2001-04-27 - 11:59 p.m.

Digging For Four Color Gold

Today I did something that I haven't done for a while - I went to someone's house to look at a comic collection.

In the early days of running the comic store I used to do it all the time, but in recent years I've always managed to get people to bring the comics to me. However, recently I've bee thinking I should be more proactive in seeking out new back issues, so off I went.

There is a certain science to buying and looking at collections of comics. One of the rules of the game is, sad to say, that everybody exaggerates what they have. Most of the people who own the books don't do it on purpose, it's just that they don't understand what they have, they don't understand what it's worth and why.

For instance if some person says to me on the phone: "I have Superman #1," the odds are overwhelming that they don't have the first appearance of Superman from 1938, which is worth thousands of dollars. It is far more likely that they have something else: a reprint, a different Superman #1, or heaven knows what.

Something important to remember is that the expensive comics sell for so much money because they are RARE. This means that it's very unlikely that any of these rare items is going to be in the random pile of books sitting in front of you. It's just the law of probability. Sometimes, you get a pleasant surprise, but generally when someone has a pile of comics, it's not worth much of anything.

The Manager gave me a phone message to give a guy a call about some comics he had. He indicated that the person had some Golden Age books (comics from the 1940s) and some early Silver Age (comics from the 1960s). The main Silver Age book that was mentioned was Silver Surfer #1, a book that's worth about $150 in average shape. So, this sounded like something worth pursuing.

I called the person with the collection, and I got my first intimation that the collection might not be so good - it was a high school kid. Generally, kids don't have old, valuable comic books; mainly because they weren't alive when most of them were made. But once again, surprises do happen.

However, since he was a kid he couldn't bring the books to me - I had to go to him. Well, so be it.

He lived in the suburbs in the middle of the Capital District, a good distance from where I was. Unfortunately he'd made the appointment very near to rush hour, so the going was slow. I finally found the street with the help of my trusty area map.

Although this was the suburbs and there were some pretty opulent houses nearby, they weren't on this street. About half of the houses seemed to be prefab or made from converted trailers.

I found the right house, and while I was looking for the doorbell, the kid came out and found me. He looked a lot younger than his voice, but maybe that's because he was so painfully thin.

He invited me into the house, and his parents were there, an older couple. The house smelled of cigarette smoke, and while I was looking through the books, the kid lit one up. It looked like the whole family smoked.

As soon as I saw the pile of comics, I knew it was your basic Worst Case Scenario. The books were worthless. What he basically had was a pile of books from the early 1990s. There is very little chance that ANY book from the early to mid-1990s will be worth anything, but if I had to pick the MOST worthless books from that time period, some of them would be in that pile.

There were three Golden Age Comics among the books, but they were books of no great value in horrible condition. The most potentially valuable book in there was Marvel Family #23 which would be worth a couple hundred bucks in perfect shape. That is, I'd SELL one for that, but I could only pay about $50-$70 for it. This copy however, looked like it had been in a fire, it was missing its back cover and the pages were so brown with age that they were crumbling and flaking in my hands. Comic collectors are very condition-conscious people, so I'd probably put $4 on the comic and be prepared to sit on it for a couple years.

Oh, and there was indeed a Silver Surfer #1 in the pile, but it was Silver Surfer VOLUME 3, number 1. The original Silver Surfer #1 was published in 1969, this first issue from a later series was published in 1987. The guide listed it for $9, but it's a very tough sell at nine dollars in my opinion; I'd probably cross my fingers and put $6 on it. I certainly wouldn't want to buy it for more than a dollar.

So, while the kid hadn't actually lied to me about the books, he'd managed, unintentionally, to give me the impression that he had something better than he did.

As I was going through the books, it occurred to me that I couldn't really make a serious offer on them without these people thinking I was there to rob them. I wasn't really willing to spend more than five or six dollars, in fact I didn't really want the books at all. So basically I broke the news to them that the books really weren't worth much of anything, and they should hang on to them, or sell them at a garage sale or something.

When something like that happens, I always feel like a fink, but all I am really is the bearer of bad tidings. I tried to be as nice as I knew how to be, but the plain fact remained: the books weren't worth anything and were unlikely to ever be valuable.

Well, it wasn't a totally wasted trip. As long as I was out there I went to one of the big bookstores near the mall and got a couple books and a few CDs.

It's a little ironic that I probably spent more at the bookstore than I would have on the comics if they'd been something good. And I KNOW that books and CDs have almost no resale value!