A few items of nonsense to start off this week's Blog:

   *I just can't get enough of those Marvel Essentials! Just finished Luke Cage Power Man, and I'm starting on Dr. Strange Vol. 2, Most of both books I'd never read before, so it satisfies the Silver/Bronze Age junkie in me!

   *There comes a time in a collectors life to consider unloading. Stuff just starts to take up space after awhile. Once every few months I used to go through my comics collection, and come out with a thick stack of comics I'd take to the Crossgen offices, because there was a 'junk box' to put it in. The younger colorists, who hadn't reached the maximum hoarding stage as I had, would scarf them up. Most of the stuff I unloaded was stuff I planned to read and never did, or bought and disliked. I used to donate comics to the local Children's hospital, but aside from the few 'for kids' comics, there really wasn't anything suitable for young'un's until recently.
Speculator isn't a word you hear much anymore in the comics world. The early 1990's, as you know, was the peak of speculation, when last week's comic became this week's $25 wall display.Which brings back memories, to the start of my hard-learned introduction to the financial aspects of comic collecting, learned almost twenty years prior (God, I sound old!).

   In 1976, I bought Howard the Duck #1 brand new at a drugstore in Sharpsburg, PA, when my mom would take me on Saturdays to visit my Aunt Pidgie, who was one of the toughest, yet kindest souls on Earth. My mom, Aunt Pidge (who was taken away from us decades too soon) and Aunt Brenda would talk their 'girl talk', blowing off steam over coffee, while I played in the neighborhood looking for trouble or comic books, whichever came first.

   Back to Howard the Duck. I normally wouldn't have picked it up, but there was no other books that I either didn't have or cared to read. I was too young to appreciate the story, but the little Spider-Man cover insert promising an appearance inside seperated me from my valued twenty-five cents. I later traded it to a friend for another comic. Howard quickly became one of the early books targeted for fannish financial speculation, along with Swamp Thing and others. I found out two years later that HTD #1 shot up to $10!, a few years later, $20! I made the mistake of telling my dad. For years, he said "Don't trade any more comics away!" Of all the comics I'd have laying about the house, the only name that stuck with him was Howard the Duck. You'd have thought I'd traded the island of Manhattan for some beads the way he'd bring it up! Actually, my dad was never nasty about it, he would just bust my chops like dads do. What's wacky is, I continued collecting subsequent issues of Howard just because I figured future issues would go up in value as well, even though I HATED reading it. Thankfully, a few years ago, Marvel came out with an Essential Howard the Duck collection which I now recognize as the stuff of genius! It just was over my head at the time.

   Since then, I've had my share of blind investment luck, and that was only because I actually bought what I liked!

   Despite my occasional purging of my collection, I save odd, crappy comics that I bought from the quarter bins during the Black and white boom of the '80s (remember all those goofy slapped-together Solson books and endless Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle knockoffs?). A few I snagged was the original Men In Black miniseries by Malibu, a company later purchased by Marvel. It was one of the most fortuous purchases I made, just as it was for Marvel, as ten years later, the blockbuster MIB movie drove up demand, and I, being no fool (at least, at that particular time), knowing the skyrocketing value wouldn't last forever, I traded them in for a few hundred bucks of store credit!

   When I moved to Atlanta, in early 1991, a new comic book company called Valiant showed up on the scene, with some of my favorite creators that I hadn't heard from in years: Jim Shooter, Bob Layton and Barry Windsor-Smith! The first two releases, updates of Gold Key's Magnus and Solar, were top-notch quality books, comparable to the Big Two. Even better, you could get in on the ground floor! The first year brought other new titles like Harbinger and X-O Manowar, all solid refreshing reads. That is...until Unity, the unnecessarily-ambitious company-wide crossover that occured before the first year of books had hit the stands. I say unnecessary, because company-wide crossovers usually occur when indie companies are on their last legs (Eclipse's Total Eclipse, Valiant/Acclaim's uncompleted Unity 2000, Crossgen's uncompleted Negation War). At the time of Valiant's first Unity crossover, they published trade paperbacks of the early issues. I could see the writing on the wall, when the Harbinger #0, which I ordered using detached coupons from the earlier issues, peaked at a whopping $150! I promptly cashed in all my early Valiants for several hundred dollars of store credit. According to my 1998 Overstreet Price Guide, Harbinger #0 is $3.00 in mint condition. Buy low, sell high! In the past ten years, there've been many a long box at conventions where you could get entire runs of H.A.R.D. Corps, Ninjack, Rai, etc.

   TODAY'S RELATED NEWS, FAT-PACKED IN A PARAGRAPH JUST FOR YOU: Apparently, it was announced today, but not yet confimed that John Taddeo, who previously attempted to purchase Crossgen, was the highest bidder on the rights to the Valiant characters, minus the Gold Key/Western Publishing characters, Magnus, Solar & Turok. However, Christopher (the former Jim Owlsley) Priest and Mark Bright are laying claim to their Quantum and Woody book, a critically-acclaimed book with modest sales, so I don't think that will be a factor except maybe in the courts. Oh, yeah, possibly the trademarked name Valiant is legally still up for grabs. If there's any revamps, this will have been the third time, the second having occurred during Acclaim's mid-nineties purchase of Valiant. What a mess. I've met Taddeo, and he's got a lot of energy, so I wish him luck because it could be an uphill battle selling Valiant comics with all these headaches.

   My final lucky penny story: Back in 1994, at both the Pittsburgh Comic Con and Atlanta's Dragon Con, I was trolling the small press companies for work. To familiarize (and ingratiate) myself with these publishers, I'd buy a copy of whatever they were selling. I went through my money quickly buying a lot of crappy, but well-intentioned books. Some were done much better than others.

   One of the books I thought was going nowhere was Knights of the Dinner Table #1, a comic about about role-players sitting at a table, using a handful of figures and panels photostated endlessly. Clearly the art was serving the writing, which was chock-full of RP scenarios described by the players. I thought about tossing this first-and-I was-positive-only-issue, but it was a guilty pleasure of my collection, just as those b/w '80's books were. I just sold it last year for $175! It was an unexpected and much-needed windfall, because that particular month was slow, work-wise, for a variety of reasons. Knights of the Dinner table is still going strong and has inspired a new sub-genre of comics devoted to role-playing.

   In this age of countless cable channels devoting prime time to showing people playing poker, a Knights of the Dinner Table live TV show doesn't sound terribly unlikely.