The Collector

Collecting things is a weird obsession. I don’t mean to use the term “weird” pejoratively, mind you—I myself have collected lots of things over the years.

Some children will collect toys, which makes a great deal of sense. Toys are the first thing a kid really owns, so a young mind might turn toward wanting to have every item from a set, for instance, or all the characters from a franchise. Some kids will leave a toy in its original packaging, preserving it for posterity.

I never had any time for toy collecting, possibly because I was far too busy dissecting and reconfiguring whatever toys I had (or just playing with them), like this picture my folks snapped of me creating a little makeshift prison for the Hulk:

Instead, my collecting bug first manifested with comic books. Someone gave me a Transformers comic they were going to throw away. Now, I didn’t know much about pricing collectibles or how to find out what something was worth, but I took one look at the cover price (75 cents), and I reasoned immediately that there was more value than zero remaining.

At first, I might have wanted to read the comic and gawk at the art. I certainly taught myself to draw by looking at comic books, but this really didn’t manifest until a couple years later, when I had a more sizeable collection. Regardless, collecting for its own sake quickly took center stage.

Many kids wanted to collect things because they wanted to own that complete run of Transformers comics or what have you, but for me, there was a deeper motivation: these things were worth something, damnit! Eventually, I figured out that you could purchase a book (Overstreet’s Price Guide, typically) and then determine how much something was worth. Other people might then want to buy the comic from you at some future date.

That’s right: I regarded comics as little more than a certificate of stock ownership or a bond, albeit with very cool art. Over time, this morphed a bit as I learned more and more about comic books, superhero storylines, and genuinely creative artwork, but the idea of a speculative investment was never far from the center for me.

I found out that there were comic book shops where you could buy not only new comics, but also older collectible ones. I began to lust after X-men #1 and other really cool classics that seemed so ridiculously beyond my price range that they would stay that way forever.

I discovered comic book conventions, too, like the one where I met the Incredible Hulk! I got comic books signed by my favorite artists (and other artists I didn’t really care much about, presuming that their signature would increase the value of the comic).

I created a notebook to track all my comic books, and meticulously went through Overstreet’s Price Guide to do my best to determine a value for each comic I owned, one at a time. Collecting comic books was already around by the mid-80s, but it grew a ton while I was involved, including the availability of a monthly price guide.

I made it a point to update the notebook every month, whenever those new monthly guides came out. So, in addition to drawing these comics every day, I was also painstakingly pricing them on a regular basis. It might be fair to say I was a little obsessed.

I still have some of those old comic books today, but the majority are long gone. Why? I sold them around 25 years ago when I was first trying to become self-sustaining. Do I regret this? Nah, not really—the funds allowed me to pursue my dreams to an extent that would not have been possible, had I not been that weird kid who viewed comic books as bond certificates.

Here are a few random (but interesting) comics I grabbed just now for this photo op. The Space War and Turtles comics have been with me since I was a kid, but the Archie from the 50s is one that I found about 25 years ago at a flea market:

Besides comic books, there were coins. Coins were everywhere in the 80s! You needed quarters to play video games at the arcade, and spare change was a significant portion of my available free cash at any moment. If I was saving up for something, that certainly meant saving coins.

Of course, some older coins are worth more than their face value. Most of these are much older coins, and just like with comic books, the better the condition, the more valuable. And, just like with comics, coins had price guides you could check to determine if you had something of value.

Then came stamps. Stamps didn’t take me away from comic books—on the contrary, my passion for collecting grew during this time—but it did give me a very different perspective on collecting. I didn’t travel to any conventions for stamps, but I did head out to a few stamp collecting clubs. I may have been the youngest person there by several decades, but our neighbor, Mr. Mulkins, took me under his wing and eagerly brought me along, being a bit of a stamp nerd himself.

Here’s a giant (and heavy) book of stamp images, which you’re then supposed to affix the actual stamp atop it when you find it—not by gluing the stamp, mind you! There were special little tabs that were safe for the stamps, and if they were really valuable, you’d put them in a little plastic protective case:

Stamps and coins didn’t hold the same spell over me that comic books did, but all three were certainly manifestations of the same concept: that collectibles can be worth something in the future, and that I could play a game of sorts, trying to identify undervalued items to buy them.

There’s an old adage in investing that you make your money when you buy, not when you sell. I understood this pretty early on, although I might add that you also make money when you sell at the right price.

Collecting for the purpose of eventual selling (one day, maybe) isn’t quite the same as collecting for fun, but this type of collecting can still be invigorating and energizing. I became a collector because, at the end of the day, I saw value where others did not.

What sorts of things have you collected over the years? Is any of that same passion there today?