Giant Size Topless Slumber Party

No, I still don't give a mess about current Marvel releases, I just like making fun of them. Moving on.

I haven't written a journal since January, so it's time to get back in the saddle. The past 5ish months have been a busy time in my own little corner of the collecting world. Initially I had planned to take a decent spending break after telling my C2E2 budget to go sit in the corner and stay quiet while I splurge on Silver Age X-Men. But as it turned out, if three straight days of working the Comics to Astonish booth and setting up Rich Henn with places to eat in Chicago couldn't stop my wallet from hemorrhaging money, then nothing could!

OK, that's not quite accurate. Citibank and its titillating 6 month 1.99% APR promo had a little something to do with it too. As did a look ahead at what's to come -- key books keep getting more expensive, and odds are my wife and I will look to expand our family in the next year or two. So the end is approaching for my generous comic budget. The time to strike was now.

I've always had a rough list hashed out in my head of the keys I ultimately want to add to my collection -- Avengers 1, JIM 83, AF 15 (yeah, that's probably a pipe dream), GS X-Men 1, X-Men 94, AND...Incredible Hulk 180-182. Complicating matters was that I'd also like to complete a run of X-Men 1-19 signed by Stan Lee, and the sooner the better since he could stop making appearances at any time. And JIM 85 for good measure, because Tom Hiddleston as Loki. Need I say more?

So what stopped me from tackling some of these throughout all the years I've been collecting? My pesky Wolverine collection of course, which always found a way to take my money. But here we are in 2016, when my Wolverine set is damn near complete. NOW I could expand my horizons. And expand I did. From the list above I landed X-Men 3, 4, 12, an upgraded 1, JIM 85, and our feature presentation - a full Universal 9.6/white page set of Incredible Hulk 180-182!! Being the Wolverine fanatic that I am, how could I continue on any longer without these?

There's significant details about what led me to put the specific group that I now own together in my actual registry set, but suffice to say I wish I had done it years ago. Maybe then I could've put together a 9.8 run!? But at the same time, was the money ever really there? In retrospect, it was once -- I should've bought the set in 2010 instead of remodeling the kitchen in my old condo. In fact, I shouldn't have invested a dime in that place considering the loss I took on it...

Regrets aside, a milestone I'd been dreaming about for 15 years is finally complete. I've actually owned two previous copies of Incredible Hulk 181. The first was a low grade, raw 3.0ish copy that I landed for about $60. Can you imagine, $60!?! They sell for $600 now! The other was a PGX 8.0 that I picked up in a large eBay lot. If it didn't look like a 6.5, I might've actually kept it.

So...when I unpacked this book in particular...freshly arrived from Australia...Wolverine looked about 10 times his actual size, like he was literally jumping off of the cover...yeah I'm a comic nerd, sue me

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