I'm 49. I started buying comics in 1965 when I was 7 and quit(the first time) when they went to 20 cents in summer of 1971. I remember the last comic I bought was ASM #101. Had 'em all. Showcase, F.F. "44-115 complete, etc. True, they weren't in mint shape. Never heard of bags, price guides, etc. back then. Sold them to a used book store for 3 cents a piece. I think he charged 6 or 7 cents for them.

I've always wondered if any of them are still in circulation. Anybody got silverage Marvels or DCs with an "RW" on page one below the legend that looks like it was written by a little kid?

I remember when X-Men 94 was about $50, but it was out of my price range then. I also remember seeing Amazing Spider-Man 129 for about $20, but I passed on that as well.

And to think I was spending money back then on crap that's worthless now. If only I was a little wiser as to what to purchase. I'm still not.

I have almost 30 longboxes.

I am about to sell them off - stuff from the 1940s to date. All sorts of stuff.

I was told 20 years ago by a dealer, when I was very proud of my collection, "eh... you only rent comics."

I am finally seeing that what he said was true.

I spent alot of money on comics and comic cards around 1991 to 1995. I was in middle school at the time so money was hard to come by. It kills me to think that I spent so much money on them when I could have been buying other things.

One of the other main things I was into at the time was videogames. I limited the money I spent on the games since I thought that they would drop in price while the comics would go up. Ironically, the games I could have been playing have held their value fairly well while my comics are now virtually worthless.

The damage isn't too bad. I only have about 3 short boxes and a few assorted comic sets. It was decent collection for a young kid with no job though.

I was never really into comics, but I remember doing this with the DC cards. I figured out that the top four pack s of a box were much more likely to have hologram cards, so I would always buy those if I saw a display anywhere.

I'm glad I didn't know this then, or I would have wasted a lot more $ on DCU cards. As it is, I have 4-6 boxes (those standard letter/legal size) full of various comic cards from that era. Completely worthless I'm sure.

Valiant? Love Solar, bought all the issues because as has been said, the stories were great. The art was so so, exception being Solar, I love Windsor-Smith. I actually got a free trip to Cancun buy selling a few of my valiants (those gold logo ones and multiple first issues, or even rai #3!). So Valiant was good to me.

My biggest regret? Going to a fleamarket in college, down by Champaign-Urbana. It was in a huge farmhouse, saw a kid in his stand selling a comic "Daredevil vs Hitler", $15. Being a poor college kid, I thought, nah, this isn't worth crap. Later on i go look, and it's about $2,000. The condition wasn' tmint, but it was pretty damn nice.

I would have regretted not buying 2 copies of Hulk 181 when I did. I Thought they were too expensive, one at $20, and the other at $10.

My only regrets now are that I have so many books. I have only a few boxes, but man, that's too many. I have almost all of the Marvel Star Wars series, and almost all of the Warlord series, and a bunch of other crap I'll never look at but also never sell. All that is just taking up space.

I noticed collecting is only cool as long as you're still collecting. I want to get rid of all these monthly issues because I'm not buying or reading them anymore. What a waste of time, money, and space.

Sometimes, if I need bags-n-boards, I'll just take comics that were bagged/boarded, and removed them from the bags/boards, and just throw them away, and then reuse the bags/boards for the new stuff.

I regret keeping a lot of stuff around that I truly no longer have time to even re-read anymore, but kept them for sentimental reasons, even when I knew I could have netted a good amount of cash for them back then when the interest was high.

I also have a few binders full of comic-related card sets. I was very good at finding the chase cards back then, it's must harder now, and I don't really care about the cards these days. Plus the packs are far too expensive nowadays to get into them again.

Not every comic card set is worthless. I'm always peddling crap on eBay. Last year I realized that the last set of Marvel Masterpieces was selling for anywhere from $600 to $800. I sold my set, an almost complete set, about 40 singles, and some of the chase cards for $1200.

Sadly for me, this is the exception to the rule, because everything else I have has sold for peanuts.

My sad and ironic story.

I never collected comics for value. The only comics I had were ones I liked to read. Always hated collectors. They ruined comics for everyone else. So when I was younger, in late 90's, I went through this defiant phase of throwing out all my bags and boards. If I wanted to read an issue I wouldn't have to play with the tape or the bags, all I had to do was open up the long box and grab an issue. But then one day when I was moving I decided I would store all of my long boxes in my parents attic, just temporarly until I get things settled. To put it bluntly. It was a new house, there was damage to the roof, and it was winter. I mostly buy trades now, but I do still hate collectors, if for a different reason all together.

Don't forget Ultraverse. I collected Prime, Hardcase and the other titles.

I only made money on the Peacher comics that I picked up on a whim.

I stopped buying sometime ago and glad I did. I can't believe how much I spent on them.

I remember when X-Men 94 was $0.25 (or whatever) at my local drugstore. Picked up a copy and still have it, though not in great condition.

I do regret getting into a competition with a friend over who could collect more complete sets of the Tales of the Green Lantern Corps miniseries. I forget who won, but I still have 10 sets in a box somewhere and he sold his long ago.

I recently sold off a massive amount of comics. The only thing I regret, so far, is selling off my full runs of Hitman and Deadpool. Everything else I haven't thought twice about.

I'm probably going to go through and sell everything else off soon. Except Preacher. I'll be damned if I ever sell off my copies of Preacher.

Well be sure to post what you have in the Comic/TPB/Gn exchange thread (if you can find it). There might be something one of us could use!

The early Valiants were great. I started collecting Valiant right in the beginning after meeting Don Perlin at a local comic store who was promoting Magnus #1. I bought 3 copies of the 1st 8 issues (2 to cut out the coupon for issue 0 and one in mint for the collection). I ended up with the complete Shooter valiant run. When shooter left, the company became a victim of its own success. I met Bob Layton at a convention in New York, (right at the time Valiant was at its peek-Magnus 21 had just come out) and he said they will never overprint and they will keep the universe to 12 titles maximum. Well both were flat out lies, because Valiant overprinted and they started releasing a new title for everything. Turok, Doctor Mirage, Armorines, Visitor. Secret Weapons. Stories really got bad too. I stopped collecting many of the titles when acclaim took over. I even tried it again when Fabian Nicieza ran the company for a while but the quality just wasn't there.

I agree 100 percent. I was trying to find some things to get rid of about six months ago and ran into my old Valiant books. I pulled out a few and was surprised how good they were. It's a shame the whole thing caved in on them.

I have about a long box full of early Valiant. Odds and ends as I collected most for collectability, but I regularly read Ninjak, Turok and XO:Manowar. Hell, I even collected all of those cards (2 sets) you needed to turn in for some special issue or something (I never got around to sending them away). I quit right before the Unity line ended.

Aside from collecting Uncanny X-Men, Daredevil, post Byrne Superman titles, Batman, Batman and the Outsiders, Teen Titans, etc., I collected a lot of VIZ manga, Kamui, Crying Freeman, Urusei Yatsura: Lum, Ranma 1/2. I also collected odd stuff like Whisper, Shuriken, Ninja High School. And I have my share of Image titles. I think at the time, I bought 4 issues of every Spawn and I have full sets up to about #15. I also have a lot of the early Alien stuff from Dark Horse. Somewhere I have the early Evil Ernie and Lady Death stuff, too. I have about 14 long boxes of this that I just need to catalogue. They need to go.

Thankfully, I never got into the whole collecting for profit that was big in the early '90s - I just read what I liked and never bought multiple copies of anything. But since I did get in on the ground-floor of the Valliant books, I had all of the issues from Shooter's stint, and even though I enjoyed them, I sold them off while the iron was hot, making a nice profit (though I kept all the books drawn by BWS, as he's my favorite artist). That was the only time I've ever sold anything, even though I have quite a few valuable books in good shape from the '60s, '70s and '80s - it's just that I know those older books would retain their value, since they have established, popular characters.

Still, having been a comic-book collector for almost 30 years now, my main regret is being a comic book collector at all. I wish I never picked up that issue of The Avengers 30 years ago that got me into this ridiculous hobby. Making myself a slave to weekly release dates, and filling in gaps in my collection, and all the silly things that go with this hobby that took up so much time, money and effort are my main regrets.

Anyways, in the long run, as much as I enjoy comics, the time, money and effort I've put into it has not been worth it, and I wish I would've done something else instead. But I guess it wasn't as bad as having a drug addiction...

I also have a pretty big collection of CDs (about a thousand), DVDs (about a thousand) and video games (about 150) throughout the years, but for some reason, I don't regret those at all like I do the comics (20 long-boxes). I wonder why.

Good post!

I narrowed my collection down to two (very heavy) long boxes by giving some to my 4-year old, donating a bunch to the thrift store and dumping scores (Power Pack, for instance) into the trash. At least with DVDs, we can get trade-in credit at BB or DVD Planet or even the local pawn shop. They still have some value. CDs are relatively small and easy to store. Comics? Unwieldy (a bitch to move and a pain to store) and rarely retain their value. I can get $8 in trade-in credit for a full screen, snapper-cased version of, say, Children of the Corn VI, but who would even give me a dime for Rob Liefeld-illustrated Avengers #3?

Yeah, I'm up to about 3 long boxes right now after getting back into comics a couple years ago. I hate storing Comics. I'm getting ready to cut back on purchases to slow the build up.

Space is a big reason why I've switched to buying mainly just TPBs. I'm up to maybe 30 long boxes, and the collector in me can't imagine selling or otherwise getting rid of most of them (hopefully that will change someday, or I'll have a kid or relative that will appreciate them).

32 long boxes and climbing. Thankfully I have a pretty big walk in closet where I have been able to stack about half of those in there on top of each other. I've got the titles pencilled in on the side of the box in case I ever need to find something. Sometimes I look at all these and wonder what the hell I am doing.

I dread the next time I have to move, because lugging these two tons of comics to the new place is GOING TO SUCK.

The only thing I regret about collecting is what made it worthwhile in the end, namely, being so anal about condition and taking care of them. Comics are meant to be read and enjoyed, yet I often didn't get that much pleasure out of them, being as they were bagged and boarded and I didn't consider it worth the effort to take them out to read them. Once I sold off one portion of my collection to finance my wife's engagement ring, and the rest years later to pay for my HDTV, though, I was glad I did take good care of them.

Oh, the other thing I regret is continuing to collect books that were clearly absolute shit, mainly because I had always collected them, and what if I missed an issue?? For example, I had a complete run of Spectacular Spider-Man that I kept going well into Sal Buscema's shitty run as artist, not to mention the period a few years before when the even more incompetent Al Milgrom drew the book. But I couldn't give it up, it was like crack.

Yeah I've decided to stop buying all Batman Titles unless I get a heads up about a special event. Batman is cool but there hasn't been anything really awesome for me for a while now. I'm also going to really try to stop buying Mini Series and wait for Trades.