. Moms! Moms make a collection valuable. What Sammie? How does mom make my collection valuable? Well, after several years of accumulating a small collection, I got older. Not everyone is like our illustrious Bob Reyer and collects all the way through. The teenage years jump up and bite us on the pocket book. Worse yet, I lived through the 80s, where excess in life was as bad as the excess in the 90s for comic collecting. I reached high school, got in with a band (completely not as a musician, I have zero ability), and started drifting away from my beloved comics. Then, girls, cars, gas, rock & roll took a priority.
Meanwhile, my books sat in a corner of the closet, or under my bed. Organization?? Don’t make me laugh. Bagged & boarded? I bought mine at a gas station, I didn’t even know they could be bagged and boarded. They laid there, almost completely forgotten. So, here comes mom, she’s going to teach me a lesson. “Clean your room”!!!, she says. Which I ignore, so she’s going to clean it for me. There’s a stack of comics, magazines (Hit Parader, Circus, etc, for you 80s rock fans), and probably newspapers. Where’s the stack go? Trash!! I come home and unfortunately, at the time, what I was worried about was my lost heavy metal magazines. Again, the comics were lost to the times.
See, moms made your collection valuable. You hear Bob talk about how many books they sold back “in the day”. 1 million copies of Wonder Woman were sold. Where did that many copies go? Moms!!!! It’s the rule of supply and demand. If the supply is down and everybody wants a Batman #2, the price goes up, simple economics. So, when you gaze at that New Mutants #98, that FF #48, that Preacher or Walking Dead #1 and smile. Thank your mom or blame her….or everybody’s mom for the cost.
But we still love them, Happy Mother’s Day to my mom and yours!
Next Time: The First Completed Run
