Regrets

[Hepgwyn]

X-Men #1

 

I'm sure every collector out there has had the chance to buy something they passed on or bought something they shouldn't have. Here's my biggest comic book regret, besides say not cornering the market on Hulk 181s in 1984.

 

When I was a kid I was obsessed with the X-Men, being a complete nerd I even had a crush on Kitty Pryde. The only title I ever really set completion goals for was X-Men. In '84 when I started collecting Uncanny was in the 180s. At first I set modest goals to start working my way back towards 94 and Giant Size X-men 1. Eventually I started picking up some of the silver age ones with the goal eventually of having 1-20. I'm not sure why I set that arbitrary run as a goal and didn't just finish the the whole damn series. That's one small regret but the big one was when I bought X-men #1. The price of good copies of #1 were already out of my budget range by '88 when I started looking to buy one so I set a more modest goal of just getting any decent copy I could afford. Eventually I found one for $80 that was pretty tattered. And I made an emotional and ultimately not very shrewd decision to buy it. That summer as my dad and I made our usual scouring of comic book stores around the country, I remember very vividly being in a store in Madison, Wisconsin that had a shiny seeming X-men #1 for $100. I knew it was way better than mine but did I really need 2 copies and $100 would have been most of my summer buying budget. I thought about it for a long time and eventually decided not to get it. Of course now in my memory that copy is way better than it probably was in reality but $100 might have gone a lot further in Madison than in San Francisco...

 

Without any further ado I present my 2.0 X-Men #1. I think the pictures speak to the condition of this book and if memory serves the cover was pretty loose on the staples as well.

 

Anyone else care to share some of their biggest comic collecting regrets?

 

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[Shivabali]

Nice story...but at least you have a comic you spent $80 for that now fetches $1,000+!

 

My buying regrets are usually in the form of being ignorant and/or not paying attention. Sometimes from misleading sellers. I've "accidentally" bought a couple 2nd printings when I thought they were firsts. I've also (and this is inexcusable) bought the same copy of a comic I already had in the exact same grade. I have a spreadsheet w/ all my comics, and why I've done this is just idiotic.

 

The craziest thing I "almost" did, was when I first started collecting Sub Mariner CGCs a couple years back. There was a number 34 9.4 and if I remember correctly, the bid was at $150 or so. I looked it up in Overstreet (didn't know about GPA yet) and the book said the 9.2 was worth well over $1,000. Holy sh*$ Batman, I'm going for it and put up around $750. I was immediately the highest bidder by $500 or so. I thought this was a little too good to be true, so I looked closer and realized my mix-up (which most of you have undoubtedly guessed by now). I was looking up Sub-Mariner Comics, not the The Sub-Mariner. The funniest part of the story is that someone else made the same mistake, and I was actually outbid! So someone paid $750+ for a comic worth $140 in 9.2. OUCH!

[biggblaster]

I have said this before but I do not really have too many regrets with selling books over the years but if I had to choose one for instance it was around 1989 or so and I had the opportunity to buy Hulk 1-6 for something like 2000. They were in high grade and I am pretty sure the owner would have worked with me since I spent a lot at his store. My thinking back then was I would rather spend all that money on a lot of cheaper books than on a few expensive one. So instead of ending up with something like 40,000.00 in classic Marvel history, I had 100 + copies of X-Force 1 and X-men 1 and the like. . Again, though I must say that the Hulk books would have been sold way before they became that valuable and I did acquire 100 + Amazing Spiderman 300’s 298’s and Hulk 340’s so it wasn’t all bad. On a side note I wish I would have bought a few lots of 100 Troy Aikman Score Rookies from 1989. They were going for about 20.00 each lot in the card magazines back then.

[Mailman_Comics]

I bought a Marvel Silver Age collection of 160 or so comics in Austin in 2010. Collection included about 60 Silver Amazing Spiderman. 2 copies of #50, Amazing Spiderman #129, Silver Surfer #'s 1,4 and Iron Man #1 (which i got signed by Stan and graded and is the last of the collection I have.) among others. There was alot in the 8.0-9.0 range. Anyways at the time i was torn between selling them and keeping them for my collection. I wasn't too knowledgable about CGC at the time. My wife and i were having marriage issues at the time. I decided i was gonna sell them and prove something to her. So i sold them all on eBay, my wife and i are fine now, but i still regret not keeping them and slowly getting them graded. I bought them all for $1,250 and I sold them for around $6,000 plus i still got the Iron Man #1.

 

It was an awesome experience walking into the guys house and he had them all on his kitchen table spread out in stacks. Luckily at the time i had just got my tax return and i was quick to respond to the Craigslist ad. I hope I get to experience something like that again.