Hit and Miss

Let’s stay with Time to Collect as the name on this year’s posts, this column will continue to explore the ins and outs and the ups and downs of comic book collecting so Time to Collect it is.

We are into the second week of the new year now and all signs are pointing to continued strong collectible comic book sales, I’m watching auction results and scratching my head at some of the closing prices. I’m sensing there is a lot of new blood in the game, non traditional books are catching fire and that is most certainly coming from the demand being generated by those new to the party.

I’ve always liked it when we get a new wave of collectors/investors coming into the party. Most often they start with their likes and stick to what they know but inevitably they will start exploring the older stuff, start dabbling into some Bronze Age and then reach back into the Silver Age, and a few brave souls will go deep into the Golden Age.

Work continues on that warehouse collection I picked up recently. As I mentioned last week we got all the boxes under one roof and last week we were trying to get them into some sort of order, luckily the boxes that were already numbered seem to be in good alphanumeric order so we segregated those boxes from the ones with no numbers, there were over 1,000 numbered boxed, that’s two thirds the alpha battle with a good head start. We put all the numbers below 500 in an area, the same for 501 – 1,000 and then a third area for boxes numbered over 1,001.

Having two-thirds of the boxes in some sort of crude order we wasted no time in trying our luck and we attempted to locate a few books that are currently in high demand.

The first book we scrambled to see if we had any copies of was Star Wars Clone Wars #1, Dark Horse, 2008, featuring the first appearance of Ashoka Tano. After zeroing in on the Star Wars box numbers in the late 1180s and early 1190s, box #1191 ended with several nice copies of Star Wars Annual #3 from the old Marvel series, it’s a nice book with that jet black Darth Vader cover. We’ve looked and looked but so far cannot find box #1192, we did find box #1193 and in it were a bunch of Dark Horse Star Wars books, mostly Episode One stuff, we did find a Clone Wars but it was one lonely copy of Clone Wars #2, sigh (I included a picture of our copy). I’m thinking that box #1192 was pulled a while ago by the previous owners. So we struck out on our first expedition. While we had the Star Wars boxes in front of us we looked for #42, found none. Our efforts were eventually rewarded when we pulled out a nice little stack of Star Wars #68. See the picture above of the four best copies.

We’re happy with the selection of issues and depth of copies of each issue in the Star Wars run, no copies of #1, #42 or #107 but a very healthy representation between #6 and #90. Thankfully the whole Marvel Star Wars run is heating up so I’d say the Star Wars cache is a solid start to the ball game. I’m still on the lookout for box #1992, if you see it please let me know.