Stuck to the cover

The cover price of an American comic book didn't mean shit to godless foreigners like me. By the time they ever got to any shop near me and through freight and exchange rate hikes, they were costing three times what the cover promised. A 75c issue of Alpha Flight would be $2.15, so it had to be bloody worth it.

So almost all the local comics had some kind of price sticker on them. Comics were so worthless to many sellers that they just scrawled the local price on the cover in irreparable ink - I still have so many comics with the owner of Baird's Bookshop's distinctive scrawl - but they mainly came with some kind of sticker.

And I always hated them and had to get them off straight away, to get as much of the cover as pristine as possible. It's a bit of a compulsion, and I've always had the same issue with old videos and DVDs that I bought from the local stores before they all disappeared, (getting the Video Ezy New Lynn sticker off a disc without leaving behind enough glue to jam up in the payer was a goddamn art).

But when it comes to comics, sometimes it takes so much patience to get it off without damaging the cover and you can't rush it, and after all these years, I've become a goddamn expert at it. I know exactly how slowly to pull something off, and the exact moment it's all gone wrong and the cover is starting to tear.

It was always bad enough with stickers, but leave them too long and they can become a complete mission. Because I know what happens when you leave them so long or pick up a comic second hand.

I spent about an hour recently getting a big 'NEW TITLE' sticker off an old 2000ad sci-fi special from the 90s, and there was was one local distributor who did comics for just a few months in the 90s, but left a garish yellow sticker that was hugely difficult to peel off without damage at the time, and near impossible now. I wasn't able to clean the sci-fi special, and you can see the sorry attempt in the photo above.

I've now been getting new comics from the local comic shops for a long time, and they know the value of things and never have any stickers, but I still get them off my 2000ads that I get at the local newsagent as soon as possible, before they become a permanent fixture.

Like many things in my comic reading life, I have become such a fucking expert for something that is of absolutely no use whatsoever in the real world. It's always the way.