Huge Comic Book Collection! Rare Number Ones! Worth Thousands!

I’ve been looking through ebay’s listings for “comic collections”. I’ve got a huge one of my own that, barring a miracle, I’ll need to sell. As far as I can tell, there are currently no comparable collections available. Sure, there are a number of large collections being shilled but they aren’t as big or as broad as mine. That’s not bragging. It’s not a matter of pride. It’s a matter of numbers. I spent more on comics than I ever did on any my other vices. Certainly more than I ever spent on drugs and alcohol.

With Aged Mother here and us needing to empty out the house in California I need to find homes for my stuff. Some of it, my books and photographs, Lovesettlement should be able to send up here fairly easily. My artwork will be more problematic. Some of it I want. Some of it I have no use for. Mostly I wouldn’t know one way or another without seeing it first. There’s toys and tchotckies and junk that I guess I could lay claim to that I’m fine if I never see it again. My glow in the dark Creature from the Black Lagoon and Godzilla would be nice to see again but, really, I don’t have a place for them. That stuff can go into a dumpster with A.M.’s beat up furniture and triplepatched clothes.

So the biggest chunk of Stuff is the comics. Thousands of them.

What are they worth?

Please. Not a damn thing. Or thousands of dollars. It’s all a matter of who is looking at them. To me, they’re priceless. To many of my friends they might be sort of neat but not really worth the time it takes to move them. That’s something that a lot of Collectors don’t get. Just because some book says that your Badly Drawn Musclefreak #0 is worth $350 doesn’t mean that anyone will pay half that much for it.

I’ve made an all-or-nothing offer of them to one of my friends who was heavily into comics back in the day. I suspect that he’ll pass on them. He wants to look at them first. That’s cool. It just doesn’t work for him to take what he wants and leave us still having thousands of comics to move.

I doubt that I’ll have a chance to look through the collection again myself before it goes. If I could afford to go to California to do that I could afford to get it back here.

So, it goes.

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“Is your Dad still alive?”

“He died three years ago Mom.”

“Oh.” She thinks about that. “I didn’t think he was still alive. But I didn’t think it was three years.”

After reading the Kipster’s latest post and the attendant link to Modern Drunkard Magazine I think I’ll amend Item #1250 to staying drunk all week. Staying drunk all day lacks ambition. Anyone can be drunk all day. To stay drunk all week requires stamina and forethought.

Yes, that’s my email address on the right. Way down there. Above Meaningless Statistics. Just to make it easier to talk to me. Hopefully it still requires a tweak in order to use it. I’ve put spaces on either side of the @. I’m happy to get letters. Just a few words of caution –

1. I’m a lousy correspondent. I used to be very good at returning letters back when they required stamps and envelopes. No longer. I try to respond to every letter I get but it sometimes takes a while – a long while.

2. If I don’t know you include my name or some obvious reference to my galleries or posts in the subject line of your email. I get lots of spam and delete most emails from unfamiliar addresses unread. “Hey” or “How’s it going” or “Remember Me?” or “URGENT REQUEST” will all be ignored.

Happy Holidays!

Item #1249 – Publish a Coffee Table Book of Photos of My Friends

Pure vanity project here. Do a series of photos of my friends and family and publish a nice hard cover book of the results as a Christmas present for them. I’d be fine having someone else be the photographer. Some of those friends are much better photographers than I am.

Item #1250 – Stay Drunk All Day

I tried this for one of my birthdays years ago. It took me two hours to finish my first beer of the morning. The appeal of this idea these days is more in having the time to actually spend a day doing something that dumb and unproductive than in the actual drunkness.

Item #1251 – Cycle Around the USA

Basically that. Cycle around the United States. Start on one coast, cycle the small roads over to the other coast and head back taking a different set of small roads. I get the feeling that this couldn’t be done in one trip, at least not comfortably – what with seasons changing and all.

Item #1252 – Win the Lottery

Can’t really plan for this one can you? I buy the occasional ticket but I figure my odds of winning are lower than average. I already know someone who won.Statistically that shouldn’t change my chances but still …

Item #1253 – Run a Marathon

More to say I’ve done it than because I have any great attraction to running long distances. I’d probably want to run it somewhere exotic so I’d have somewhere new and different to look at.

Items #1254 – 1278 – Have Sex With …

No celebrities here. Friends and acquaintances. Some I’ve slept with before, most not. No names named. That would be tacky. (As if mentioning it on a list isn’t.)

Item #1279 – Build a Scale Model of New York

(or Tokyo or Paris or London). The city is just background. Once it’s built I’d fill it with model kaiju smashing it down.

Item #1280 – Make the Big Score

In other words, pull off a theft so big that I never have to pull another one again. Really the only kind worth planning.

Nizzibet and I watched a special on the Discovery channel a while back that told the story of a guy who pulled off one of the largest armored car thefts in history. $17 million dollars. He stole so much money that when it came to transfer it to another vehicle they could take it all and abandoned $3 million of it. And then his idiot accomplices made themselves obvious by buying houses and cars and living large throwing around lots of cash. Of course they all got busted. Such stupidity. It was embarrassing to watch.

Item #1281 – Publish The Call

Write it first. Duh. Or write it and draw it, since, as with all stories, I imagine doing it as a comic. The Call is a novel length expansion of The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft. It follows a trio of survivors of LeGrasse’s bayou raid in 1908 through the Great War and the Jazz Age to the rising of R’Lyeh in 1925. Romance, adventure, history, conspiracy, politics and madness. Always with the madness.

I don’t even want to think about how many pages it might run.

Item #1282 – Raise a Polydactyl Maine Coon

All of my cats have been strays – some abandoned, some escapees and others completely feral. All of my cats will be probably be strays. Why pay for some purebreed when there are plenty of cats out there that need homes? If I were to get any breed of cat, however, I’d want a Maine Coon. Apparently polydactylism is common among the breed so I’d look for that in my cat. A giant cat with thumbs. Purrrrrrrrrr.

Item #1283 – Publish the Boy’s Life Graphic Novel

Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon would be a fun novel to adapt to comics. Each chapter features some boys’ adventure idea – lake monsters, mobsters, secret Nazi menaces – wrapped in a story of growing up in the early sixties. The original novel is almost 600 pages in the paperback edition. The graphic novel would need to be at least as long to do it justice.

Item #1284 – Publish the Robert R. McCammon Illustrated Library

Produce illustrated editions of all the rest of McCammon’s novels and collections. This would include the ones that he’s decided to let go out of print.

Item #1285 – Learn to Hang Glide

This would be another one of those ambitions that gets less appealing the older I get. Still, if I happened to become wealthy all of sudden and somehow found a lot time on my hands, I’d happily take this up.

Item #1286 – Publish the B-Movie Monster Re-Imagination Project Theatre

This would be a series of comics (graphic novels) adapting a few dozen obscure and sometimes absurd horror movies from the fifties and sixties. The length of each story would vary according to the potential of the story being adapted. Killers From Space. The Astounding She-Monster. It Conquered the World. From Hell It Came. And the ever popular – many more. While a lot of these movies were horrible, only occasionally blessed with an interesting premise, I’m one of those foolish optimists who believes there’s at least one good story to be found in even the stupidest idea. I’d like to test out that optimism. And draw a bunch of goofy monsters of course.

Item #1287 – Publish Tintin at the Mountains of Madness

It would be fun to write and draw the thing as well but I’m not attached to that. There may be others who are better suited to the task. Herge’s style might look simple but many people have attempted it without managing to duplicate it. It takes work and practice to say so much with so few lines. To do the material justice I’d want the book to be standard size and length (60 pages?) and in color.

Item #1288 – Climb Mt. Everest

This used to be higher on my list (like there’s really a ranking system here) but as I’ve gotten older I get less interested in taking my lazy self to very cold dangerous places.

Item #1289 – Eat a Human Being

You know, luau style. Pit roasted and shared with friends. I know, the immediate reaction among polite people is to be disgusted and horrified. But think about it, there’s over six billion of the damned things on the planet. Why not eat a few of them?

I am little picky about this. I do have stipulations for the meat –

A. It be a member of the upper classes, preferably third generation or later. I know there are many more lower class folks around but if I’m going to eat a member of the dominant species on the planet I’m not interested in being halfway about it. I want to eat the most pampered and relaxed human flesh available. At the same time I can ever so slightly open up access to health and wealth for the lower classes by removing one of those that disproportionately consumes them.

B. It be young. I’m sure even rich people get stringy when they’re old. Might as well get it when its still relatively tender. This is for the luau. I’m quite willing to have older, stringier specimens smoked for jerky. Or marinated and stewed with a lot of vegetables. Nizzibet has a great beef roast recipe that could be modified for this.

C. It be male. It’s not my feminism talking here. It’s basic livestock thinning practices.

D. There is no D..

The biggest road block to fulfilling on this item is that killing another human being isn’t on my list. There are plenty of individuals that I wouldn’t mind seeing drop dead but I’m just not interested in actually making someone dead myself. I know, I know, big surprise.