Comics in every box of comics everywhere

Inspired by this conversation:

Should I sell my comics?

random friend gave me a box filled with this kind of stuff: micronauts, rom, xmen, alpha flight, batman, superman, gi joe, image... late 80's/early 90's shit. it's a box filled with comics that not only myself but like 5 million kids my age bought up when we were all around twelve or fourteen. Same era of stuff. At one point, when I pared down my collection for the first time, they were the first books I got rid of. Years later, a friend would say, "hey I'm getting rid of my comics, you wanna buy them" and i'd go over and whattayaknow: it's like 90% that generic late 80's early 90's marvel/dc/tmnt/eclipse/image shit and i say nah, it's okay but he ends up just giving them to me and it's not like I'm gonna turn down comics, right? and then eventually I pass the white elephant on to someone else and then some other guy does it again and this is like the fifth time I've gotten what feels like the same useless box of barely readable larry hama, ann nocenti, chris claremont, bill mantlo, al milgrom, marc silvestri, keith giffen, j.m. dematteis stuff. Just this once, rather than find another person to pass it along to, i'm throwing each book into the recycling bin once it makes the rounds out of the bathroom.
― I have been forks-style since day one (forksclovetofu)

ha, i had a feeling that's what you were getting at. so many of us got into comics during that time - Batman movies/dark grim era/speculator boom, with millions of copies of X-Men #1 or Spider-Man #1 collecting dust in longboxes
― Nhex, Monday, June 14, 2010

I too have a box of 1990 era shit at my parents house. It's the only thing left there from when I was kid. Some late 80s baseball cards are in there too - lots of Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire '87 Topps rookie cards.
― calstars, Monday, June 14, 2010

feels like a support group...
I have 3 long boxes of 80s shit at my parents house, same crapola (goddamn Alpha Flight, New Mutants, X-Factor) with the bonus of all the Secret Wars 1&2 and Crisis on Infinite Earth bullshit.
although hidden deep within is some gold like my Phoenix-era X-Men, Frank Miller Daredevils and the complete US Eagle Judge Dredd/2000AD reprints (need to get those, Nemesis rules).
― No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us. (herb albert), Monday, June 14, 2010

So what's in that box?

American Flagg
Secret Wars 2
Rom Space Knight
US1
Transformers
GI Joe
two issues of Groo
Suicide Squad
Marvel Comics Presents
Master of Kung Fu
Iron Man Annual #8

Raphael TMNT One Shot
Strikeforce Morituri
Static
Random Rock Bio comic
a run of X-Factor
oddball Kubert war comic
George Perez Wonder Woman #4
World of Krypton
Pre-Teen Dirty Gene Kung Fu Kangaroos one shot
two frank miller daredevils
one alan moore Swamp Thing
an old Previews
four Hero/Wizard ashcans

just went home and went through this stuff as well.

Alpha Flight
Machine Man 4-issue series w/ Barry Windsor Smith
TONS of Aircel comics...Samurai, Warlock 5, Dragon Ring.
The Vision and Scarlet Witch 12-issue series, etc.

filled with comics that not only myself but like 5 million kids my age bought up when we were all around twelve or fourteen

black and white reprints of New Teen Titans
Crisis On Infinite Earths #1
More Frustration by Bretecher
Arcade #5
Bloom County Babylon
Feiffer's Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler
local MADs with horrible covers by Zmud
those 70s MAD Annuals with colour comic-sized Kurtzman best-ofs bound into the spine
Sagendorf's horrible self-serving Popeye history with a bunch of amazing Segar Sundays
some Adventure digests

x-force, west coast avengers, star trek: tng comics

i want to live in a world where ARCADE is found in every long box!

more likely:
Valiant comics, especially the crossovers w/ Image comics
Ghost Rider w/ glow in the dark cover
Death of Superman (still polybagged w/ trading card, now that must be a collector's item dude)
random issue of Betty and Veronica
Mike Grell's 'deluxe' Green Arrow mini-series
Warp (from First - hey, Frank Brunner art, man!)
Jim Valentino's Shadowhawk (especially the one w/ the foil cover, can't be many of those)

yeah, that only happened once, on holiday in a horrible resort town in Queensland. but that list is the sort of stuff I would buy at second-hand book shops or newsagents when I was 12. ['50s Kurtzmad paperbacks when I was 9. Footrot Flats collections when I was 7-8 (those are STILL turning up in 2nd hand bookshops today), Garfield at 5-6, Pocket Books paperbacks of Ditko Spidey and Marie S. Hulk at the same age. Lots of B&W reprints of 1950s and 1970s DC line-wide stuff from 7-10, also the entire Tintin in random order and a few Asterixes (every school library ever had most of them, it wasn't as urgent to have them all at home for permanent re-reading.) (actually it might have taken me until sometime in high school to finish the Tintins. I got Alph-Art for my 21st.) (I don't know that I ever bought Archies, but somehow they just turn up, don't they?)] at fourteen it were all Grant Morrison round 'ere - Animal Man, Doom Patrol, St Swithin's Day, New Adventures of Hitler etc etc. plus the TOTALLY READABLE giffen & dematteis! but the rest of forks' barely readable larry hama, ann nocenti, chris claremont, bill mantlo, al milgrom, marc silvestri I always found totally unreadable, I don't know how anyone could handle it as a grown-up.

actually I have read two Claremont X-Men collections as a grown-up, "barely" is le mot juste there

some issues of Omaha and Melody for the I'M A GROWNUP AND I'M BUYING GROWNUP SEXYTIME COMICS cachet

Kitty Pryde and Wolverine
Cloak and Dagger
Moon Knight
What If?
Marvel New Universe (winner concept there...)
New Teen Titans
Ambush Bug

i'm talking about early de matteis (new defenders) and dumbshit giffen (lobo, hex)

Ralph Snart Adventures
Dial H for Hero
tattered silver age comic in mylar sleeve to preserve the poor condition
two issues of sandman, generally early ones
punisher war journal
random ish of Who's Who/Marvel Universe

A single-digit issue of Legends of the Dark Knight, but not , curiously, #1.

countless TMNT rip-offs/spoofs...

Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters
Naive Inter-Dimensional Commando Koalas

Boris the Bear

Cold Blooded Chameleon Commandos!

Pre-Vertigo "suggested for mature readers" postcards for Hellblazer, Shade the Changing Man

Megaton Man!

Megaton Man!

hahaha, yes

also, Milk & Cheese

Shadowhawk
Weird War Tales
Magik 1-4
X-Men vs Avengers

the pre-vertigo "New Format" DC stuff was great. I remember specifically, I was a huge Marvel fanboy and hated DC. Then I got into black and white independents. Love and Rockets and Cerebus, sure, but also Samurai and countless self-published 1-shot wannabe superhero crap, and I still went around telling everyone that DC was lame. Then I picked up an issue of Swamp Thing, my first DC purchase. It was late in Alan Moore's run, the one where Swamp Thing is travelling through space and becomes a planet having sex with a satellite or something, you know the one. My mind was blown. I didn't jump ship just then, I just quietly put it back in the drawer.

Shi
Aliens v Predator
Terminator (circa NOW)
Marvel Age
Marvel Saga
DC Focus
Spidey SuperStories

Ravage 2099
Femforce
The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones
DC Challenge
Tailgunner Jo
ALF

The Trouble with Girls
Legend
Millennium
a bunch of Inferno and Fall of the Mutants Crossovers
Death of Robin TPB

Various issues of Action Comics Weekly
One of the Superman/TRS-80 giveaway comics
Randomly selected issues of Marvel Fanfare
A mildewed copy of one of the mid-'70s Kirby issues of Eternals
Daredevil #186 (it is always, always #186)

* A pre-Crisis Superman comic from 1980
* Random Ann Nocenti Daredevil comic
* An issue of "Blind Justice" from Detective Comics

There is a sister subset to this group, "Graphic novels no one ever takes out of the library" (usually something by Jason Lutes, or that Walter Simonson Fantastic Four collection)

There is a sister subset to this group, "Graphic novels no one ever takes out of the library"

Ha. Elfquest totally belongs to this group.

Subset: David Collier! Only in Canada, I suppose. Great stuff, though.

Yeah, that copy of the Frank Ritza Papers probably only got moved when a librarian reorganised the shelves. Although I guess "Hamilton Sketchbook" sounds more intriguing the further you get away from Hamilton.

Hamilton Sketchbook got mad remaindered here

Hamilton is sort of the remaindered version of Toronto

I've just been sifting through a fantastic box of cast-off stuff a friend of mine was getting rid of(and which I've added to over the years), practically all late eighties/early nineties.

Hawkworld
Suicide Squad
Superman post-death stuff, "Reign Of The Superman" etc.
Action Comics #1 Reprint
Cerebus Reprint
The Shadow Strikes
Justice League International
World Without Heroes(part of the "Invasion" event)
Christmas With The Superheroes(this is probably my favourite): A 1988 DC special collecting Silver Age Xmas-themed japes, including the epic "Silent Night Of The Batman".

And this is just scratching the surface!

Oh, I've just found a Morrison Animal Man I didn't even know was in there! Splendid.

Oh, also that fucking X-Men Fight Hunger in Africa Jam with some astonishingly bad Stephen King writes Shadowcat and Harlan Ellison writes Wolverine parts.

omg that was BAD

i'm toying with the idea of starting a thread for worst ann nocenti dialogue but I'm not sure if that's mean.

i have a shit ton of gi joe from the 80s. makes good collage material.

also, Milk & Cheese

for about 5 minutes when i was 12, i owned a milk & cheese shirt w/the classic "gin makes a man mean! everybody booze up and riot!" on it. then my mom asked to see it and made me take it back. thanks, mom, i could have been one of the cool kids.

My daughter made me tiny little Milk & Cheese figures out of polymer clay when she was 5 or 6 -- amazingly detailed considering they were less than 1" tall. They were pretty fragile though, and didn't survive the next couple of moves. (Pretty sure she didn't make them flipping the bird.)

I LOVED X-Men Heroes for Hope! Wrightson! Chaykin!

that thing had some of the worst printing ever, was it an early Flexographic joint?

In a couple of plastic crates in my shed, seemingly random issues of...

* the UK Transformers weekly
* local Australian-printed newsagent editions of Claremont/Lee X-Men
* Batman vs Predator
* 1 issue of Marvel Universe Handbook (dead people from H-R or similar)
* much Footrat Flats and little Garfield paperbacks and some Calvin & Hobbes collections I found behind a newsagent with the covers ripped off
* an Australian comic called Eureka, issue 3, bought because perusal in the newsagent showed one story had bare female arses and another had bare female breasts
* various issues of Giffen/DeMatteis JLA/JLE/JLI and weekly-era Action Comics that came in cheapo bags of 5 comics in the supermarket
* some awful, awful comics by Jim Shooter: almost the complete Broadway Comics output, which I got free, and am amazed I haven't thrown away
* some late TMNT issues with Shredder resurrected by alien worms or some such nonsense
* several issues of 'What The--?', bought in a small country town on a skiiing holiday when there was no snow and nothing else for a 12yo to do

Ha, the one issue of What The--?! I ever bought was in a country town while on a school camping trip through the outback. A bigger boy almost wet himself rushing to tell all his mates "He's bought a magazine called What The!" - apparently he thought that he and his friends had invented the phrase. And had never seen a comic book.

Tribe #1 (but never #2 - I suspect it doesn't exist)
Archer & Armstrong - the entire series, available for under a buck I imagine
Various issues starring Azrael
Some Milligan era Shade
The first issue of that mid-nineties Marvel series with Galactus on the background of the cover, Galactus having a popular-at-the-time glowing Cable eye for some damn reason; y'know the one I'm talking about? It a hideously designed crew of badasses wielding improbable guns in the foreground and the title was a pretty ridiculous "pull whatever's in the ether" title involving computers. Christ, what was it called?
A Joe Kelly JLA issue
etc.

Ha, the one issue of What The--?! I ever bought was in a country town while on a school camping trip through the outback.

Who would have thought rural Aus had such a taste for broad comics parody?

Archer & Armstrong - the entire series, available for under a buck I imagine

would smash

i would love to re-get my marvel universe handbook and marvel sage; regret giving those away

The Spider-Man and Power Pack child abuse crossover.

I have all of the Essential Marvel Handbook collections and most of the newer hardcover collections. I will never tire of reading through that stuff.

I wish I could remember what I did with all my MU Handbook issues. I used to pick them up on clearance at $.20 each circa 1989...

X-Men: Heroes for Hope
US1 #1

https://giantsizecomicthings.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/us_1_vol_1_1.jpg

i, uh, may have gone on ebay and bought all the marvel universe deluxe, original and update 89 issues

Good man.

They're an essential part of any worthwhile reference library.

Ha! I found a stray copy of Transformers Universe at my parents over the holidays.

i have two issues and a "Call of Duty" GI Joe encyclopedia... would buy if i saw them!

At the bottom of every pile of stuff in my parents' house, there's always a coverless issue of Shade the Changing Man

A few random issues of Marvel Comics Presents that allow one to read, at most, 3/4 of a complete story.