I’ve regained the one comic book I regret having sold

Posted by: Scott    Tags:  , ,     Posted date:  November 30, 2012  |  8 Comments


I used to have a pretty decent Silver Age comic book collection—that is, until working in the business burned me out on comics altogether. Eventually, I couldn’t bear to look at them, and sold all save a few of the more valuable ones, which I hung onto in a safe deposit box purely for investment purposes.

But as I’ve mentioned here before, there’s one comic I later regret letting go of—a comic I wasn’t even sure of the title and issue number of at first—but which thanks to one of you I learned was Tales of Suspense #69.

And thanks to Claudio Piccinini, who located and kindly sent me a copy, Tales of Suspense #69 is mine again.

Why was that issue so meaningful to me? Not because it was the first appearance of the Iron Man villain the Titanium Man, or anything else in the stories themselves, but rather because of a box that appeared within an ad for Marvel stationery—a box that included my name as an early member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society.

Tales of Suspense #69 isn’t a very valuable comic by monetary standards—from what I can determine, a copy in good condition is worth about ten bucks—but it’s now the most valuable comic I own.

Nostalgia is priceless.





8 Comments for I’ve regained the one comic book I regret having sold


Joe c

And Mr. Game of Thrones is there too! Nice company.

    Scott

    Since there was no “R. R.” in there, I wasn’t sure …

    Was he from Pittsburgh?

Cecilia Tan

Awesome! Comics is one segment of publishing I never managed to break into. I was writing some Crow backup story scripts when Kitchen Sink went under which was as close as I came.

I still have the Legion of Superheroes issue that printed a letter of mine in the letter column. 🙂

    Scott

    Comics is where my writing career began.

    So what was your letter about?

Joe c

Ayup, the same guy. If you search the web you can find out more, including some of his modern-day demands to write a story for Marvel.

Here’s a letter he had printed in an old Avengers, with his middle initials intact: http://marvel.com/images/gallery/story/18400/images_from_the_marvel_life_george_r_r_martin/image/911894

    Scott

    Oh, I knew that he was an avid Marvel fan in the old days, but since I used to read his fan fiction in Star-Studded, put out by the Texas Trio, the state surprised me.

Craig

So what burned you out on comics back in the day? Was it the medium itself? The business? Something else? I’m curious because, despite it all, you still have an obvious love for them 🙂

    Scott

    Sometimes, it’s not a good idea to get too close to the thing you love.

    Spending day after day with the folks who made the magic happen did two things — a) made me too conscious of the process to be able to be swept away by the result, and b) made me realize the creators were real human beings with feet of clay, and I could not set that aside to enjoy the comics they’d created. It took some maturation on my part before I could consult a psychic wall and partition away the makers of the product and the act of making from the end result.

    I can do that now. I couldn’t then.