Some pickups come from a doorstep and a cup of tea. This one came from a raised paddle in a Sheffield auction room, and it turned into one of the best hauls I've had all year.
I'd been watching the listing for weeks. A single lot, dozens of X-Men and Wolverine issues, no individual breakdown, just a grainy photo of spines and a guide price that told me the auction house hadn't properly catalogued what they were sitting on. That's exactly the kind of lot worth turning up for in person rather than bidding blind online.
The room
Sheffield saleroom auctions move fast. Comics rarely get their own slot, they're usually tucked in as a job lot alongside the general collectables, gone in under a minute if nobody in the room knows what they're looking at. I did. I sat through box after box of unrelated lots waiting for mine, watched the room, and when it finally came up I knew within seconds it was worth pushing for.
Got it. Boxes into the van, straight back down the A61 with that particular kind of buzz you only get from winning a lot you've researched properly.
What was in the boxes
The headline book was Uncanny X-Men #101, the first appearance of Jean Grey as Phoenix. That's a proper key, one of the moments that defines the entire Claremont era, and finding it sat anonymously in an unsorted lot is exactly the sort of thing that makes this job worth doing. Alongside it sat a genuinely deep spread of Bronze and Copper Age X-Men and Wolverine issues, the kind of run that takes someone decades of careful buying to put together, not a few months of eBay browsing.
Whoever built this collection knew the character. It wasn't a random pile, it was a proper X-Men library, and going through it box by box back at home took me a good few evenings.
Why the auction room still matters
Everyone assumes eBay and Whatnot are where the deals are now. Sometimes they're not. A saleroom lot with no itemised breakdown is exactly where a serious key issue slips through, because nobody's had the time or the knowledge to go through it properly before it hits the floor. Doing the legwork, turning up, knowing your Phoenix Saga from your Dark Phoenix Saga, that's still worth something.
This is one of those hauls I'll be picking through and listing for a good while yet. Keep an eye on Whatnot over the coming weeks, because a fair few of these are heading there.
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