The idea for Key Collector Comics came to me much like the opening of a BOOM Tube when summoned by a Mother Box. It was one ordinary day as I walked outside after another 12 hours in a warehouse basement plucking key issues from a collection of 50,000 comic books and noticed the leaves had begun to fall signaling the end of an entire summer spent underground.
Months prior, I had met a used bookstore owner who told me about this geeky Shangri-La where over the decades, he amassed a collection of long boxes that had become unmanageable to him. I proposed he allow me to find the needles in the comic stacks, the “key” issues that are prized among all others in any comic book hobbyist’s collection. The issues that introduce a new character, debut a legendary artist or serve as the canvas to an iconic cover and many other instances of importance.
The following week, after getting my motivation back, knowing if I wanted it, surely other collectors would want it, I posted to the Facebook group Comic Book Collecting which has almost 300,000 members. My post was immediately deleted and I was banned for advertising my free app for comic collectors. I’ve also been banned from Reddit, The Outhousers and the CGC forum, a of which happening after I learned and began to follow the rules.r modern mythology, our virtues and values are printed on these fragile and finite pages that are lost to any number of tragedies every day.
So, after many visits to this used bookstore, espousing my philosophy regarding the artifacts that lie unprotected in a basement I earned the bookstore owner’s trust or annoyed him to submission. He agreed to allow me to sift through the collection, separate the worthwhile from the worthless and we’d split what was sold. I set to work as springtime began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
I considered myself an expert having been a collector since 1989 after seeing a commercial for Tim Burton’s Batman starring Michael Keaton. I thought my knowledge of which comics were valuable was second-to-none. Within a month among those long boxes I came to the realization that I, much like Jon Snow, knew nothing.
Most of the time wasn’t spent flipping through comics but instead, rifling through a price guide or googling one individual issue after another after another and so on to identify whether or not it held some secret. Numerous times I stumbled upon information on a valuable book I recalled seeing days before that had been reabsorbed by the chaos. I’d go hunting for it and recognize something else but couldn’t remember if it were important or not so I’d search online or page through the price guide. I had no choice. I am a completest if that’s even a thing but spellcheck seems to think it is which is enough for me.
While I repeated this pattern of events, trapped by my own will in the oubliette of childhood fantasy that turned into an adult nightmare of wasted time I had one wish. I wished there was a resource that isolated just the key issues, only listed what was worth pulling from the stacks so I could go through a box and see all the keys without the clutter. If nothing happens between Detective Comics issues 100-150, then just show me 99 and 151.
I sought that resource out. Surely in today’s day and age everything has been thought of and convenience is at our fingertips. Okay, I thought I was an expert in comics but I could easily become one in the time it takes to download a mobile app. But no. No comprehensive and concise guide directs the collector to the issues of significance which is what the majority of us are looking for anyway. The best I could do was query an incomplete, outdated price guide or use a search engine for an answer and hope its right, because I’ve come across a lot of bad information across the spectrum of resources, even from the source. After discovering that the issue was valuable then its off to ebay to determine value. Then log into a cataloging app to remember what to list on ebay later on. Brutal.
How could there not be an app that includes all these aspects of collecting in one place. Are we comic collectors so entranced in the stories of tomorrow’s science fiction that we forgot about the technology to make this hobby more enjoyable right now?
In my head the Mother Box was pinging that whole time, trying to tell me something yet I couldn’t understand what it was saying. Until one day the words became clear and instantaneous, “why don’t you make it,” and BOOM, a portal opened up to this dimension that I still look around and wonder how I wound up here.
Where is here? Here is having an app that has been downloaded 35,000 times in over 40 countries in the past eight months without an advertising budget. Here is having Valiant Entertainment, Stanley ‘Artgerm’ Lau, Briand Pulido and most recently, Alex Ross and Neal Adams endorse the app, recommend it to their social media following and provide giveaways to my fellow collectors who use the app.
Here is an astounding place where I see the app affecting comic book pricing when I send out a Key Issue Alert push notification of news about a comic book property that is confirmed to be produced. Except that news won’t hit the general media for another three weeks. A friend of the app graciously allowed me to share his inside information with my audience which sent the comic skyrocketing from a dollar on ebay to $40 then $60, $80 up to $100.
I sit here at my desk, logging in key issues that instantaneously become available on the front end for anyone to see in the moment I load its loaded. How, I have no idea. I know as much about mobile app development as mobile app development knows about me. Yet I have at the very least, five years of deployment ideas that I can make happen by telling my developer what I want and through some wizardry, it happens.
For example, I want to put this database on the app and include a simplified price guide of non-graded comic books with explanations of how to assess the condition of a comic book for anyone of any experience level to understand. I also want to be able to catalog what is owned and build a wish list for what is wanted. I want to see the comic cover but I want the option to collapse the images so I can scroll through a long series extremely fast and only see the issue numbers of the keys. I want to be able to filter by comic book age – Golden Age thru today and search by artist, writer, publisher and series. I would also like to search by character to view a timeline of their life, told via their key issues from first appearance to where they are today and the moments in between that defined who they are.
When all of that was finished, it was ready to be launched. I traveled from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to the New York Comic Convention in October 2017. I had a booth, if you could call it that. It was a card table with two monitors looping a video of the app in action. Day one of the convention, the Apple version was approved and up in the store for less than 24 hours while version 1 of the Android app was stuck in the submission phase on a technicality. I was losing my mind, thinking half of the 200,000 people in attendance won’t be able to download Key Collector Comics. Which wasn’t true. The Android version went through but no one could download either version because cell service in the Javitz was non-existent.
After four days, I left New York and headed back to Wisconsin “America’s Dairyland” where the football team is called The Green Bay Packers and their fans are collectively referred to as cheeseheads. I left with hopes that people would remember the card table with the monitors and the guy trying to sell something standing in everyone’s path didn’t go as planned but I learned tech doesn’t grab people’s attention when there’s a giant mural of Superman made up of jelly beans and the entire Justice League movie costumes (pre-release) displayed on the opposite end of the 840,000 square feet exhibit hall. They didn’t. The downloads barely broke 100 when I thought it would be well into the thousands.
The following week, after getting my motivation back, knowing if I wanted it, surely other collectors would want it, I posted to the Facebook group Comic Book Collecting which has almost 300,000 members. My post was immediately deleted and I was banned for advertising my free app for comic collectors. I’ve also been banned from Reddit, The Outhousers and the CGC forum, all of which happening after I learned and began to follow the rules.
Then an admin from another Facebook group reach out to me. He glimpsed the post that had been deleted, downloaded the app and liked it. He invited me to post in his group, the Comic Book Collectors Forum and it caught fire.
I was finally able to get it into the hands of collectors who could give me feedback and it was overwhelmingly positive. Since then there have been numerous ups and downs, many of them sharing the same day of successes and challenges.
But here we are, Key Collector Comics and I, with a 4.8 out of 5.0 on both Apple and Google Play which will fluctuate to 4.7 if I get a string of reviews where people complain that they can’t find their comic on the app, not understanding its focused exclusively on key issues, not really caring to understand either because I respond to every review. All 800+. No matter what thought, I always fall back on my favorite review from a collector named Marc Goodfellow who wrote about the Key Collector Comics: “This is the best thing to happen to me since my daughter was born.”
Being here in this role as an advisor for the many people who reach out to ask for buying and selling advice. That was an unforeseen part of this package and its even stranger yet that I have a very educated guess because without realizing it, over the past three and a half years, I’ve put the hours in to get my doctorate in key issue comics, speculation trends and how to create partnerships with people who have been here longer than I have. If one were to tell me I’d engage in regular conversations with the creators who bring the heroes to life, I would wonder in what alternate dimensions this were happening. But I’ve made connections with executives and artists, retailers and social media influencers simply by picking up the phone and being politely aggressive and delicately persistent. What my sister said to me last week is true, “being an annoying nerd is finally paying off”.
But there are sacrifices both big and small, financial and social. I can tell you any number of things you want to know about valuable key issues: how Action Comics #869 was recalled because Clark was drinking a beer on the cover with Pa Kent, which issue the cocaine-powered super villain, Snowflame made his first and only appearance (New Guardians #2 “Blow In The Wind” – I’m not even kidding) and the DC Whitman variants. What I cannot tell you is how any comic movie that came out over the past three years ended because I haven’t seen any of them. I haven’t turned on my television in the same span of years. My friends are surprised to see me when I’m out and I’m surprised that I’m out too.
I’m laser focused on this app with Omega Beams shooting out of my eyes, bending around obstacles so I can keep my sights set on Key Collector Comics and envision the six months ahead from today, whatever day that might be. The fun part about this, more fun than the blockbuster movies and a night out with friends is doing what has never been done in the comic business with each decision made, offering something that embraces new collectors and makes collecting more fun for the experienced ones and considering the massive potential that’s waiting in this world that exists on the other side of the Boom Tube.
