Ruben Blades 500,000 Comic Book Collection to Be Auctioned

Panamanian singer and politician Ruben Blades has been collecting comics almost since he reached the age of reason, but now thinks enough is enough and plans to put them up for auction.

Comic lovers will be able to bid on the almost 500,000 copies belonging to Blades up to Aug. 13 when the online auction organized by ComicConnect.com comes to an end.

Blades started collecting comics when he was a little boy in his native Panama and except for a few years when he left the picture stories aside, the Panamanian singer spent over 30 years piling up a huge, diversified collection.

“My mother threw a lot of them in the trash, and when I turned 18 I stopped buying comics because other things began to matter more in my life,” Blades, the singer-songwriter of smash hits like “Pedro Navaja,” said.

His passion for comics returned at age 26 when he was living in New York and one day in 1974 came upon a second-hand comic-book store at the intersection of 57th Street and 8th Avenue.

“I was snagged once more,” Blades said, adding that in all those years he concentrated on completing series no matter what state the copies were in, including some featuring the most popular characters of all like Batman and Superman, as the Web site shows.

ComicConnect representatives said it’s not easy to find a collector who has completed so many series as the Panamanian musician, from gems of the Action Comics 1 series to Detective Comics 27.

“I’m going to sell them little by little to focus on other things. I have too many comic books and in completing the series I felt that had I achieved my goal. It’s been fun and I met some interesting people along the way,” Blades said.

Published in Notitas de Noticias

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