G.I. Joe 23 (May 1984)

My parents are "lake people" in the sense that they grew up spending their summers on a lake, and so as I grew up I was a "lake person" too, except that I didn't like it very much. I've never liked swimming, boats aren't that exciting to me, and, because we would go to a lake 500 miles away from my hometown, I'd invariably have to leave my friends behind for weeks or sometimes even months at a time.

But that remote outpost, sitting nine hours north of all my friends, did have one important saving grace in my eyes: a comic book shop. It took half an hour to drive from our lake house to downtown Cheboygan, where Taurus Comics stood, but every time we went into town I'd beg my parents to drop me off at Taurus for a few hours while they did their own shopping. As comic shops go, it was perhaps slightly larger than Vintage Books and Comics, and about the same size as 25th Century Five & Dime, but of course its inventory of back issues was completely different, and that's what made Taurus Comics such an exciting store to visit.

In the summer of 1986 I made my first trip to Taurus Comics, having only recently begun reading the kinds of comics one would need to visit a comic book shop to buy. And I was deep into my hunt for older issues of G.I. Joe to fill out the series, of which, at that point, I still had only a handful of issues prior to issue 42. So when I saw that Taurus Comics had quite a few earlier issues of G.I. Joe in their back-issue bins I became very excited, and when I saw the hand-written price tags stuck to their polyethylene bags my eyes practically bugged out of my head. I picked up issue 23, walked nonchalantly over to the guy behind the counter, and asked, "Is this really the price?" He took the book from me, looked at the price (65 cents), and said, "Yep."

I suppose I'd expected older issues of G.I. Joe to be selling for, I don't know, $3, $4, $5. My perception of the series, since I now cared about it, was that it must be popular and, therefore, in demand--thus, expensive. This perception was partly supported by the mail order companies who ran ads in the current issues of Marvel's comics. I remember ordering many issues of G.I. Joe from a company called American Comics, and I seem to recall routinely spending more than a dollar on those issues. So to find an issue that was so much older than any of the others I'd found thus far (a whole two years old! Amazing!) that cost only a nickel more than its cover price, was incredible to me. You can bet I bought this issue, along with a handful of others that day. And, as I mentioned before, I made several more trips to Taurus Comics that summer, as well as in subsequent summers for the next five years or so, until I went off to college and no longer spent my summers on Mullett Lake.

Taurus Comics was renamed Comics North! in the early '90s when it was bought by the store's manager, Dave Elyea. While Googling Taurus Comics for this entry I just learned that Comics North!, like Vintage Books and Comics before it, burned down back in 2009. Unlike Vintage, Comics North! apparently never reopened.

Archie 300 (Jan. 1981)

This issue of Archie is somewhat unusual in that it contains a single, 22-page story (albeit broken up into four parts) rather than a bunch of unrelated six-page stories (the standard length of an Archie story). But the reason this issue is of special note to me is that it was the comic book that tried to prove to me that the comics I got ahold of weren't ever going to be worth much money.

You'll note the cover has a "Special Collector's Edition" balloon on it. The balloon is all jagged and exciting, seeming to indicate that this issue will be of some worth. So the next time my dad took me to Caveat Emptor (the used-bookstore, previously mentioned here) I brought this issue with me and, with some excitement, asked the guy behind the counter how much I could get for it. He was very nice to my 9-year-old self and let me down gently. It was, practically speaking, worthless.

A year or two later, in sixth grade, I'd receive this same lesson secondhand, from a friend who'd received a few '70s-era issues of Batman and The Phantom from an uncle and, since he had no interest in comics, had taken them over to 25th Century (one of Bloomington's comic book shops, also previously mentioned here) to see if he could get some money for them. Again, the answer was not really. In that case, my friend just handed them over to the guy behind the counter anyway, since he didn't want them.

I, of course, still really liked Archie, so I kept this issue. Even though, I have to say, the story itself is kind of terrible. It's one of those that breaks the fourth wall so as to celebrate Archie's 300th issue within the book. Basically, everyone's running around trying to get away from Archie, and Archie starts to take it personally, until the end when it's revealed that they've all be trying to plan a surprise party for him. Great artwork by Dan DeCarlo, though.

And what could I get for this issue now? According to Mile High Comics, probably about $3 (considering the condition it's in). That's a 600-percent increase from the cover price! And it only took 32 years....