Sell? I just threw mine out when I grew up. I was around 12 or 13 tops, when I marched down to the basement, took a few hundred comic books, some DC, but mostly early Marvels, Spiderman 1-45 or 50 or so, the same for Fantastic Fours, Daredevils, Hulks, Thors (I think the early ones were called “Tales of the Unknown” or some such), Avengers and a few other series, and just pitched them into the trash, because I didn’t need to be reading “joke books” anymore.
Oh, wait, that wasn’t me. That was my aunt. I’m the one screaming like a stuck pig when I found them gone three weeks later.
My mom tossed mine, but she did give me warning: “If we’re all waiting to go somewhere and you haven’t even started getting ready because you’re reading a comic book, I’m throwing them all out.”
I’ll often mention to her how much my early Spideys would be worth now (actually, they got folded and stuffed in pockets so much that they’d be graded “0.05 = Crappy”).
Then I drop hints that my therapist wants to talk to her about the effects of stealing from your children…
When I read that, I thought “Ahhh, there’s your mistake.”
My grandma threw out the ones I kept at her place (I spent summers with her as a kid) and that about broke my heart. Then as a college student my mom ordered me to get rid of the ones I had left at home as they were “taking up too much room in the storage locker”. I sold them to a guy for a pittance.
I did hang on to that Supie #17 though. Dad bought me that at a comic book meet back in 1968 for either $20 or $40, I don’t recall exactly. But that was a LOT of money back then.
I also held on to the issue of National Lampoon with the dog with the gun to its head on the cover, too.
I’m torn between selling individual comics/runs, and finding someone to take the whole lot.
My comics are disorganized, about thirty short boxes’ worth. Do I really want to take the time to sort through them to find runs of good series, #1s, or key issues (“First Appearance: Matter Eater Lad’s proctologist”)?
On the other hand, I do know a Comics Guy who’d take a quick look and make an inexact (but probably low) offer.
.
Or, I could be like one of my friends. She’s downsizing and liquidating a shit-ton of comics and graphic novels.
She’s donating her impressive collection to the local library “for the maximum numbers of readers”.
Lucky readers… she has complete runs of series like the Brian Michael Bendis Daredevils and the Jim Steranko SHIELDs…
I didn’t have anywhere near as many, but I thought the sorting and curating was the best part of ditching my comics. Already keeping them alphabetical and chronological probably helped facilitate that though.
Late correction: it was bugging me so I wiki’ed it and found out that the series was called “Journey into Mystery” that introduced THOR in issue #83 when I was 9. I don’t think I owned the first THOR but 9 is about when I started collecting comics, so I think I had all the THORs from about #86 or #87 or so.
It’s actually pretty cool to be able to go back and see my early collection. It would be much cooler, of course, if my aunt hadn’t pitched them out, but there’s a lot about the past that I regret.
I have a subscription to Marvel Unlimited. If my entire collection of Marvel comics went up in flames, my only regret would be financial. It’s just a bunch of unnecessary paper now (although it is fun to read some of those old ads that are the only thing not always digitally archived.)
And options like that are a big part of why comic collecting isn’t as valuable as it used to be–if you want to read a copy of an issue, you no longer have to track down a physical copy of that issue.
My mother was apparently a bit of a Tomboy. She had golden age comic books and baseball cards from the 30s and 40s. My grandmother was whatever is the opposite of a horder. It made cleaning out her house easy but it meant all of those things were gone long before my mother reached adulthood.