A lot more than $1, but I like taking my time telling stories, so let me spin my yarn. TLDR version at the bottom of OP. Also if you have an crazy comic book finds, I'd like to hear your stories.
I took my wife on a date yesterday. She wanted to go to a dinner theater in the evening, but we were spending the whole day together, so after a nice late breakfast, we had some time to kill. Surprisingly, she said she'd like to go to some flea market style stores, we found ourselves in a place called Hillcrest Junk in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was just a little store that sold used odds and ends, and to my surprise, there were comics on a stand as soon as I entered, a dollar a piece. Worth checking out, right, so I flip through it, and it's mostly crap, but I did find an Authority trade with a bent cover, and for a dollar, I'm willing to give that a try.
A little further back, they had yet another section...this time with collections of comics. There were about two dozen comic runs bagged together. Most of it was boring or too expensive, but then it caught my eye. Preacher #1? I'd heard of Preacher; it's a famous series, and here was not only Preacher #1 but the first sixteen issues all in one bag.
Well, I've not really read Preacher nor had I been keeping up with recent news, but for fifteen bucks for a bag of sixteen comics in a row, why not? However, I always like to make sure I'm getting a deal, so I yank out the phone and check out MyComicShop where I see that Preacher #1 is oddly sold out, but Preacher #2 is selling for...$95 for a 7.0? What the #&((?
So I kind of take it out of it's cover to make sure it's not a reprint or anything, and it looks legit. Looks like all the comics are there. I play it cool and wait for my wife to finish looking.I say nothing to her, and I even try to haggle on something my wife wanted, but the owner says all prices are non-negotiable, and at this point, that's exactly what I want to hear. I pay a crisp fifteen bucks for my bundle of money and resist the urge to cackle like a grade-A super villain as soon as I leave the store.
Later in the day, we find ourselves at a real comic book store where I ask the owner about how much it is worth. I'd been looking up prices this whole time on my phone and seen that they were...impressive, but I didn't understand why they were so inflated and inconsistent, but then she tells me the big news; Preacher is being made into a TV series on AMC with the producer from Breaking Bad. Holy crap!
People are asking as much as two thousand dollars for a copy of Preacher #1 on Ebay, but the highest I've found actually sell was for six hundred dollars. Of course that's in mint condition, so you are probably wondering how good are these comics?
They are good. They are so freaking good!
I didn't touch them again until I got home since I knew by then how much they were worth and didn't want to damage them in any way. I did the full setup when I got home finding a clean surface, washing my hands and drying them thoroughly. I examined the cover of each comic and looked at each page without opening the page far enough to stretch the binding. Most of them are darn near perfect. They look like someone flipped through them maybe once and put them in storage. One issue has a bent corner, and that's by far the worst. Every other one has perfect interiors.The covers have no smudges, if you reflect the light on them and look carefully, you can see some ever so slight impressions in the cover. One of them has the tiniest flecks on it in just a few places. One has a line on the back that looks like a printing error. Even the binding on them has only slight wear on some of them and absolutely nothing on others. There were a couple where the only flaw I could find was an ever so slightly imperfect edge on a small section of the cover where someone had ever so slightly made it less sharp by brushing gently against it. I would never have expected comics in a junk shop to look near that good.
So holy crap! I bought sixteen comics. Issue 12 was sadly missing. Apparently, that one would have been valuable as well, but I still have Preacher 1-16 excluding 12 and Preacher: Saints of Killers #1. I'll probably wait at least until the show gets closer to sell them. You'd think the value would only go up. However, I'm not sure if I should sell them before or after the show comes out. As controversial as that show will be, I'm not sure it will last on TV.
So, any thoughts and have you ever scored an awesome find?
TLDR Version
I bought Preacher 1-16 for $15. Since a show has just been announced on that series, the values have skyrocketed. I could probably sell the comics for five hundred bucks today, and there is every indication they will go up in price.
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