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Just bought the grossest, most disgusting collection
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171 posts in this topic

7 minutes ago, kav said:

Trust me there's a JIM 83 in there somewhere.

I wish.

There's no Silver at all.  There's a few bronze.  90% is garbage I'm sure, but...... just found a nice Swampthing 37.

Seriously...... it's shutting my nose down, keeping my gag reflex in check, and just getting the comics out of these disgusting mylars and moving them into a pristine mylar with a new board.

All the while I go to my happy place in my brain.

Edited by gadzukes
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Pretty sure you’re gonna have to do something about the books absorbing that odor. Cats will spray boxes to mark territory and from the looks of those boxes, they did it often. Was it worth it? I guess time will tell. Can you imagine sending some of those to cgc and getting a rejection letter because they smell?

The Crow looks nice but there are 3 printings of number 1. A 1st print is dated 2/89 on the interior. 2nd and 3rd have the notation on the inside front cover.  

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I had bought a lunch box full of 60’s and 70’s baseball cards back in the early 90s for 10 bucks. In it were a couple of stars: Hank Aaron, Willie Stargell, a Gary Carter rookie if I remember correctly. The lunch box was rusted at just about every 90` angle and the cards had absorbed that humid, metallic smell that haunts me to this day. It took weeks of keeping them in a bag with baking soda to at least make them somewhat bearable but I had to trade them off to get that feeling of disgust from off of me. 
Turns out, had the lunch box been in better shape, it would’ve sweetened the pot but it was corroded to the point that cards were falling out of it on the trip home so I just chucked it and carried the cards in a shopping bag.

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4 hours ago, gadzukes said:

I'm sure other board members have lots of war stories to tell about collections they've bought, but.... wow I just went to see (and ended up buying) such a disgusting presenting collection.  Ugh!!!

11 long boxes.  It's sitting in the back of my (covered) pick up right now.  I don't even want to bring it into my garage (my wife will divorce me if she sees it).

The woman who had them was a hoarder, a cat person, a bird person..... she wouldn't let me into her house (cuz she was embarassed).  When I arrived she had 4 of the long boxes in her front yard and she was trying to clean the cat vomit and bird poop off of them.  She later told me that her cats have eaten on top of the boxes for years.  Ugh!!!!

Yes, I know... you want to run away right now.  But what if there's a major key issue?????

From talking to her I knew it was a Copper/Modern collection which is a time period I don't know a lot about (except that there's a ton of drek in the 90s)

But..... there's always a chance of Some Batman Adventures, or New Mutants 98, or Walking Dead so I stopped breathing thru my nose and plunged in.

The first box I grabbed had early Teen Titans including #2.  My big test was to open the disgusting mylar and see if the comic inside was actually nice.  Ugh! To my delight it was actually fairly high grade.

I found many more keys from the era.  Probably the biggest comic I found was The Crow 1 in pretty nice shape.  I also found Xmen 266 in nice shape.

There's a bunch of Turtles comics which I don't know a lot about (and didn't feel like figuring out at the time because of how disgusting everything was)

I made a fairly low ball offer because of how disgusting everything was.... she took it.... and now.... my goal is to remove every comic and dispose of the awfulness of the bags boards and boxes as soon as possible.  But... with 11 long boxes, that's a lot of work!!!!

Here's a pic of the Crow 1 comic.  Front cover presents like a 9.0, but there's some small flaws on the back cover.  By itself it will probably pay for the entire collection.

2nd pic is of one some of the boxes I was dealing with.  As bad as I've ever seen! I think her cats used the boxes as a scratching post.  Luckily EVERY comic I checked out was good in the mylar, but the mylars are disgusting too.  It's really bad.

Have any of you had to deal with a disgusting "presenting" collection like this?  I will say this.... It sure makes negotiating easy.

 

 

 

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This thread could be useful to you in dealing with the smell issue:

 

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I once bought a pile (maybe 30 or so books) of early Our Gang comics via eBay from a guy in Puerto Rico. Included # 1 - first appearance of Tom & Jerry - that presented as solid 4.0s to 4.5s, but for the mold. Kept them in the kitchen for a few days before my girlfriend, repulsed from the smell, made me move them to the backyard shed.

I mean, she wasn't wrong - but that was my first experience with moldy comics.

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I bought a pretty large golden age collection from Craigslist a few years ago. 

The OA had passed about 10 years prior. They were never bagged or bordered, probably on shelves or boxes. When he died, someone put them in trash bags and put them in the basement. The basement had a lot of moisture problems. Probably a few floods were the comics were only protected by a garbage bag. 

I bought it knowing the comics were a wreck. I figured they were old enough that there could be several copies of AC1 or Tec27 just waiting to be discovered!! 

There weren't lol. Lots of classic illustrated. Funny books, a few 50s EC Bible books.  But what I loved about the collection is,  it never really stopped. This guy bought comics from childhood to the 80s.  No big keys (or someone knew enough to grab them), but cool to see his comic journey. Even it was a smelly mess. 

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In my hunt for comics I have found myself in a few locations where I wish I had told someone where I was going. I honestly wondered if I would be leaving (especially after they heard my offer). Lots of doubles and triples so far. For me the most depressing condition issue is when the paper is dry and brown. 

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Looking at that box :sick:

I hope you can salvage lots of those books and you don’t catch a 🦠 handling that toxic waste!

It’s sad how some people can live in filth like that! 
let us know what else you find and the conditions!
 

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6 minutes ago, ThothAmon said:

In my hunt for comics I have found myself in a few locations where I wish I had told someone where I was going. I honestly wondered if I would be leaving (especially after they heard my offer). Lots of doubles and triples so far. For me the most depressing condition issue is when the paper is dry and brown. 

Dry and brown in this case will be much worse ! 😷 

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