A Return to Comic Book Collecting Part 2

Continued from Part 1...

So I'm sitting at my computer, and I've found this wonderful site called Comic Book Realm, that is chocked full of all kinds of wonderful information, but it has the one things that piqued my curiosity about my old books in the first place, values!

I started thumbing through my box of old comics, and picked out a few that I thought might be worth some money, starting with my favorite cover of all time: Pitt #1! This has to be worth a truckload of cash, it's the "RIPPIN' 1ST ISSUE!" To my amazement, it wasn't worth much at all. Ok, that last sentence was complete sarcasm, as I was pretty sure it wouldn't be worth much. Still doesn't change the fact that it's my absolute favorite cover. All those teeth! And gums! Some day, I'll show Dale Keown the tattoo I have of his first Pitt cover...It'll be RIPPIN'!

But I digress.

So with my Pitt letdown out of the way, I kept looking. Secret Wars #8. Hey, I remember some hubub about that one. Bingo! We have some value in my picked over box! The Punisher mini-series? Another win! Batman 404 & 405? Hey, not bad! None of these were going to let me retire, but it was cool to see that I hadn't let everything go of value when I was a kid.

I certainly had more duds than winners though. All the big names: Captian America, Spider-Man, Hulk, Avengers, Batman, Superman, etc., etc. But only 1 or 2 issues of each, and nothing of significance. Looking through a few more brought things back into prespective a bit.

My next thought was that I should just go through the entire box and see what I have in it's entirety. I'd need to keep track of that on a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are my jam. I keep track of just about everything on them...trip planning, tire rotations, weight lost (or gained), you name it. So I started making my list. Pull it out of the box, enter on the spreadsheet, and look up the value here at the Realm.

It wasn't until I was almost done with this process, that I took a closer look at the website. You mean I can keep track of all my books right on the site that I'm using to look up the values? That's awesome!! To bad I had killed a couple hours making up a spreadsheet. Oh well, live and learn. It didn't take long to go through the list again, I had a spreadsheet to reference after all, and before I knew it, I had a Master Pile all decked out with my entire collection of comics.

This was an extremely satisfying process. The idnetifying, looking up, and cataloging took me to a happy place, a place I didn't want to leave. I've already addressed the comics I've owned since my childhood, so there was only one thing I could do to keep up the euphoria...

... buy more comics!

Stay tuned for part 3!