If he weren’t still married to their daughter, I’d say the dude should demand $75K from his in-laws.
At least. That aunt deserves a few years on Devil’s Island.
What an amazing find. It’s one of those things that nearly everybody knows about, whether they’re enthusiasts or not.
Never tell anyone except your spouse about a windfall, until it’s safely secured and invulnerable to other people’s idiocy.
I remember a guy in college who always insisted he had an AC #1, as well as a bunch of other things including a first issue Spider Man comic (I guess that’s worth some money as well), but his mom cleaned out his room while he was away and tossed the lot in the trash. Hundred maybe thousands of comics in his collection, all tossed out. 
Yup, my mom threw away my entire collection of every DC and Marvel #1 issues, along with my collection of Honus Wagner baseball cards and upside down airplane stamps. I had a complete Spinosaurus skeleton too.
Damn, you had a Spinosaurus skeleton?? :eek: That sucks that your mom also threw out all your good stuff too…you’d be rich just with that Spinosaurus skeleton alone! Myself, the only thing like that I can lay claim too was when I went overseas once my wife sold all my paintball gear to a shop for $150…and thought she had made a great bargain and couldn’t understand why my face was turning red. 
Of course the only reason extant copies of most of these things are worth a lot in the first place is the collective efforts of mothers everywhere to keep them rare.
My mom threw out my copy of Aristotle’s* Poetics (Comedy)*. 
I met this guys mom, and she was definitely not one to put up with any ‘foolishness’…such as comic books. Especially for a ‘grown man’. 
I think a lot of mom’s from the 50’s and 60’s were like this.
Though it might be a mom thing…my wife sold off a lot of my toys when I was away, and she went through my eldest two sons rooms and pretty much tossed out everything she could, including comic books, old computer game disks and CDs and toys.
I had a friend whose mother got so disgusted with “all those comics cluttering your room” that she had the girl’s father build a special shed in the backyard for them.
The day her daughter left for college, she set the shed and the entire comic book collection on fire:eek:
I still have my Legion of Super Heroes collection–all the comics from Adventure #303 on.
XT: Your wife went through YOUR stuff and tossed it?
She’d better have warned you beforehand.
We found a metric ass-ton of old newspapers from the 40’s under the floor of an old bar/brothel. Lots of em in pretty good condition.
Kinda fun reading the old war news from the era before ultra-PC. Great ads, too.
Did some research at the time, but nothing seemed to be too valuable. There all sitting in my garage now.
Nope. She knew I had ‘retired’ from competition paintball (yeah, there really is a competition paintball circuit :p), so she figured she’d take my stuff and see what the local store would offer her for it since we were planning to move back west. They offered her $150 for my entire collection, and she thought that was a great price for ‘toys’. When I calmed down I told her that just my harness and front/back plate cost me nearly $300, and my heavily modified auto-cocker, my mini-mag (also heavily modified) and my Typhoon were all over a thousand dollars each (not to mention the nitrogen system and all the other stuff I had). She just couldn’t grasp it…how could 'toy’s cost so much??
Won’t even get into my Major Matt Mason collection that also got sold off at a garage sale during the same trip.
silenus:
More specifically, on the Devil’s Island of Space.
There was somebody who posted here once about how a relative had died and the family had cleared his house out so they could sell it. Among the possessions that were tossed in the garbage because the family wanted the house cleared quickly was a complete run of Playboys from its first issue into the seventies. Several of us pointed out that collection could have been sold for about ten times more than the house.
I know a couple who work at an antique store (I have a booth there, which is how I know them) and while cleaning out his parents’ house, found several years’ worth of Reader’s Digests from the early 1930s; most of them were in mint condition and a few were even in the wrapper. His brothers were going to toss them on the burn pile :eek: :eek: :eek:
They’re not extremely valuable, but I bought the lot of them for $20.
When my grandmother, who has since died, moved to a senior village in 1975, one of the things that ended up on the burn pile was my grandfather’s WW I uniform. My brother has said, “You know how much you could get for that now on Ebay?” but even then, apparently just wasn’t worth that much. It may also have been in very poor condition too; I was 11 years old and don’t remember.
Was a WWI officers uniform go for (IIRC) around $500 on Pawn Stars once, so it might have been worth more than you think. I’d have thought the sentimental value would be worth something in any case.
Having watched things like Pawn Stars though, and seen all the folks bringing in stuff they got for next to nothing at a yard sale and then selling it for fairly big bucks (and the Pawn Stars pay pretty much low dollar), people have a hard time valuing things very well, or knowing what the stuff they have is really worth (either overvaluing, or undervaluing stuff by huge margins).
I think Spidey’s first appearance was Amazing Stories #16, which is super valuable. As a teen in the early 80s I spent $200 for a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #1, and it ranks as one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of my life. I just knew one day I’d come home to find my “funny books” had been thrown out as clutter, but no way could I confess to spending that kind of money.
After about a week of running home and checking on it constantly, I bought a foot-locker and padlock, ostensibly to protect my stuff from my siblings.
epbrown01:
Amazing Fantasy # 15.