In the summer of 2001 I received a phone call from my fellow comic book collecting friend Richard Delmer. He told me that Jerry Ringi who owned the Amazing Fantasy comics store in Chesapeake, Virginia had just found a large collection of Silver Age Marvel and DC comics. Richard said I needed to get over there and take a look. Normally I wouldn’t waste anytime checking on a lead like this but I was really short on money at the time. I just recently had bought several hundred movie and girlie magazines from the Napa Valley collection for about $14,000. I had bought them on credit that I was paying interest on. At the same time my air conditioning unit had to be replaced which costs me another $6,000. So there I was $20,000 in debt which is a bad place to be if you’re trying to buy expensive old comic books.

Another factor that made me hesitant to look at Jerry’s collection was his slightly stained reputation among other comic dealers in my town of nearby Virginia Beach when it came to grading comics. I had heard the story about Jerry turning up a Golden Age collection several years earlier. According to the story, he had overgraded many of the books he sold to mail order customers and he had some customers return their books for a refund. I don’t like buying from dealers who overgrade a comic book to ask a higher price. I believe I discussed Jerry’s new find with some of my dealer friends and none of them seemed to excited as they believed Jerry was probably exaggerating about the condition of the books like he had done on the earlier Golden Age collection. Also, Richard had told me in his phone call that other people in his area that he told about the collection also had shown no interest in checking it. That contributed to confirming my hesitation in going to see Jerry.

But Richard kept calling me back over the next few days with fresh details about what he was seeing in Jerry’s store. Apparently it was taking Jerry a long time to process the books and he was only showing customers what he had ready to sell. Richard said that Jerry definitely had Marvel 1960s westerns and even several of one my favorite types of books, the early 1960s pre-Marvel science fiction / fantasy books like Journey Into Mystery and Strange Tales which had big monsters on the covers. Richard and I called these “monster books.” This new information changed my mind. Maybe Jerry didn’t know how to grade books, but I trusted Richard’s judgement. If he said the books were high grade that was enough for me. Still, I had almost no money but I figured I could at least buy some of the Marvel westerns which were way cheaper than the more popular “monster books.”

So I called up Jerry and made an appointment to visit his store. When I arrived Jerry told me a little about how he got the comics. An old man named R.J. Long whom Jerry knew had several boxes of comics he had kept from his childhood. He trusted Jerry to act as his agent and sell them for him. Although the comics had never been bagged and boarded and stored in a hot attic, many of the books were in high grade. The page quality was still off-white to white despite being kept in the attic. Many of the books didn’t lay flat but had minor curls from the way they had been stored. They were just packed haphazardly in boxes. The lack of plastic bags may actually have helped the gloss and freshness of the books. Plastic bags supposedly can damage a books over long periods of time.

The books I wanted, the Marvel westerns, were in pretty nice shape. Jerry seemed to be grading them accurately and pricing them in line with the Overstreet Price Guide. Plus he said he would give a discount for large large purchases. Then I took a look at the “monster books.” They were in high grade also and my resolve not to buy any melted away on the spot. It’s extremely rare to find those type of books in nice shape and when you do, you just have to find the money somewhere. So I made a few more trips to Jerry’s store and bought as many books as I could. I ended up eventually getting 30 books from this R.J. Long Collection. I got mostly Marvel westerns but a few “monster books” as well.

There were a few disappointments. Jerry had a Tales Of Suspense #16 that I asked him to hold for me until I could raise the money. I had another high grade copy of this book that I had bought in the late 1970s. I had never seen another high grade copy since then and I wanted this new one. When I returned to his store another day to get it he couldn’t find it. I don’t know if he really did misplace it or if he sold it out from under me to another customer and didn’t want to admit it. I remember one late evening I was in his store and he showed me Tales To Astonish #27, a “monster book” with the first appearance of Henry Pym who became the Marvel superhero Ant-Man. That book has a dull brown cover and as collectors know, brown does not show gloss very well. But this copy had the best gloss I had ever seen on this book. Jerry said he was going to mail it in to CGC for grading but I could buy it now if I wanted. I just couldn’t raise the extra money. Another setback involved Tales Of Suspense #41, an early Iron Man issue. Jerry had it priced at $700 which I could barely manage. I was in Jerry’s store the day before a local comic book show “Comics At The Beach” in my town of Virginia Beach. Jerry wasn’t in his store so I told the clerk watching the store to tell Jerry I would buy the book the next day at the show. When I saw Jerry at the show he said he didn’t know where the book was. I thought to myself, “How can you misplace a $700 book that you had sitting in your store the day before?” Again, maybe it was Jerry being scatterbrained or he had sold it out from under me again.

Jerry did well with his R.J. Long comic books. The Amazing Spider-Man #1 was graded 9.2 by CGC and he sold it in Heritage Auctions for about $35,000. That is probably more than the annual net income from his store. Jerry’s brief story about the R.J. Long pedigree collection appeared with his photo on the front page of the widely read trade journal Comic Buyer’s Guide (CBG) . Click here for a copy of his article that appeared in CBG. The article also lists some of the “Key” books from the collection.

And my friends and I had some fun too. Richard Delmer bought several books. He got a nice Fantastic Four #10 and some Amazing Fantasy Steve Ditko books. Our mutual friend Jim Frost sold some of these over the last few years for Richard on the CGC internet chat boards. As far as I know however Richard still has his Amazing Spider-Man #2 he got from Jerry. Richard paid $2,000 for it in 2001 so I’m sure he’s got a nice paper profit in it. Jim Frost got several books from Jerry that he made time payments on including several “monster books” that I had passed on. When most of the Marvels were finally sold and Jerry’s sales slowed down Jim arranged for dealer Chris Foss from out of state to buy the remainder of the collection. Click here for Jim’s own informal report on his experiences with the collection. Another high grade Silver Age collection hasn’t surfaced in our area since this R.J. Long bonanza. I’m glad Jim, Richard and I all got some good books out of out of it before many other people had seen them.