Many of us collect comic book runs -- i.e., a sequence of consecutive issues from the same series -- for a variety of personal, historical, or investment reasons. Personally, I grew up reading Chris Claremont's run on the X-Men in the 1980s and, in an effort to recapture a part of my childhood, I have all of the Uncanny X-Men starting from #210 (beginning of the Mutant Massacre) through #266 (1st appearance of Gambit). When I flip through this run of comics in my short box, it brings back memories of the good old days when, as a middle-schooler, I'd sit on my twin bed at home reading the latest copy of the Uncanny X-Men that had arrived in the mail (yes, they used to have a mail in subscription back in the 1980s).
With the exception of X-Men #266, most of the comics in this four-year run aren't very valuable, but most are in NM condition, and several of them are 9.8s (but most are raw copies). So, even though this run in my collection is complete, there's a lot of room for improvement.
Thanks to the CGC Comic Registry, an online platform where comic book collectors can register, display, and compete with their graded comic book collections, we can get a glimpse into the comic runs assembled by other members of our community. Some of these collections are absolutely epic and can even make the collection in Selling Superman seem small in comparison.
While flipping through some X-Men-related collections, I came across what must be one of the greatest X-Men runs ever assembled: the Baker X-Men #1 through #544 + Variants collection. Take a look at this graded collection -- if you're an X-Men collector, you just have to give dbaker2025 a slow clap for the time and effort it must've taken to build this collection.
This is a near complete run of X-Men volume 1 from X-Men #1 (1963) through X-Men #544 (2011) which also includes almost all of the annuals and variants. In addition, every book in the collection is graded. After my review, the run is 100% complete through Uncanny X-Men #302 and, after #302, its only missing 25 books. Considering those remaining 25 books aren't highly sought after, it seems as though it won't be too long before dbaker2025 completes their run.
If that weren't impressive enough, there isn't a single book in the collection, including X-Men #1, that received a grade below a 9.2. The 9.2 copy of X-Men #1 in this collection is within the top 1% of CGC graded copies and is worth approximately $195,000 (although it appears dbaker2025 purchased that copy during the tail end of the comic boom for $204,000):
Here's another mind-blowing fact: beginning with X-Men #107, there's another run of 437 consecutive 9.8s in this collection. Let that sink in for a minute. This is clearly a collector who enjoys the thrill of the hunt for not only completing a run but also including the highest grades possible.
It's not easy to calculate the estimated value of this collection, but ChatGPT estimates that it's worth between $500,000 to $750,000. That range sounds about right considering the biggest keys in this collection (X-Men #1 through X-Men #14 and the 9.8 copy of X-Men #94) are worth approximately $300,000 to $350,000 according to my calculations.
