Since my comics class is, technically, a SAGES course, we have to have guest speakers every now and then. Our first guest speaker was awesome--he runs a comics shop and was telling fantastic stories about comics he's bought and sold, including a story that sounds like an urban legend:
I got a phone call one day asking me to come out to this house and look through some comics. I get a lot of these calls, so I didn't think too much of it, but it was Christmas Eve and I wanted to get home, so I closed up shop and hopped in my car. I drove up to this five story mansion--no, I'm not kidding. And I'm looking at this place and I know, I just know what I'm going to find inside. The guy comes out on the front porch to meet me, and says "The comics are up in the attic." Of course the comics are in the attic. They always are.
The first floor is crammed full of newspapers. All newspapers. The kind of pack rat stuff you only ever hear about on CNN when some old lady dies, smothered by all her old issues of National Geographic. The second floor is board games--board games! Stacked to the ceiling. The third floor is like books or something, I don't know, the fourth floor is jam-packed with army stuff--clothing and weapons and even unopened MREs. It's disgusting, but I can't help but wonder what he's got up in that attic.
We walk up and the first thing I see is the pile. A six foot tall pile, like a haystack, of comics. As I get used to the light and the cold, I see comics up on the unfinished attic walls, and they're good ones--all the really iconic cover art from the 60s and 70s. I look a little closer and I cringe--he's just nailed them to the walls, a single nail right through the entire book. "Um, why are these comics nailed to the wall?" "Oh, I like to look at them," he says nonchalantly. I could probably get a couple hundred bucks for each of those books, without the nails.
I walk over to the pile and see another, smaller pile next to it. I blink. I have to be hallucinating. Right there, on the top of this other pile, is Action Comics #1. I blink again. It's not going away. I grab it and flip through it--it's in pretty decent shape. I look at the pile again. It's all great, great stuff--classic issues of Fantastic Four, more Superman, all sorts of stuff. This pile is worth about a million and a half dollars. The guy comes over and takes Action #1 out of my hands. "That's not what I called you about." He gestures to the large pile. "That one is." Of course it is.
The bigger pile's not bad, but it's nothing wonderful. I make a stack of things I know I'll have buyers for, and we agree on the price. As we walk back down the stairs, my arms full of slithering comics, I ask him if he won't let me make him an offer for some of the books in the smaller pile. He says no--a little angry. It turns out he only sells them when he needs the money to keep up the rest of his collecting habits. He branches off to the kitchen as I walk the comics out to my car, then come back inside for the rest. I walk up and down four flights of stairs, cursing myself for not hiding just a few books in my pile. I pack the comics neatly in a box and come back inside to pay him--in cash, of course. The guy's standing over the stove making dinner. I pay him, and make to leave.
"What, I'm not good enough to eat with? I'm good enough for you to buy my things but you won't sit down and eat with me? Tell you what, if you don't eat dinner with me this whole deal is off!" Now, in retrospect, I should have told him I'd eat with him in exchange for some of the smaller pile of books. But I just wanted out of there. So I sat down in his newspaper-covered kitchen, on Christmas Eve, and ate his nasty dried up pork chops, then hightailed it out of there back home. I've always wondered if I could have done anything differently there, but I've never heard from him since.
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