Largest Comic Book Collection Ever! - Guinness World Records

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Hi, I'm Bob Breetall. I have the record for world's largest comic book collection
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I have over 138,000 comic books as we record this, and then I buy and read and add to my collection every week
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Welcome to my main, I call it the comic book room, but it's got a lot of stuff that's related to comics
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So we'll look at a few of those things. First one we'll stop at on our tour is Mjolnir, Thor's hammer
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It's a reproduction, obviously, because I can pick it up. I don't know if I'm worthy
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This area up here, I have a lot of my major comic book busts
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These are all by a sculptor called Randy Bowen. He does really kind of the classic Marvel versions of characters
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That's my amazing Fantasy 15. So this is the first appearance of Spider-Man, and it's signed by Stan Lee
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I don't get a lot of things graded. This is actually in a, we call them a slab, and it's also, this frame has got UV protective glass
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to keep the colors of the comic from fading from light sources in the room
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I got myself a copy of Amazing Spider-Man number 88 in the summer of 1970, and that was the first one, and I loved it
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The ball kept rolling from that point, and I just started getting more and more series and, you know, reading more and more comics
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This is from Amazing Spider-Man number 88. Run down there, run, do you hear? My webbing can't hold the concrete much longer
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And then Spidey's thinking to himself, the arms are racing away, but I can't go after them, not till the street is cleared
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These are something that I'm really proud of. These are original covers, you know, Batman covers that I got way long ago, back in the early 80s, I think
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These are all collected editions. This is all of the Karl Barks Disney comics, and it's all of the EC comics in reprint form
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because I don't have necessarily all of the originals of those, so getting the reprints is kind of an easy way to do that
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In my spinner rack, I kind of put comics on there that I kind of like to look at
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There's been Alex Ross covers a couple of months ago, with all the different villains from the Marvel Universe
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and I've been buying those, and I kind of put those up on here just to look at
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And they'll stay up for six, eight months, and then some other cool thing will come along
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I'll take these down and file them away in a box and put some other cool comics up that I can look at
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I read probably a hundred comic books a month still, a little over a hundred new comic books a month
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And of that, maybe 25 to 30 are superhero books, and then I read like 70-plus just independent books
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that are in those sci-fi, crime, romance, other kinds of genres. These are called absolute editions
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They're just like really giant reprints of various comics, and I've got a bunch of those
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Typically, if there's a series that I'm really a fan of, and I know I'm not going to like pull those comics out to reread them
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I'll get one of these really kind of nice reprint editions of it
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Down here, I've got just loads of what are called artist's editions, and what an artist's edition is
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is it reproduces the art at a hundred percent of real size
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It's a scan of the original art, and it's like each, nowadays, any page of John Romita's Spider-Man art
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probably is several thousand dollars if you wanted to buy an individual page, if you could even find one
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But this book cost me, it was like $125 or something, but that's a pretty good deal when you're talking about
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getting probably a couple of hundred pages of original art. And it's just a fascinating thing for a fan and collector like myself to be able to read and see the original art
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I've got quite a few of them you can see here. And the last one we'll focus on here to close out the tour is my little shrine to Stan Lee
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I credit Stan with getting me into comics. I mean, he wrote the very first comic that I picked up off the stand and read
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And this is a huge book that the company Toshin put together that talks about Stan Lee
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And I worked with Toshin and loaned them hundreds of comic books from my collection and other items
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that they took pictures of to put into this book. So they gave me a complimentary copy of this
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And this is actually signed by Stan. It's one of the last things that he signed before he unfortunately passed away a few years back
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Okay, so here, welcome to my secondary room for my collection. I call it the library
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I put a lot of bookcases into it. But I've got here, these are called Marvel Masterworks
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And there are right now 331 of them. So I can pick most Marvel comics from the Silver Age
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There are some Golden Age, some 50s stuff and up into the 70s
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But I can pull those off these shelves and I can read them whenever I want
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Along the top, I have a bunch of comics that were all cover dated March 1962
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which is the year I was born. So these are all Marvel comics to go with the Marvel Masterworks
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Here's an Avengers poster. Again, Alex Ross, one of my favorite things
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This one's signed by Stan Lee. And it takes me 10 to 15 minutes to read a comic book
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In the amount of time that it takes someone to watch a football game
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you know, I can read 10, 15 comic books. And nobody asks them, how in the world do you find the time to watch a couple of sport games
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every weekend? You know, so it's the same kind of thing. There's plenty of time for whatever hobby you enjoy
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And on this side of the room, I've got DC archives and kind of the same kind of setup with
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DC statues. And I've got an area here with the Spirit, who is a character created by Will Eisner
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It ran in newspapers. Every Sunday, there would be a full page, actually a little 8 to 16 page comic book
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in the newspaper. It was called the Spirit section. I have some of the original Spirit sections here that you can kind of see
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This is what they looked like. I've got like 50s comics down here and just archive editions of all different superheroes
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In this closet, it's like kind of a mini version of my garage
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I've got lots of boxes of comics that I put up here. They started making boxes with characters printed on them, which I thought was kind
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of cool. And I have a lot of comics in those boxes that are in this closet
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Every item in the collection has got a story behind it. And I could bore people with every one of those stories, but it's just so many things
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in the collection. My main advice is find something that you'll enjoy reading
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I look at collecting as it's a fun hobby. It's you do something that's giving you joy
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And some people, they get joy out of collecting books that have the highest dollar value
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associated with them. I don't really worry about the dollar value of books
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I don't obsess over what the dollar value of my collection is
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It's more I want books that I can read them because I enjoy reading the stories and I
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enjoy the characters. Some people will fall in love with comics once they start reading them
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Other people, it's just not going to click and that's okay. But someone who the medium does click for them, they should really look for comics that
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they get a lot of enjoyment out of reading. This is my garage
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And this is where I keep most of my comics. My brother-in-law actually made me these cabinets
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They're on casters, so they sit up off the ground. They're sort of movable
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And each one of them holds 30 long boxes of comics. This is the fourth one, so I've got boxes 91 through 120 in here
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And if I pull it out, you can kind of see how long a long box is
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It's pretty long. And, you know, they've got... Here is Our Man
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They just got a bunch of comics in them. You know, these would all be in my database, you know, that would say they're in box 109
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So that's that. This repeats a bunch of times here in the garage
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This is 377 and this goes down into the 400s, but, you know, similar
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You know. Captain Ginger is a cat in space. That's a sci-fi comic for cat lovers
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Constantine, who many people who have seen Hellblazer or watched some of the DC TV shows
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might know who Constantine is. I'm always going to be partial to Spider-Man since he was, you know, that character that
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got me into comics. I think another reason why I kept reading comics is by the time I was a teenager, I
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moved away from reading just superhero comics. I think a lot of people who think that comics are only superheroes and they're just reading
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superhero comics, they get burned out pretty easily. And I started reading lots of different kinds of comics and I discovered Independent and
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other kinds of comics. There are comic books in every genre. So if you look at like just movies and TV shows, every one of those genres that you
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have for those, there are comics in those genres. So you have comedies, you have romance, you have Western, sci-fi, any kind of literary
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genre you can think of. There are comic books in that genre
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So when people ask me, you know, what kind of comics would they enjoy
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I ask them what kind of movies and TV shows they enjoy and then I can find them comics
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in that same kind of vein. I've got more blocks of them over here up into the high 400s
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You can see 461 and on down there. I'm working on box 489 at this point
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And those are just the long boxes. I've got other boxes up in my comic room, in the closet, in that library room
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I've got a lot of short boxes. I've got magazine boxes for those larger size ones that are, I don't know, they hold
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maybe about 125 magazine size comics. I think I'm working on magazine box 50
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So I've got 50 boxes of those. If I look at art versus storytelling, storytelling will take it by a little bit because it's
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a visual medium. That said, I can read a comic book that I love the art and I'm not so crazy about the writing
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But if I love the writing, but the art is really something that just kind of visually
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doesn't do it for me, I find it a little harder to get through
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That's why I would say that art's going to take it by a little bit. But really, comic books are about that merger between the art and the writing
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And they both really have to be there for something really to resonate with a reader
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as being a really great comic, I think. I order from two different online subscription services
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Plus I buy stuff from my local comic shop. I buy online mostly because I get a good discount from them
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Then they also have good selection. I order in advance so I know that I'm going to get them
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I don't have to worry about getting to the shop before they sell out of something
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This one, they have back issues as well as the new comics
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So I usually will get a mixture in any given week of back issues that I'm buying to add
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to the collection. These are all from a couple of weeks ago
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I've got The Avengers and The Daughter of Blade. This is an Archie comic actually, but it's more from that like Chilling Adventures of
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Sabrina type of Archie. The Seasons Have Teeth is a horror comic
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And then I've got She-Hulk and I've got Spider-Man 2099. And then on my back issues, I've got one I've been looking for for a while
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This is a Marvel Assistant Spies Spectacular. Just a goofy title, but it's got the first appearance of the Daughter of Galactus
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This is just the Season of the Bruja. It's Bruja is Spanish for witch
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This is a page of original art of a story that an independent cartoonist did for me
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related to when I actually got the Guinness record originally. And it's kind of a spoof of an Uncle Scrooge page where he's diving through his money bin
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and it has me diving around through a bin full of comic books
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Here's some original art that I've got. Some various things that I like
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This is a page from Tomb of Dracula by an artist I really like named Gene Colan
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And this is a Dracula that he did. This is a Daredevil that he did
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I've been on the nominating committee for an award ceremony called the Inkwell Awards
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which recognize inkers of comic books. And I've been serving on that for over 10 years where each year I look through comics and I
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nominate a bunch of inkers and then those go forward and then they vote on that and then
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the awards go out. If you had limitless funds, you could buy almost any comic book that you want to get
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your hands on if you're willing to pay the price that people are asking for
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I kind of take a different route and I have an amount in my head that I'm willing to pay
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for something. And I'll watch sometimes for a decade or more. I'll just kind of keep an eye out and watch for that book coming up at a price that I
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want to pay in a condition that I want to have that book in
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I don't want something that's totally beat up, but at the same time, I'm not a collector
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who only collects things that are in super high grade. I'm fine with middle grade condition books, but there's been a lot of books that I've
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spent years. My copy of Amazing Fantasy 15, the first appearance of Spider-Man, I think I probably actively
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looked for that for four or five years before I ended up buying it
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This issue of Patsy Walker, number 58, is the first appearance of the comic code seal
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on the cover. This was an interesting one also because this is one where my friends and I on a call one
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Saturday, we spent hours digging around through the internet trying to find the very earliest
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comic book that had a comic code seal on it, and that's this comic
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I buy a lot of original art, and I have some of that up on the wall too
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This one I particularly like. It's a page of Black Panther from Jungle Action, and this is a couple issues after the story
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that was in the Black Panther movie where Killmonger throws T'Challa off the falls
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This, I think, is from Jungle Action 9, but it's one of the pages of original art, and
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that's how they would make the comics back then. Now most of it's digital
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People will do the art completely in the computer, but back then someone would draw a pencil
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drawing on a piece of art board like this, 11 by 17, then somebody would come in and
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they'd go over that with India Ink, and a letterer would come in and hand put the letter
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in, and then there was a whole process to add colors and just all kinds of things to
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make the final piece of artwork. And then in this closet I've got something called drawer boxes, which are actually kind
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of nice. Most of my comics are not in drawer boxes. This makes it kind of easy
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I can go and pull out various... This is my Justice League drawer, and I've got a bunch of old Justice League comics in here
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And now I've got, let's see what I've got in this one
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I've got Fantastic Four. I enjoy having the record, you know, and I realize that I don't absolutely necessarily
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have the most comics. I am the guy with a lot of comics that jump through all the hoops that you have to jump
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through to, you know, get the officially recognized record. You know, there's a lot of work that goes into that
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And not everybody wants to do that

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Largest Comic Book Collection Ever! - Guinness World Records