Comics, pt. 3: Not Money

CREEEEK.

THWACK! One box on the counter.

THWACK! One more follows it.

Let the counting begin.





This is Chris. He's cool.



Follow Central Avenue south from Rt 119 in White Plains. Pass the Trader Joe's. Get ready to flip a U-ey when you see the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery on your right.



Thanks to The Petcast for the pic



Park, in front of the yellow hydrant if you must. Chris, the owner of Undiscovered Realm, says no one gets a ticket for parking there.

Then, open that creaky door, take a deep breath, and hold tight because you are about to enter a MAN CAVE.

The place was not what I expected. It's less a comic book shop than it is a way of life.

Via Facebook messages, Chris warned me not to come by on Friday or Saturday: "There's literally no room to stand."

Still, I was surprised that when I showed up, at 3 pm on a Sunday, a card competition was well underway. There is no downtime at Undiscovered Realm, I guess.

While I breathed deeply, acclimating to the den's distinctive scent, a player caught my attention.

Look at the picture above. That guy with the goatee and the brown coat smiled at me: "What a small world." We had met at the bar of Finalmente! the night before, bonding over homemade pasta and our admiration of US vixen Ashley Wagner's attempt to seduce the Olympic judges.
 
And just look how pissed she was that it didn't work....

Justin (my dinner buddy) and I shook hands. This I took as a good sign of my acceptance in the Den (I warned you in pt. 2 that this was only "mildly important"), but I might have been wrong.

Generally, I kept my eyes down as a guy named Andre (my dad's name--a good omen?) counted the comics, tucking in a Post-It every 100. It seemed the wise thing to do.

But when a guy I'll call "Ted" (the stuffed bear from the movie was behind him on the wall) told his fellow competitor, "I want to get you in the worst way!" I rolled my eyes and smirked.

Although no one else noticed my reaction, Ted did. His eyes flashed.

For the next three minutes, Ted, Chris, and several other guys (not, happily, Justin) casually threw the word "Penis"--and dazzling variations of it, from the scientific to the street, biological to prosthetic--into every utterance.

Oh, yes. I had angered The Bear.

(In times past, I used Eve Sedgwick's theory of Male Homosocial Desire to teach Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, but it's always fun to have a real-life example of being pushed out of the homosocial circle...and you don't need to be a theorist to understand this experience. To be fair, though, I had busted into HIS Den with my annoying estrogen...)

As the tide of genitalia talk washed over me, I kept counting comics.

I was silently daring myself to launch into a detailed description of my two vaginal births when Ted loudly feigned surprise: "Oh! I should watch my mouth. We've got a New Customer here!"

Chris called back, "Naw, man, she's cool."

Just like that, the dick-talk ended.

And so help me God, I was suddenly awash in the same conflicting waves of feminist rage and "Exceptional Girl" pride that I felt as a young teen in Pat's '80s comic den.

But, Back to the Comics...

Chris and I agreed that the catalog of the boxed comics showed promise--a couple signed copies, some cover variants, a heck of a lot of Buffy, a $40 Daredevil from 1981 ($40 IF it didn't have "condition issues" like a 2 inch tear in the cover), a #1 of Shaolin Cowboy... valued at $30....


"Value" is one thing; finding a buyer is another. I'm a Re-seller, not a Retailer. Before I slept the night before, I was resolved: fifty cents per comic was my price.

Some, sure, were worth more...maybe.... Some, however, would only get pennies, simply because there's a glut of them on the market. When I considered the thing as a whole, $.50 a comic seemed fair: it represented a ten-fold return on my nickel-per-comic investment. And, since I had sweated through the research process, I know I wasn't handing over a genuine treasure by accident.

Chris and I recognized the pragmatist in the other, I think.

$.50 was our agreed price. There were 716 comics.

WHOOSH. Musty pulp paper and man-smell pushed me back out into the snowy afternoon.

I had $360 more for my travel fund, more than enough to cover four one-way flights from Bergen, Norway, to London, this summer. 

I hope Chris makes many thousands on those comics. One day, a 90s and 2000s Comic Bubble will grow and they'll be worth that.

In the meantime, I'm sure that Unknown Goodwill Guy is happy that his comics are back where they belong, with The Guys.


Copyright 2014, Tanya Monier