Welcome to Cool Comics in My Collection Episode 152, where we take a look at various comic books I own (and in some cases ones that I let get away), both new and old, often with a nostalgic leaning for those feelings of yesteryear.
For each of the comic books I include in this blog (except for digital issues), I list the current secondary market value. This is according to the listings at the website www.comicbookrealm.com. They list out the near mint prices, which are on the comic book grading scale of 9.4. If you go to the website to look up any in your collection, you can click on the price and see the value at different grades. Not all of my comics are 9.4. Some are probably better, and some are worse. But to simplify it, that’s the grading price I use here. And remember, a comic book is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
Have you considered being a guest host for Cool Comics? You can do a theme or just pick any of your comics for inclusion (this blog is for all ages, so please keep that in mind), with a maximum of seven issues. Repeat guest hosts are permitted and encouraged. Send your completed blog to edgosney62@gmail.com.
If you have any questions or comments, please scroll to the bottom of the page to where it says, “Leave a reply.” I hope you enjoy seeing these as much as I do writing about them. And now, Episode 152…
Cool Comics News!
I love my local comic shop and feel lots of loyalty, but when it comes to great sales on back issues, sometimes we have to get them when and where we can. Last Saturday Rubber City Comics in downtown Akron, Ohio, had a one-day sale in which every comic in the store was just $1 each. I made sure to get there about 10 minutes before the doors opened, and of course found myself waiting in line. Once inside, there was not necessarily a method to my searching. I had to look at boxes that were available for browsing (meaning no one was crammed in front of them at the moment), and I didn’t want to dawdle and hold others up. A few people had lists they were checking against, and some probably moved too slowly for what this was, but I flipped through lots of boxes and came up with some really cool comics. I went for old stuff, the older, the better. At the end of an hour, I had 53 comic books I was happy with. When I got home, I spent a couple hours adding them into my computer files and looking up the values (for how I do this, please see the second paragraph from the top…no grading involved, just simply seeing what the secondary prices would be if they were rated at 9.4). And the total came out to $2,529. You read that right, $2,529. And remember, I paid just $1 each. Okay, I couldn’t sell them for that price on eBay, because the grades don’t hold, but it’s a lot of fun to get such great deals, and you’ll get to see what I bought via the Cool Comics Classics section of my blog over many future episodes.
Cool Comics Battle of the Week!
Your Cool Comics Battle of the Week is Deathstroke versus Deadpool! What do you think would happen if they faced each other in a titanic tussle, and how do you see the winner achieving victory? Let us know in the comments section below.
Cool Comics in My Collection
#724 — Forever Evil: A.R.G.U.S. #2, DC Comics, January 2014.
This is the second “Forever Evil” comic I’ve read, and I got them both in special discounted packs. I wasn’t collecting comics during the reign of The New 52 at DC, so it’s been interesting seeing bits and pieces of it. This comic came from a 4-pack I bought at Five Below for just $4. Not bad at a buck apiece. The way the packaging worked, I could see both the front and back comics, but not the two in the middle. So, you take your chances, but remember, folks, that most of the comics coming out today are $3.99 each. If you don’t know what’s going on with the whole “Forever Evil” saga, it usually doesn’t do much good trying to figure it out with a number 2 issue, but at least this featured two familiar names in Steve Treavor (you know, Chris Pine in the Wonder Woman movie…not to mention Lyle Waggoner from the Seventies TV series…and oh yeah, I think he appeared in the comic books a long, long time ago) and Deathstroke the Terminator (not to be confused with the Arnold Terminator movie franchise…but Slade Wilson was here first). The cover price of Forever Evil: A.R.G.U.S. is $2.99, while the current value is $3.
#725 — Justice League 3000 #3, DC Comics, April 2014.
Have you read this series (again, part of The New 52, and one of the Five Below comics in that 4-pack for $4 I mentioned above)? What did you think of it? From this one issue, it seems kind of cool, and Superman’s resurrected personality makes it fun, in a twisted way. This series ran 15 issues, and another came in my 4-pack, which I’ll save for a future Cool Comics episode. I guess if I ran across other issues in the quarter boxes at Kenmore Komics & Games I’d buy them. This takes place in the far future, so DC could do whatever it wanted, and it wouldn’t eventually have to “be,” since the future isn’t set in stone…or is it? Can time be interfered with? Can it be changed on a whim? In the world of comic books, all sorts of wacky things can and do happen, and change is the only constant. Time travelers may vow not to interfere, but the very fact that they appear somewhere that’s not in their own time makes a timeline different, doesn’t it? Some people hate time travel in fiction, but I love it. What about you? The cover price of Justice League 3000 #3 is $2.99, while the current value is $3.
#726 — Cable & Deadpool Annual #1, Marvel Comics, October 2018.
I never intended to buy this comic book, but, as a reader of Cable (although his ongoing series is no longer ongoing), my local comic shop pulled it for me. I love the store, and they are very good to me, so I decided to purchase it. And whereas I like Cable, I’m not a big fan of Deadpool. I own the first comic he appears in (The New Mutants #98) and also collected the first couple of mini-series featuring the character (I think I passed them on to my son), but he wasn’t for me. I’ll be the first to admit that I loved this annual, which pays tribute to time travel via hints of The Terminator series and Doctor Who. Was Deadpool funny? Yes. Yes he was, as he often talks directly to the reader, explaining the differences between the movie experience versus the comic book, and also explains, in his way, how comic books are interactive. This reads perfectly fine as a standalone if you don’t have much of a background on the two featured characters. Sometimes enjoyment comes from unexpected places. The cover price of Cable & Deadpool Annual #1 is $4.99, while the current value is $5.
Cool Comics Done Dirt Cheap
#727 — J2 #1, Marvel Comics, November 1998.
J2 (Zane Yama-Marko) is the son of Juggernaut, and first appeared in the second volume of What If #105…you know, the one with Spider-Girl. J2 became part of the MC2, a possible future Marvel Universe that is populated with offspring of our current heroes and villains. It was a fun concept while it lasted, and I actually bought Spider-Girl from the beginning through issue 63, at which point I stopped collecting comics completely for a while. It was fun, and now that I’ve had a chance to read this story (which happened to be part of my Legendary Longbox, so the cost of this individual issue was less than 5 cents) about the son of Juggernaut, it seems a shame that these didn’t make it. The problem is, collectors can only afford so much, and while these were perfect jumping on comics for a younger set of readers, they had more entertainment choices in the Nineties than I did in the Seventies. I ended up giving my Spider-Girl collection to my oldest daughter, and I think J2 #1 should find a home with those comics. The cover price of J2 #1 is $1.99, while the current value is $2.
FCBD the Cool Comics Way (Week 16)
#728 — Bob’s Burgers, Dynamite, May 2018.
You never know what you’re going to get when it comes to Free Comic Book Day issues, especially when you have the opportunity to read them all, and they contain lots of things you’d never pick up on your own. This is the third issue of Bob’s Burgers from Dynamite for FCBD, not to mention a couple volumes of series they published a few years back. I’ve never read one of these comics before, nor have I watched a single episode of the cartoon. The first story in this comic is an alternate trip on the Titanic aptly called “Tinatanic,” which I admit wasn’t my kind of story. Perhaps you loved it. But the second story was strange enough, odd enough, and bizarre enough that I found myself enjoying this weird tale. It’s titled the “Bizarre Bazaar,” and that made it worth the price of…wait a minute, this was a free comic, right? The last entry is called “Where the Fried Things Are,” and I’m sure you can figure out the motivation for it. I may never read another Bob’s Burgers comic again for the remainder of my days, nor watch an episode on TV, but now I’ve experienced it, and have been forewarned not to put pineapple on my burger. The cover price of Bob’s Burgers is free, while the current value is $1.
Cool Comics Classics
#729 — The Amazing Spider-Man #145, Marvel Comics, June 1975.
I was twelve years old when this issue of The Amazing Spider-Man hit the racks at Slicks, a little mom and pop shop in my small hometown of Martins Ferry, Ohio. And just as in the previous issue, we see more of the Gwen Stacy clone. Clone? I can remember being a little confused, because I’d also been reading some issues of a comic called Marvel Tales, and in those, Gwen Stacy was alive and well, and certainly not a clone. It was probably around this time that I figured out, after careful examination of the current issue of Marvel Tales, that it was a reprint of an older issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. All the Marvel Tales issues in my collection were reprints. And I realized Spider-Man was so popular that he got reruns! Anyway, this issue sets the stage for what’s to come in the remainder of the clone saga, as Gwen’s fingerprints match, not to mention that her body is still buried. Hence, the way is also paved for Ben Reilly. Some people are critical of this storyline, but I remember how exciting it was to twelve-year-old me. The cover price of The Amazing Spider-Man #145 is 25¢, while the current value is $55.
Recently Read Digital Comics
Peter Parker is a rich tech genius with a company that is global. He no longer has to worry about paying his rent and where his next meal is coming from. You know, comics and characters go through change, just like the people who read them. But sometimes certain changes just don’t feel right. I didn’t mind Peter teaching and being able to support himself that way, and I realize he’s up there intellectually, but suddenly being in Tony Stark’s tax bracket just doesn’t feel right for Peter Parker, in my opinion. I have several more digital collections from this series yet to read, but I’ll take Seventies (and Sixties) Spider-Man any day of the week over this Amazing Spider-Man: Worldwide Vol. 2 collection. The good thing about these is I always manage to get them when they are very inexpensive, and they aren’t taking up any space in my house!
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Thank you! Jumpsuits are so fun.
Thanks for reading!
My cynical reaction to “a poet writes a comic has me thinking I”m actually the enemy. To recap: we want comics to be seen as legitimate, then something happens that actually legitimizes them, then we think to ourselves “wait, doesn”t that poet have something better to work on than comics? See what I”m getting at here? You know, maybe I should rephrase as “wait, doesn”t that poet have something better to work on than a Marvel comic? Yeah that”s it. And doesn”t Ta-Nehisi Coates have something better to do? There are poets “of comics (I”m thinking Michael DeForge or Eleanor Davis), so crossover artists might in fact HURT the cause, for the reasons outlined above. In conclusion: no, YOU”RE the enemy!
Hi Comix, I’m a little confused about your reference, since it doesn’t seem to line up with my blog this week, but I appreciate that you read it and took the time to write something. I’m just hoping that at the end when you state, “No, YOU’RE the enemy!” you aren’t referring to me!
Also, as a writer myself, we often like to create in various mediums, be it poetry, fiction, articles, and comic books. Variety can keep our skills sharp. Plus, comics are supposed to be about fun, and poets like to have fun as much as the next person, I suppose. Thanks for reading!