What was your best/most interesting/coolest purchase pre-Internet?

[vader2001]

My best comic buy was in 1979 I was 19 and my friends and I went to a comic store downtown Minneapolis and I bought a ASM #1 for $365. My mother yelled at me for spending part of my college $$ on that stupid comic as she called it. I still have it today.

[B-Smooth]

My mail order bride.

[B-Smooth]

And I got a 1st print TMNT 1 for $50 back in '89. Great condition,too. Sold it to go on some stupid dates, with girls who didn't put out. If only I knew then, what I know now.

[jerome34]

There was an auction in CBG for the "Cancelled Comics" 2 volume set and

I made calls to bid on it (way pre internet). When it got real high, I said "I

do not know the seller so I better drop out" and did.

 

A few weeks later, I was looking at a new DC book and among the creator's

was the name of the seller. I called him, learned the final price, and that

the people at DC were shocked at how much it went for. I told him that

if anyone at DC had it and was willing to sell it for that price, I would buy it.

 

In about a week, I got a letter from a DC editor about the set and sent him

a check. Almost a month passed and I was worried.

 

Finally it arrived along with a note. It had been in storage and the weekend

the editor was going to get it, he developed a bad cold. That was the reason

for the delay.

 

Along with the set and the letter, he included the "Bradman" Superman comic

(listed in the guide as a birthday comic but it was really a Bar Mitzvah comic).

 

I still have both and the letter.

 

[Captain_Pike]

Back in the late 70's I would do my weekly run to the comic store. I still recall picking up individual bundles of comics(20 count) like Xmen 120 and going through them to pick the best copy. I usually bought 1-3 copies,1 to read and 2 I kept.

What was I thinking ? I should have bought the whole bundle 7 bucks was not going to break me.

I enjoy looking back at those memories but too bad you cannot go back.

[jimbo_707]

The topic of this thread is a tough question, because some of the purchases that were the most interesting to me wouldn't be that interesting to anyone else. Here are a couple, though:

1) I bought a handful of GA/Atomic Age books at an antique shop for five bucks apiece. (I think they had everything priced at five bucks; this was circa 1985, and they'd probably never heard of a comic book price guide.) They were worth more than that - maybe $20 each on average. I was about 11, so for me, that was a heck of a score because it gave me the chance to read some really old comics.

2) The first really OLD comic I bought (in '84 or '85) was a Muggsy Mouse #1. It was probably only about a VG, but for me just having something that old was awesome. I guess it was about 32 or 33 years old, so no older than early Copper-Age books are now, but from my 10- or 11-year-old perspective, it seemed ancient. (I don't have it any more, but I'm still on the look-out for an ultra-high-grade, white-paged copy of that book. It rarely, if ever, gets slabbed because of the low guide value.)

[archer]

I only bought once from the net. It wasn't even a comic. Everything I own/used to own were bought in person, or at least asked someone else to buy it in person. I also subscribed directly to Marvel back in 1983, so this is another exception.

 

Since I already started collecting in 1983, I bought Amazing Spider-Man 300 almost as soon as it came out. I thought McFarlane was God (or something).

 

Latter nice finds include Iron Fist 14, Amazing Spider-Man 238 (no tattoo) and Daredevil 168. 20 pesos each and 35 pesos for the ASM or about 46 to 81 cents each.

 

From National Bookstore I found captain marvel # 3 (1968) for 12 pesos (28 cents) around 1989. What was stupid is that there were other early issues (#4 and so on) of CM as well. I only bought #3 because it was the oldest issue there.

 

Around 1992 at SM-makati's school supply/magazine section, I bought nm copies of Warlock 12-15 also for P12 each. I also saw mini-sized Man of Steel by John Byrne around the same time, but they were more plentiful. Are these worth anything?

 

Maybe they're not much but they were cheap. When I started to collect comics regularly in 1984, pre-1980 was already hard to find in the wild. So the older the comics are, the more difficult they are to find in my country so my purchases aren't that impressive. I'm not willing to shell out a lot of moolah either.

 

Cool=cheap