Enthusiasts: Comics

A lot of collectors have an inclination toward a particular category, but they dabble in everything, sort of like drug addicts. And once upon a time, comics were seen as contributing to juvenile delinquency: Robin had bare legs, Wonder Woman sent dangerous messages about women's roles, and Superman defied the laws of physics with bedevilling impunity. There were mass burnings of comic books in the 1940s, and judges showed leniency to 'delinquents' who could show it was comics what did it.

But a comic collection is unlikely to destroy your family or make you a coke bore. It might turn you into the Comic Book Store Guy, but it didn't do that to Garrett Roche, a.k.a. Mr Barney, a.a.k.a. Mr Vintage Brown. He has almost every comic book a collector would want – two, three, four, five copies of some. So what happens when you've collected everything? You keep going. Or you think about opening a shop, if only to feed your inner comic monster.

It started in the mid-1980s. ”It was a comic called Screamer. It wouldn't be well-known, but it was the first that was sent to me, probably in 1985, by my brother who lived in New York. He continued sending me comics, and then when I moved over there I continued collecting.”

His wife Tracey list off some of the other things he collects: DVDs, movie posters, whiskey, antique medical supplies (and he and Tracey use an antique she-pee as a port decanter), and paintings by artist Graham Knuttel. And that's on top of 30,000-40,000 comics. Enough that his estimate has a margin of error of 10,000.

“You don't know you've got a collection until there's no more room to put anything. And then you're like, 'How did I end up with all this stuff?' Or you get married and your wife points out that you have no room to put anything else.” He turns to her, “No, actually, you're quite patient.”

Tracey has sufficient hoarder's instinct to be sympathetic to his collection. They are both 'junk junkies', and she is a second-hand and vintage shopper. “When we started going out first, I went into his room, and he had these toys – to the untrained eye they were toys. I went to go touch them, and he said, 'They're not toys.' It was a make or break moment. Looking back now, if I'd gone, 'Ah, they're only toys,' and pushed them off the shelf, I'd have been gone!'”

He admits sometimes he's sick of collecting, but knows he'll still find himself back in New York, spending three days looking through the same shop.

Tracey says, “When he goes on his comic book adventures -- I can't imagine what those explorers felt when they found the North Pole but by the look on his face, it's like that.”
Comics are about hunting and hoarding, and Tracey's North Pole quip seems resonant. Global exploration also deals with a finite space; there are only so many Incredible Hulk comics in the world. Maybe that's part of the reason why comics became collectible in the first place: the thrill of discovery, plus control over the small and measurable world of comics, making everything as it should be.

Everything is double-bagged with a backing board, arranged alphabetically and numerically. It's lucky that meticulousness and collecting seem to go together. I picture their house looking like the museum of some Victorian Royal Society: everything classified, ordered, numbered, and yet, this extreme order comes full circle into boggling chaos.

Comic book collecting as we know it is relatively recent, and like Victorian gentlemen with antiquities, butterflies, or geodes, some collectors have periodised the history of comics into neat(ish) boxes: the Victorian, Platinum, Atomic, and so on up to the Modern, post-1980 age, after which the comics produced are less collectible because by then people had started to keep them in 'collectible' condition.

“I know most of the stuff when I was a child got cut up, painted on the walls, buried in the back garden. A couple were fed to my dog. I wasn't that way inclined as a child,” says Garrett, “Things got destroyed. It was only in my early teens that I started collecting.”

Pre-1970s generations folded them, carried them around in pockets, and so where these survive, they are almost never mint. “That's why those comics are now worth like half a million dollars.” Garrett shows me a copy of one of the 'Holy Grails' of comics, a Hulk with a €1400 price tag. It's amazing to think he'd be willing to part with it. There's the explorer's instinct, yes, but it's also like a trap-and-release sort of hunting. The price tag may €1400, but the real value, the real thrill, is in passing it on to the next collector, then trying to find another one.