Well, ok ... maybe NOT "Ever Sold", but they are comics I've owned, and they have a special place in my collection for a variety of reasons. Today, we'll start with ...The Brave and The Bold # 142 - Why is this here? What's makes this so darn special? Why would I talk about this and not Avengers volume one # 1 or the Watchmen tpb?
I grew-up with two older brothers who read comics. One didn't like me reading his comics, the other didn't care as much, but I hated the fact that I didn't have anything that belonged to me.
I don't remember where or when this was purchased. Heck, I'm not even sure if I'm the one who picked it out. What I do know is that this was the first comic that was mine, that I didn't have to ask for permission from someone else to read it. I might not have been (or ever will be) a fan of artist Jim Aparo, or even all that excited to have a Batman comic, and I still couldn't tell you what happened in the book without looking at it, but it was mine, and that in itself made it special to me way back then.
I didn't keep this forever, though. In the early 1980s, I wanted money in my pocket, and a comic that I didn't care much about wasn't worth keeping. So at one of the many flea markets my mom would set-up at, I took my comic collection, maybe about 100 books altogether, and sold what I could ... which ended-up being everything. I was happy ... I think I bought some hockey cards. I never thought about this book again, until one day I was at a small comic convention about 15-16 years ago. I was flipping through a bargain bin when I ran across this book. "Hey! I used to own that!" Well, since it was cheap enough, I bought it, which started me on a path of trying to find all the comics I read as a kid.
And that's why The Brave and The Bold 142 is one of "The Greatest Comics Ever Sold", because I can look at it and think about two different times in my life of collecting comics.
