An Infinity Gauntlet to the face

Some of my very good comic-reading friends are obsessed with key issues, and are always going on about fuckin' CGC slabbing and the latest first appearances, and I love and respect them at all, but I really wish they would stop fucking it up for those who just want to read the damn things.

I do not follow the rises and falls in the price of key comic books. I used to look at Wizard price guides all the time, but it was always morbid fascination, or to find out which issue Morrison started on Doom Patrol. That's all. The hot books meant nothing to me, and still don't. Anything that is all slabbed up is worthless to me. I don't even fuck around with putting my comics in bags anymore.

I guess somebody is getting a kick out of it all, and I'm not the kind of dude to shit on their beer. But they're shitting in mine, because I keep getting holes in the stories I'm trying to follow.

It's understandable why people would be after Hulk #181 or New Mutants #98, but it's also happening with perverse regularity with brand new comics, when someone far away from me apparently decides that the new Daredevil or Catwoman comic is suddenly a hot commodity, and they convinced enough others to jump on the bandwagon that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough collectors buy into the delusion, it becomes true, and suddenly I can't get the one issue of the current Legion of Super-Heroes comic because it has fucking Gold Lantern in it.

Any now my decades-long push to get a tonne of the Surfer Surfer comics from the late 80s and early nineties completely hit a rule with the last issue I need, which is improbably priced because it has the first appearance of a fucking glove in it.

The early Marshal lrogers issues are absolute blinders, and I've long been into the Starlin/Lim comics - and #44 is the last one I need, but it has the first appearance of the infinity gauntlet in it, and is now going for big money.

I know the this particular piece of handwear was a major plot point in some of the biggest films of the past decade, but I'll have to learn to live with this one-issue hole in the Silver Surfer collection, because of a glove.