More Information on Comics Variant Editions I'll begin today's newsletter with a clarification. One reader pointed out to me that in my last column that I seemed to be overly harsh in my description of the competency of "weekend warrior" comics dealers. I assured him that I meant no such affront. The truth is that many of my best friends in the comics world sell back issues only part time, while still keeping their more secure day jobs. This does not in any way mean that they are any less competent than dealers who run brick-and-mortar retail comics shops. In point of fact, quite the opposite is oftentimes true, as it is only thanks to my weekend warrior friends generously sharing their knowledge and unique perspectives with me at smaller comics shows, that I am able to gain some sort of overall sense of trends in demand for collectible comics. On the flip side, however, there are sometimes fans who rent tables at small shows who set up to sell comics from their own collection with little, or no, knowledge of current trends in BI comics prices. They want to generate X amount of money at the show, and they do not care what they have to sell in order to achieve that goal. They are the ones who can cause actual harm to every other dealer in the room (full time, or part time), by simply not caring if they are dumping their comics at below market values. Moving on to another topic that was raised, my correspondent made an excellent case for why true scarcity is the driving force behind almost all of his purchasing decisions. I completely agree with him, and it has directly affected our own business model. That is why, for example, that you will see so many subcategories of comics offered within our website database. While we do try very hard to provide everyone with the convenience of being able to engage in one-stop shopping on our website for all manner of comics, books, and magazines, our real emphasis these days is in accumulating and documenting every printing variant ever created, no matter how rare, or obscure. This variants effort started out as an innocent attempt at just improving our database/website inventory records, but once we began documenting all of the newsstand editions ever printed, this project became a personal obsession for me. Simply put, I am a collector's collector. If I start collecting something, I want to eventually own everything ever created within that genre. That is why I have tried to limit myself within the comics world to collecting just a couple of artists (Will Eisner and Wally Wood), a few genres (fanzines, undergrounds, dealer catalogs, giveaway comics, International editions, and religious comics), and finally, books about the history of the comics industry. The one commonality with most of my collecting interests is that these are genres that are not well-documented, and also where the spectrum of possibilities are almost beyond comprehension. There are, for example several underground comix guides, but none have managed to even come close to documenting all of the printing variants that I own. The same is true of MARCH OF COMICS, the iconic Dell/Gold Key giveaway series (480+ different issues) for which the publisher would print an infinite number of custom covers, each featuring a different sponsoring chain store. I have one MOC issue that I just obtained with eight (!) different cover variants, each featuring a different retailer. Offer me a dozen more copies of that same issue featuring other retailers, and I would be delighted to add them to my collection, too. This brings me to a definition of alternative perspectives among collectors which I think is quite relevant to this discussion. Simply put, there are collectors for whom owning even a single copy of each issue a given comics title is quite enough. Once they have accumulated AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1-#441, for example, they are done. For me, however, that is only the beginning. For my collection to be "complete" I need to own the newsstand editions, the UK editions, the Whitman variants, the Jeweler's editions, and the Canadian Price variants, as well as any custom variants that Marvel has created along the way. Within my underground comix collection, for example, I want to own every single price variant, as well as any issue where the coloring changed, or the interior ads. My monomaniacal obsession with completeness may seem excessive, but why only collect the easy stuff? Isn't the real challenge for a collector in putting together complete runs of the nearly impossible? Returning full circle to the topic of scarcity and our database, what I am trying to do right now is to locate as many rare variants of traditional comics as I possibly can, and to then document them all on our website. I am doing this not only for informational purposes, but also because it makes me very happy to think that, somewhere out there in the great Internet, there will be someone who will be overjoyed that I finally located an almost impossible-to-find variant for them. My entire lifetime has been dedicated to helping other comics collectors, and this is one area in which my own personal passions and perspectives help me to be uniquely suited for the task at hand. What makes all of this effort such a challenge is that there are almost no sources of documentation for what was printed in the past. In effect, we are trying to gradually build an informational database of variants out of whole cloth, purely from our own purchasing of collections. This may seem like an impossible task, but what we are discovering is that most of the more readily available variants (such as 1980's newsstand editions) have already drifted to us during our first couple of years of research, and that we are now finding enough scarcer variants quickly enough to exceed our capacity to document them. Even after nearly two years of concerted effort, however, I would estimate that we still add 300-400 new variants into our website database each week. Suffice it to say, our task is not even close to done. To be continued... Chuck Rozanski, President - Mile High Comics, Inc. Current Newsletter