Since I got a great response to my previous post on The Great Playboy Unloading Project, I wanted to write a follow-up on it. Here’s the original post:
Nobody Wants These Playboys
A few months ago, a friend of my friend, Claynferno (definitely a good follow, especially if you like cat videos), asked if he could help her sell some old comics that had belonged to someone she knew who had passed away. Clay came to me, knowing that I have
There’s not a lot to update about the Playboys themselves, but some thoughts on the previous owner.
As I said I did not know this person, not literally, anyway. But I feel like I was able to learn some things about him through the collections that I received. I know I shouldn’t make assumptions about a stranger, but sometimes you can tell a lot about a person by their possessions.
For example, they obviously collected comics, as well as Playboys, for many, many years. Most of the comics that they had full runs of spanned almost 40 years, from the early ‘80’s all the way to the early 2000s. And not just Marvel and DC comics, but several other rare independent titles that can be hard to find, and several I’ve never even heard of. And strangely enough, there were no Batman, Superman or X-Men comics in there. In fact, while there was the full run of the Marvel spoof Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham, there were no actual Spider-Man comics. So he didn’t gravitate towards the popular titles like I did. He liked the outliers.
There was also a good chunk of what I assume were self-published comics from that era, the kind you usually found at conventions or bought directly from the creators. I know because that’s pretty much how I sold mine. And as much as we try to make them look professional, there is always something about them that says, “I made this myself.” That is not neccessarily a bad thing. It’s just how it is. But these weren’t comics you casually picked up at the newsstand. You either had to seek them out or have the creator practically beg you to buy one (like I did). My guess is that this guy sought them out.
There was also a certain style to most of the comics. A lot of them, indie and mainstream, were horror comics, and some of them were a bit on the risque’ side, which I can’t deny kind of goes along with the Playboys. Not flat-out porn comics, but there were some well-endowed and/or scantily-clad women on the covers.
No judgments, of course. There was a time when those comics were hard to avoid. Just one of my observations.
But there was something else about this person’s comics. Mainly, collecting a complete series of long-running titles is kind of hard, assuming they didn’t go on eBay and buy the full run (and, ironically, here I am, attempting to sell those same runs). Some of them were clearly bought individually and stored in order, although surprisingly, only the “important” ones, like the debut issue of a character or issue #1, were bagged, and almost none of them boarded, like most collectors would choose to do. They were also not stored in standard comic book long boxes, which is another thing most collectors do with their books.
Comic collectors are a peculiar lot. Some of us meticulously organize every issue, bagging and boarding everything to preserve its condition. Others are more relaxed about it. But this guy seemed to fall into a category of his own. He clearly wanted complete runs of the comics he liked, but didn’t seem particularly concerned about preserving them. He stored them in whatever boxes he could find, including a Mr. Bubble box that I got a kick out of. He seemed more interested in having the comics than in what they might someday be worth.
There’s also the comics themselves. Besides the full runs and indie comics, there were several from a bygone era: Western Gunfighters, Night Rider (who was originally called Ghost Rider, until they gave that name to the guy with the flaming head), and the bizarre Chilling Adventures in Sorcery published in 1972. Some of these comic books had been around for a while and no doubt had seen some things. They were not in what I would call “excellent condition,” but books from that era rarely are. This man probably didn’t buy them in a store on a regular Wednesday. They were likely previously-owned, maybe by multiple collectors, and purchased at a convention or off a dealer’s wall. And now they were being sold again, by me. Possibly to yet another collector, maybe to a dealer, maybe to someone who just likes to read comics. One buyer’s username was “all-things-comics,” and they had an eBay storefront that bore out that name, so there’s a good chance that one will be flipped and passed on to yet another owner.
But the person who bought all 42 issues of Dazzler didn’t appear to have a store. And neither did the person from France who bought the complete run of Savage She-Hulk from the early 80’s. It’s actually cool to think that those comics traversed the Atlantic. It’s also kind of sad to think that it took this guy years to put this collection together, and it’s taken me a few months to scatter it across the country, and even across the ocean, and I doubt he ever thought that would happen. Hopefully Savage She-Hulk will be part of the buyer’s collection in France for a while. But what will happen when they die, or when they need a few francs? Will they be sold yet again? When does the cycle end? When the comics become so old that they just fall apart?
In the end, I’ll never know the fate of his comics, but I have to admit, I kind of admire his collecting style.
Over the years, comic collecting became like collecting baseball cards or stamps or anything else that people collect. For a lot of us, it wasn’t about just buying them so you had something to read on the toilet. It became about what they could be worth someday. And I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I have bought so many comics that I read and then stuck in a plastic sleeve and put in a box hoping one day to sell it for profit. And some did sell for profit and some did not, but through various moves, purges, and just generally being broke for most of the last few decades, my collection has dwindled to just a couple hundred books. And after collecting them for most of my life, that’s not really a lot. Some I have kept because I enjoyed them, but I now have the Marvel Unlimited app to read comics, so owning them isn’t really a priority. Comics are cool to have, but are they necessary in the grand scheme of things, except to simply have a comic collection?
But this whole process of selling this person’s comics has also made me think about what that means. Those comics that I tell myself I will take to my grave, I have started to wonder, “Will that literally happen?” I have no children to pass them on to, so when my day comes, will a relative give them to someone, who will in turn give them to someone else, who will try to sell them? Will they be donated? Recycled? Will someone look at them and try to discern what kind of person I was, based on the comics I collected, like I am doing right now? I’d like to think that I’m not that easy to read, but I’m probably wrong.
They would probably think, “This nutjob sure loved that Joker.”
Thanks again fopr reading. If you want to check out some of the comics that are on eBay, here’s where you can do that. I also wrote a comic myself, as I mentioned, and host a podcast. Please, enjoy all of those things, before I die and someone else has to sell them. And don’t forget…