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Meet Bob Bretall, the record-holder for the world's largest comic book collection, and explore his incredible collection of over 138,000 comics, including rare editions and artist's editions.
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Hi, I'm Bob Breetall
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I have the record for world's largest comic book collection. I have over 138,000 comic books as we record this
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And then I buy and read and add to my collection every week
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Welcome to my main, I call it the comic book room. I got myself a copy of Amazing Spider-Man number 88
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in the summer of 1970. And that was the first one. And I loved it
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The ball kept rolling from that point. And I just started getting more and more series
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and reading more and more comics. I read probably 100 comic books a month still
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a little over 100 new comic books a month. And of that, maybe 25 to 30 are superhero books
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And then I read like 70 plus just independent books that are in those sci-fi, crime, romance
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other kinds of genres. Down here, I've got just loads of what
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are called artist's editions. And what an artist's edition is, is it
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reproduces the art at 100% of real size. It's a scan of the original art
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Any page of John Romita's Spider-Man art probably is several thousand dollars
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if you wanted to buy an individual page, if you could even find one
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But this book cost me, it was like $125 or something. But that's a pretty good deal when
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you're talking about getting probably a couple of hundred pages of original art
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And it's just a fascinating thing for a fan and collector like myself to be able to read and see the original art
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And I've got quite a few of them you can see here. These are called Marvel Masterworks
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And there are right now 331 of them. But I can pull those off these shelves
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and I can read them whenever I want. Along the top, I have a bunch of comics
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that were all cover dated March 1962, which is the year I was born
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So these are all Marvel comics to go with the Marvel Masterworks
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My little shrine to Stan Lee. I credit Stan with getting me into comics
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He wrote the very first comic that I picked up off the stand
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and read. And this is a huge book that the company Toshin put together
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that talks about Stan Lee. And this is actually signed by Stan
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It takes me 10 to 15 minutes to read a comic book
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In the amount of time that it takes someone to watch a football game, I can read 10, 15 comic books
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And nobody asks them, how in the world do you find the time to watch a couple of sport
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games every weekend? So it's the same kind of thing. There's plenty of time for whatever hobby you enjoy
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