What is the best way to get my comic collection valued for free, and where is best to sell it?

Its a rather large collection, over a thousand and all I can find is rather expensive price guides, also I want to sell it securely but without going through e-bay.

If you’re willing to cart it all somewhere, you can take it to your local comic book store and they’ll give you an estimate. They will also be able to tell you which comics will be your big ticket items- then if you really don’t want to sell them on eBay offer them to the comic store if the price sounds good. Most stores won’t cheat you real bad- I mean they won’t pay what they’re worth because they need to make a profit also, but they also know that you are who they’re selling to and they won’t totally gouge you on the price either. And unless you were a much better comic purchaser than my brother and I, you’ll find that you end up with 992 worth between $.10 and $1.00 and 8 worth 20-100. The best way to clear out those other 992 comics is to sell them as a group to someone, and the only people likely to buy 1000 comics because there is 1 really great comic in there is a comic store.