Completeness 3 3

[oakman29]

Just now, Brock said:

Is that all? 

I like to collect guitars and gear too!

[oakman29]

I get the big keys in a run first, then go for the fillers.😎

[Brock]

Just now, oakman29 said:

I get the big keys in a run first, then go for the fillers.😎

I have 37,000 fillers for you if you need any help. 

[oakman29]

Just now, Brock said:

I have 37,000 fillers for you if you need any help. 

😂👍

[Qalyar]

1 minute ago, Brock said:

I have 37,000 fillers for you if you need any help. 

No one ever has the fillers* I need, because I'm (currently) completing sets of largely ignored, often valueless books. Sometimes I feel I should go back to just building runs of books I can get by throwing money at them...

*if no one has them, and i want them, does that make the keys?

[Brock]

Just now, Qalyar said:

No one ever has the fillers* I need, because I'm (currently) completing sets of largely ignored, often valueless books. Sometimes I feel I should go back to just building runs of books I can get by throwing money at them...

*if no one has them, and i want them, does that make the keys?

Yes, I recall... I was the one opening shrinkwrapped DVD sets to try to find you a Babylon 5 comic.

[Qalyar]

3 minutes ago, Brock said:

Yes, I recall... I was the one opening shrinkwrapped DVD sets to try to find you a Babylon 5 comic.

I have since learned that the pack-in DVDs are actually marked with a little red sticker at bottom right. Which would have been nice to know awhile back, but doesn't actually help put comics in my hand, haha.

[serling1978]

I collect large runs starting with the first issue and normally stop at the early 90s. My asm run goes from 1-400, X-men 1-300 something, Avengers 1-300 something. I was a teenager in the 90s and started reading comics off the newsstand around the start of the decade. So for me those issues never had much nostalgic value and I don't desire them. 

For smaller side series like Defenders, Master of Kung Fu, Nova, Captain Marvel, etc etc.... I collect the entire run because they have a clear ending that is prior to the 1990s.

For other series like Tales of Suspense my goals are usually tied to the main character. For that one my goal is to complete #39-101.  

[Qalyar]

1 minute ago, serling1978 said:

I collect large runs starting with the first issue and normally stop at the early 90s. My asm run goes from 1-400, X-men 1-300 something, Avengers 1-300 something. I was a teenager in the 90s and started reading comics off the newsstand around the start of the decade. So for me those issues never had much nostalgic value and I don't desire them. 

For smaller side series like Defenders, Master of Kung Fu, Nova, Captain Marvel, etc etc.... I collect the entire run because they have a clear ending that is prior to the 1990s.

For other series like Tales of Suspense my goals are usually tied to the main character. For that one my goal is to complete #39-101.  

Do you aim for any oddities? Price variants, inserts, that sort of thing... or just the normal runs of issues?

[Namtak]

26 minutes ago, oakman29 said:

I like to collect guitars and gear too!

You collect gear,thats a first,what do you do with them cant put them on walls its too heavy,how does it work for you?

[serling1978]

14 minutes ago, Qalyar said:

Do you aim for any oddities? Price variants, inserts, that sort of thing... or just the normal runs of issues?

Nope. For one thing, I'm not a stickler on the US price. I've got some pence. I don't want to go on a tangent but to me having the pence is the same as the cents. The same print run book with a different price doesn't mean as much to me as apparently it does to some. To each their own.

If the cover art itself was different or especially the story somehow then I would collect multiple versions of the same issue. But I can't think of any examples of that for books pre 1990. Maybe someone else can point some out though. 

[Savoyard23]

2 hours ago, Brock said:

First, the admission... I have about 37,000 books at the moment, so one possibility is that, for me, I'm in danger of having "completeness" be about having one of everything, ever.

In the past, I had aims of completeness that grew too big. Back around 1982, I set out to collect every appearance of the New X-Men (i.e. the post-GSX 1/X-Men 94 team), including their solo appearances. When I started that was a relatively attainable goal, with only a few hundred issues. Now, of course it would be thousands.

Later, I shifted to a focus on CGC books, and smaller sets. I decided (for example) to get a "complete" CGC 9.8 copies of every Adam Hughes cover. I'm currently at #2 on the registry, so I made good headway... but Hughes is releasing a few covers a month, and this could also become thousands of books over time, so I've backed off a bit.

In a sense, an din retrospect, both these projects seem impossible to actually "complete"...

Most recently, I'm focused on "completeness" in a smaller context. There are few artists (such as Dave Stevens or Milo Manara) who have a relatively discrete (i.e. small) number of books that is unlikely to grow substantially, so I'm focusing on CGC copies of those. In this instance, I have no preference for newsstand vs. direct, etc. but I will go after colour or logo or price variants.

My highest "completeness" quest, though, is to try to assemble a high grade, CGC-slabbed set of DC Whitman variants. This has the double advantage of being a reasonable size (about 180 books) and being difficult enough that it will take me some time. I've been at it for about 5 years, and have about 1/3 of the books. To me, this seems a good balance - big enough to be meaningful as a "complete" set, but small enough to actually complete; hard enough to be a challenge, but without being impossible.

Do you have the DC Comics Presents 22?

Me, I'm a run collector but not necessarily a completist.  I collect long runs of titles I enjoy reading and owning, as far forward as I have interest (usually late 80s or so), and as far back as I can afford.

[serling1978]

20 minutes ago, Savoyard23 said:

Do you have the DC Comics Presents 22?

Me, I'm a run collector but not necessarily a completist.  I collect long runs of titles I enjoy reading and owning, as far forward as I have interest (usually late 80s or so), and as far back as I can afford.

I imagine being a DC collector would be a much greater challenge since their series start much earlier and the grails are a tad bit harder to get. Well, two of them at least. Those Batman and Superman guys 

[Tghutcn]

For my collection it’s mixed for some I only collect a certain artist or writer but others can be long runs for marvel I collect avengers 1-200. For Spider-Man I collect only Asm at the moment between 1-600 I mainly focus on the 200-600 because of prices pre 200. I pick up any TTA Antman comics when I find them or the pre Ant man. But my main focuses are getting the Miller Daredevil run Byrne and Claremont Xmen and the Avengers  1-200 and Asm 1-600 and Fantastic Four 1-100 and any Silver surfer appearance up till the 2 part limited series plus any Neil Adams marvel or dc comics so still got a bit of work before completion 

[Qalyar]

So, for my perspective on answering my own question... I'm a big believer in collecting for completeness. Variants, weird stuff, foreign reprints. Right now, I'm refocusing on what is sort of my pet title, Charles Burns' Black Hole. For me, a complete collection includes the highest-grade realistically obtainable copies of:

• Black Hole #1-#12, 1st printings
• Black Hole #1-#3, #5, #9, 2nd printings (also #4 2nd printing, if it exists; I've read reports it does, but no one seems to have ever seen one and I don't think it was ever actually printed)
• Black Hole #1-#2, 3rd printings
• Black Hole #1-#6, the German reprints, which are double-sized (mostly 68 pages) and reprint the original books two at a time
• Agujero Negro #1-#12, the Spanish reprints (including a possible second printing of #1 if that's real).
• Echo Echo: Cut-Up Pictures from Black Hole (the comic format sketchbook art companion)
• SSSSSSSS, essentially Burns' privately printed partial Black Hole #1 ashcan (which I do not have, and which is far and away my grail).

I'm of mixed opinions about:

• Black Hole #1-#6 (?), the French-language hardcover reprints published by Delacourt. They're pretty cool, but they're not slabbable, so they won't play nice with others for grading, display, or storage.

And I'm not likely at this time to include from a completeness perspective:

• The trade paperback (which I own a reader copy of, so that I can, you know, read this whenever I want). Or any of the dozenish foreign language editions.
• Black Hole Fantagraphics Studio Edition hardcover, which is a weird (and expensive) sort of studio art-book version of the series... but only excerpts of it. I really do not understand the motivation behind this product. If it printed the whole thing in a high-end prestige format, that would be awesome. But why do I want an incomplete compilation with a > $100 MSRP, no matter how awesome it looks??
• Raw v2 #1, which includes Charles Burns' standalone comic "Teen Plague from Outer Space". Although Burns revisited the "teen plague" idea as the core concept for Black Hole, this is an otherwise unrelated story that is actually in continuity (well, "continuity") with his Big Baby stuff instead.
• Death Rattle v3 #1 and The Dung Boys #1, both of which have advertising for Black Hole on the back cover but are otherwise utterly unrelated.

Hopefully, I'm at least internally consistent, even if most of you probably think I'm crazy for caring this much.

[Brock]

2 hours ago, Qalyar said:

 

• Death Rattle  v3 #1 ... advertising for Black Hole on the back cover but are otherwise utterly unrelated.

 

I just shipped one of these out last week, as an add-on in a Death Rattle/Xenozoic lot I sold on eBay. If I'd known, I'd just have sent it to you.

[Brock]

4 hours ago, Savoyard23 said:

Do you have the DC Comics Presents 22?

I do, but it's raw - I haven't had it slabbed yet.

[Qalyar]

38 minutes ago, Brock said:

I just shipped one of these out last week, as an add-on in a Death Rattle/Xenozoic lot I sold on eBay. If I'd known, I'd just have sent it to you.

Haha, no worries. It's a pretty easy book, if I ever decide that I need back cover advertisements. For that matter, Dump Boys 1 is pretty easy too, but ... ugh. Not a motivational item, shall we say.

38 minutes ago, Brock said:

I do, but it's raw - I haven't had it slabbed yet.

Now that? That is not an easy book by any means.

[Savoyard23]

10 hours ago, Qalyar said:

Haha, no worries. It's a pretty easy book, if I ever decide that I need back cover advertisements. For that matter, Dump Boys 1 is pretty easy too, but ... ugh. Not a motivational item, shall we say.

Now that? That is not an easy book by any means.

Right??  To have a book in your collection that some thought didn't exist a few years ago...  

@Brock

[Savoyard23]

15 hours ago, serling1978 said:

I imagine being a DC collector would be a much greater challenge since their series start much earlier and the grails are a tad bit harder to get. Well, two of them at least. Those Batman and Superman guys 

I collect both companies but my Marvel runs do tend to be longer!