mode, I didn’t think anything more would come of it. At least not anything profound.

 

Boy, was I wrong.

 

For about 4 days that month I spent upwards of 6 to 8 hours each day clearing the piles, and for each book and series that got organized I found myself subconsciously asking, “What is the point of keeping this?” It was nothing intentional, mind you, just a state of mind that had rapidly developed and couldn’t have been suppressed even if I had wanted to. And since I was in complete honesty mode, I couldn’t hide the truth, either: For literally every book that I bagged and collated that week I answered the question of “What is the point of keeping this?” with one word. “Nothing.” For the first time in over 20 years, the prospect of being without a portion of my comic book collection did not scare the c--p out of me. Granted, at this point we’re only talking about a pretty small portion of the collection, but once a door like that is opened, it tends to swing open further pretty rapidly.

 

By the end of the 4 days I had already mentally segregated a chunk of the collection for sale. “If you can get a quarter apiece for each book in these 5 long boxes, would that make you happy?” “Yes,” was the only answer that came back. But then something even stranger happened. I began looking at the other boxes in my collection and asking what was essentially the same question. I was surprised at the answer: “Yes, I could live without a huge portion of these countless boxes that I have hoarded for almost 25 years.” What was once unthinkable had now become plausible; I had busted through the door that read “No exit” and couldn’t believe how I had been so afraid of something so simple. Yes, I would still keep the pedigrees, and those titles that still meant something -- the GI Joes and Squadron Supremes and mid-80s Avengers and Fantastic Fours and all of the drek from the New Universe and The Crisis and all of its crossovers and a bunch of other stuff that amounted to about 10% of the hoard as a total (I guess Sturgeon really was right) -- but the rest of it? Gone baby, gone. It was truly that easy.

 

Freedom never tasted so sweet...

[Flaming_Telepath]

I'd hate to know how much shipping to the UK is going to be for all those books

 

Yeah how many are we talking about? 8,000 books in one year!

 

Substantially more than that by now, I can tell you.

[towards2112]

I'd hate to know how much shipping to the UK is going to be for all those books

 

Yeah how many are we talking about? 8,000 books in one year!

 

Substantially more than that by now, I can tell you.

 

How's the back holding up ??

[PedigreeMan]

I spent a good portion of that summer getting the collection ready for sale. Throughout the past decade or so I had become quite lax in my record keeping and did not have anything approaching a complete list of the collection. That seemed like a decent place to start. Over the years I had stumbled across various websites and computer programs that were supposed to assist collectors like us organize our hoards, but after playing around with a few of them I found them lacking. Too slow, too cumbersome, too inaccurate -- I had 25,000 books here to catalog and did not want to waste my time with clunky interfaces. Around this time I was poking around the website of Lone Star Comics and became rather impressed with their collection tracking pages. I guess when you’re a huge buyer of books it pays to have an efficient method for sellers to enter what they’re hoping to sell. I struck up an email correspondence with Conan Saunders discussing what I was looking to do and asked him if there was some sort of bulk upload facility on the site. “Alan, I have just the thing you’re looking for,” he said. Turned out he was putting the finishing touches on a “Submit Your Collection” section of the website that would enable a user to submit runs of books to their inventory management system irrespective of individual grades. When it came time to submit the collection for a buy offer, the system would use the average, expected grade of each book based on age to calculate said offer. “It’s still in beta,” he said, “but it’s yours for the testing if you want it.” So I started playing with it, and before I knew it I had 1000 books entered.

 

Needless to say, this was the way to go. It took me just over a week to enter the inventory data from the random paper records I had, as well as whatever rudimentary records I could create for the inventory from the preceding decade (basically me taking a chunk of books from a long box and writing something like “X-Men 400-450” down on a scrap of paper). It was really that simple; being able to enter “1-15,18,22,40-100” into a text box and just have the back-end system understand the inventory is worth an infinite amount to someone with as little patience as me. Plus, I managed to shake out a few bugs in the system, helping Conan ultimately get it ready for primetime. It was a win-win for both of us. (An aside: Conan, whatever your dad’s paying you, it isn’t enough. Tell him to double your salary. At least. ) At the end of this initial cataloging, I figured I had about 90% of the collection entered. Sadly, like most things in life, that final 10% was going to be the b--h of the project.

 

A few days later while I was on an insanely long, completely unnecessary, multi-person conference call with a client, I whipped up a program that would parse the HTML of the final inventory page, and ended up with a data file that I could feed into Excel. After a bit of tweaking, I had a hard copy of the first pass of what would end up being the Golden List. It was 28 pages long and I had to use something approaching a negative numbered font to fit it down to that, but it was a starting point. I grabbed it off the printer and headed downstairs. The Albatross was getting organized whether it liked it or not.

 

I set a deadline of the week before Wizard World Chicago to have the entire collection inventoried and collated. Yes, that’s right, I said collated, too -- I had essentially created a goal of sorting over 25,000 comic books in a handful of weeks. Get Organized or Die Trying. It was a huge pain in the arse, but by the end of July I had accomplished the goal. Not only had I managed to catalog the missing 10% of the collection, but I also got every title and every issue sorted according to the Lone Star inventory list AND pulled the approximately 2000 books that I had decided to keep. Those aforementioned GI Joes and Squadron Supremes and Byrne FFs were staying with me and my inner 12 year old.

 

Sweaty and exhausted, I sat down at my computer and looked over the final listing of books that I had created. Since Lone Star had treated me so well during this ordeal, I knew I was going to give them first crack at buying the collection. This last perusal was more of a “go/no-go” feeling out experience … could I truly push the button and finally get on with my life? I didn’t hesitate; I hit the Submit button and waited for an offer...

[Jeffro.]

Where is this going.....?

 

 

 

 

He's about to crown himself the King of Pedigrees.

 

And then all we need is a half naked picture of F_T.

 

[edit] - on second thought, scratch that last part.

 

[OldGuy]