There have been three boxes full of my old comic books sitting in my apartment for over two years, shipped to me by my father when he moved out of his house. Every once in a while, I come across these unwieldy boxes in the course of cleaning up and think to myself that I should get rid of them and reclaim that precious Manhattan real estate for something a bit more adult.

I don’t want to get rid of all of them, though, because I adored most of these comic books as a kid; I read and re-read them obsessively, painstakingly copied the artwork onto notebook paper, and slipped them into protective plastic bags in the hopes of realizing some massive future fortune in rare issues. That reality didn’t quite work out, as too many other collectors in the had the same idea, resulting in a flooded market of comics from the 80s. What’s more, the comic books that I bought as a kind of speculative investment are the ones I care about the least.

The ones that I still treasure are the ones that I bought solely because I felt a warm, cozy fantasia when I flipped through their pages at the drug store’s magazine rack. These account for no more than a third of my six hundred or so comic books. The remaining two-thirds are split evenly between comics so pedestrian that no one would possibly want to pay good money for them — I’m hoping I can manage to give these away — and another third that might potentially be of some collectible interest to someone out there — these I’m selling on eBay.