Two similar tasks are taking up part of the month. One is sorting, bagging, boarding, and pricing a few hundred copies of G.I. Joe-related titles at Hub Comics in advance of the Tom Reilly signing on November 16th. The other is re-bagging and boarding all my comics at home, particularly my Marvel G.I. Joe-related titles, as my wife and I recently moved.
In the case of the former, I ordered extra copies of every Joe title that IDW published between 2011 and 2022, and many have been “in the back” since they arrived. This goes back to a thought I had when Transformers: Generation 2 debuted in 1993. A mail order catalog I consulted listed its top 20 sellers each month, and I was hoping that TFG2 would make the list. It did not, but I wrote a letter asking where it placed. The catalog editor kindly responded with a quantity — I recall it was 1,500 copies for the silver foil one and 500 for the regular? Whatever the number, it felt low, and that Transformers: Generation 2 only lasted 12 months says it all. The following year I was interested in how G.I. Joe #150, being a double-sized anniversary issue, might garner extra sales or attention. While it was spotlighted in the Bullpen Bulletins page in all of Marvel’s comics that month, it didn’t net a cover enhancement like foil stamping or a hologram, so it felt like people wouldn’t pay attention. I started thinking that maybe buying an extra copy would help. I’d already done this with TFG2 — not an investment if values rose, but a hedge against a friend missing out or me just vaguely voting with my dollars. After all, if everyone bought an extra copy, my favorite comics wouldn’t ever be in danger of cancellation. I’d already gone through the sad feeling of losing a favorite monthly to low sales, and I wanted to do my part. Of course, one extra copy wouldn’t make a difference, particularly if I wasn’t convincing others to do the same, but for those next seven issues of G.I. Joe and every issue of TFG2, I bought two or three copies. When, as ordering chief for the comic shop I own, I started getting extra G.I. Joe comics in 2011 — more than I knew we’d sell — this wasn’t a new mindset.
But back to Tom Reilly, we have a modest back issue section at my shop. It’s a piece of wood furniture, but the dimensions of its bays are based on those of a comics long box, the ubiquitous white cardboard found in homes, apartments, attics, and comic shops all over. The G.I. Joe-related sections take up two full rows, and if a person is standing there, flipping through back issues, it’s hard for a second person to browse Special Missions or variant covers. With a popular Joe artist signing at my shop three days after release date of an anticipated comic book, hopefully Hub Comics will be crowded with Joe fans. And with IDW’s Joe comics much less popular than Devil’s Due’s or Marvel’s, those IDW comics are harder to find and in demand. There’s a chance that fans who turn up for the signing will also be in the market for those comics.
Ahead of all of that has felt like a good time to bag, board, and price duplicates of those Joe issues, and fill a few short boxes with them. I’ll put them on the other side of the shop, on the register counter. I’ll make a sign. If a customer wanting to fill in gaps in their Hama-continued-A-Real-American-Hero series can’t look at our selection over in Back Issues because someone’s in the way, there should be a second station for looking at similar back issues. Maybe a third. In prepping this, I’ve spent an extra half-hour or hour every other day these past three weeks readying these comics.
Are you in the New England area and free on Saturday, November 16th? Are you missing issues of Snake Eyes: Dead Game, G.I. Joe Vs. The Six Million Dollar Man, G.I. Joe: Sierra Muerte, G.I. Joe: Saturday Morning Adventures, the 2019 Paul Allor G.I. Joe series? Because Hub Comics has them. Are you hunting for issues #156-300 of Larry Hama’s continued A Real American Hero? Hub Comics has most of them. In need of some specials or reprints, like the 40th Anniversary remake of Silent Interlude, or the new 2012 or 2019 Yearbooks, or the four 1980s Yearbook reprints, or The Best of Snake-Eyes four-in-one? Hub Comics has them. Howabout the Mike Costa/Christos Gage/Antonio Fuso Cobra miniseries? Yep. Fred Van Lente’s “Season 3” G.I. Joe from 2013? Yes! John Royle 1-in-10 variant covers? Yes, some! Larry Hama 1-in-10 ratio sketch covers? Yes!
While Hub Comics will celebrate the new Energon Universe G.I. Joe in just under two weeks, any G.I. Joe event looks forward as well as back, so come get some back issues!
Cleaning or organizing can be fun. Unfortunately, the company that makes the clear storage bags we carry at my shop has poor quality control, and about half the bags that arrive are a millimeter or 2 too narrow. It’s harder to slide a loose board into a bag, and takes a little more care to fit a comic book inside. But it’s been satisfying to fill one short box and now a second one with lots of extra Joe back issues.
The other bagging and boarding project has been at home. My wife and I moved four years ago, and when I set up my comics then, I had the goal of replacing all my comics’ bags and boards. Regular bags and boards are not archival. Old newsprint gives off gas, and the board absorbs it. And with any humidity, light, or warmth, the plastic yellows and breaks down faster. We do an ad every week at my shop, and the topic once came up:
I never properly finished, much less started, that project. It felt too big to bring home dozens of 100-packs of bags and boards from my shop, to sit on the floor for hours engaged in this menial task. I helped a pal bag and board and organize his entire collection around 1999. It was fun. We listened to music and talked. But owning a comic book store is a kind of slow-motion but permanent version of this, so I’m not often in the mood to do it elsewhere.
Because I’m always ordering comics and have been reading them since 1989, you might assume that I have a gigantic collection at home. Lots of graphic novels and books about comics, yes, but my back issue count is modest. Loose guess: 6,000. But one more move, lugging the collection two miles by car to their new home, a dedicated book-and-comics room, was the kick I needed. So as not to overwhelm myself, especially with the similar project happening at Hub Comics last month and this month, I started re-bagging and boarding 15 or 20 comics at a time. In doing so, I ran across some old price tags that really brought me back. I don’t recall where my brother and I bought this, but based on the price tag, I’d guess a convention around 1991.
The same for this:
This one came from Geppi’s Comic World:
There’s a lot embedded there, as Steve Geppi started and owns Diamond Comic Distributors, which my shop has ordered and received shipments from every week since 2008. Many comic shops have done the same for far longer. In decades past Geppi also owned a small chain of shops around Maryland (Diamond is based outside Baltimore), and on a single occasion when I was in probably-7th grade, my parents took my brother and I to one. (I don’t recall actually seeing or buying this Special Missions issue at this Geppi’s, but the price tag does suggest it. I suppose it’s possible we bought it at a con from a dealer who’d previously bought them from Geppi’s?) My recollection is that it was a 30-minute drive, and that we were already that far from home on some shopping or youth sports outing. Besides snagging a Special Missions, something big happened at that store. At the time I knew what issues we were still missing of the main G.I. Joe title. Flipping through the back issue bin there, seeing Mike Zeck’s thrilling Grim Reaper smiling, I announced to my brother that our long search was over. At last, after two or three years, our run of G.I. Joe was complete. (Sorry, no Geppi’s price tag on my issue #43 — I must have replaced that bag previously.) We knew what happened in the issue because it had been summarized elsewhere, but it was still a shock to read when we got home.
Not pictured because I tossed the old bag two weeks before writing this, but I’ve had the same handwritten “$4.00” price tag — red ballpoint — on my G.I. Joe Yearbook #1 for about 33 years. I have a faint recollection of getting that at a convention!
About half of our Joe issues came from mail order companies like East Coast Comics, American Comics, and New England Comics. Those would arrive five or ten comics bagged together, no price tags, although I do still have a paper order form with my handwriting and mom’s credit card info.
The final example of G.I. Joe issues we bought that are in old bags that I’m replacing that still have price tags from 1989 and 1990 come from my alma mater of sorts. A few months into getting hooked, we found a comic shop in my hometown, two miles from our house. Every month, starting with Marvel issue #98 (the prior eight came from a bookstore spinner rack at the mall) all the way until #155 and the Special, we bought G.I. Joe at Big Planet Comics in Bethesda, Maryland.
(I have no pictures of that shop in its first location circa 1990, but here’s the building captured many years later — Space Available indeed — and for color, the shop’s logo at its third location a few doors down — a composite photo.)
It had a back issue section, so it was the easiest place to start filling in holes in our run. In the first years, owner Joel Pollack and manager Greg Bennett used a price gun whose sticker color and font are forever burned into my brain:
At some point, probably before the shop moved from Cordell Avenue to Fairmont Ave., Joel got a different price gun. These stickers were smaller and had two key words on them:
(Full disclosure, that Star Wars is already in a new bag, and that’s some Photoshopping to get a different “version 2” Big Planet Comics price sticker looking right. As with Yearbook #1, I tossed this old bag two weeks ago prior to having the idea of this blog post, so this image is a bit of a reconstruction from a different price tag on a different book, what is likely the last Big Planet sticker I have.)
In ’95, when I was hired as an employee at Big Planet Comics, I got to use that price gun. The position and angle of my hands as I adjusted the pricing knob, and the up-down arm motion that accompanied pricing a stack of comics are also forever in my head. In November of 2024 it was with the slightest amount of melancholy that I folded these old bags with their vintage price tags and stuffed them into the trash. The bags were yellowing a bit, so of course I wouldn’t continue to use them. But my wife and I like to keep novelty items from our past, should we put them in our display case with similar baubles? Should I cut them into bits and tape them into my sketchbook? No, it was okay to just toss them. But the notion of old price tags sure could make for a whole blog post!
Let’s end on two happy notes. First, Joel retired in early ’23. This is 60 seconds. Please excuse the dumb gaffe, as I make these on Tuesday nights and once I’m editing there isn’t time to re-shoot.
Second, if you’re in New England, and can bus, bike, train, drive, or jog to Hub Comics on Saturday, November 16th for our amazing Tom Reilly signing that is just three days after G.I. Joe issue #1 streets — we’ll have lots of variant covers — please do!
A Real American Book! 
Had no idea you were close to or at big planet comics. When closer in to dc it was my shop also but now victory comics is as close as I get to a store between the far moons. I’d rather someone just buy one of ea Gijoe cover for me and send me a present every few months w gradable copies.
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I was always impressed with the Georgetown location of Big Planet, but only made it there twice. Briefly there was a store that opened close by, with a too-similar name, and there was a PR tussle, but I don’t think the other shop lasted more than a year or two. As for different G.I. Joe covers, I tend to want the “A” cover, even if I can get a variant that’s a nicer image (I’m looking at you, IDW), because I feel like the “A” one is what the publisher intended as the main or default one.