The Value of Things

Paying for the ephemeral.

If you’re a collector, you most likely spend a lot of time looking at the secondary market. Conventions, car boot sales, eBay, Gumtree, there are a myriad of places where you might, if you’re lucky, find that one piece of the collection you are missing. In this way, you are also exposed to the value - or at least the perceived value - of your items.

A little while ago I mentioned that I’d gone through a heap of my stuff back at my parents’ house and basically cleaned out. Some of the stuff I moved on were comics that I no longer wanted for any number of reasons. The thing is, all of these I gave away. I did not receive a cent for them, I instead donated them to local charity shops hoping that they would bring joy to some unexpecting geeky kid who happens to stumble upon them, just as had happened for me many years ago. While I’m totally fine with the decision I made, I could not help but wonder how valuable those comics actually were.

I looked up the comics I’d given away and it turns out that they weren’t wroth all that much, but it got me to thinking; how much is my whole collection worth? I decided to find out. It took a few months, but I finally finished last week.

For this I used ComicBookRealm.com (CBR), a free on-line comics valuing site. While the Overstreet Guide remains the most trusted source for comics pricing, I didn’t fancy spending £32 on what was basically a curiosity. Even so, any price guide for any collectable is exactly that - a guide. There is no guarantee that the items within would actually achieve the prices listed.

At any rate, here are the 10 most valuable comics in my collection, according to CBR.

I certainly did not spend £259.35 on Marvel Premiere #10. The “paid” amount listed here is what the comic would have originally sold for on newsstands in the ‘70s. I can’t recall how much I paid for it when I bought it at a convention, but it wouldn’t have been more than £20.

None of these are ridiculous amounts, especially when you consider how much low-graded copies of Superman #1 and Batman #1 went for recently in Australia; £98,392.71 and £31,221 respectively.

While it is undoubtably cool that a comic in my collection is apparently worth £250 (and the site did not have listings for all my comics, so conceivably I have some worth even more), I have to wonder; why is it worth so much?

Unlike other collectables such as coins, or watches, or porcelain frogs, comics can be very easily reproduced. Any print media can (well, nearly any). Maybe if this was ten or fifteen years ago before collected editions of comics became so mainstream it would make sense. Today, the stories contained within those issues have be reprinted countless times, more often than not at a much higher quality. Rather than the crappy newsprint paper used in comics of the 70s, these stories have received reprints in beautifully produced collections. Heavy duty gloss paper printed with strong backs and bright, vibrant colours, bound between nice hard covers. Why would you even want the original edition with its fading inks and paper so fragile it’d crack under a stiff breeze?

I suppose culturally the aforementioned releases are important. While Superman #1 and Batman #1 are not the first appearances of those characters, it does mark the point where they became “famous” due to receiving their own self titled series (previously, Superman debuted in Action Comics and Batman in Detective Comics). Neither Superman #1 or Batman #1 heralded the dawn of the superhero age, but they marked the embracing of it by the wider world.

As for my Marvel Premiere issue? It contains the first appearance of Shuma-Gorath, a huge Lovecraftian monster who is one of Doctor Strange’s many advisories. If you’ve seen Multiverse of Madness, it’s the big one-eyed tentacled monster at the start of the film (although due to legal reasons they had to re-name him “Gargantos”).

Even so, it puzzles me why the original printings are so valuable. It has to be more than collectors’ FOMO, surely? Even if you read the original printing now, you would need to cast your mind back to time of its release to understand the historical import. Why not do that with a reprint? A comic does not hold original art fresh from the drawing board, or original writing just pulled from the typewriter (even less so nowdays given all writing is done in word processors). They are mass produced, not one offs. Even limited printings aren’t that limited. So why the value?

It’s interesting that humans put a monetary value on items of cultural significance, especially those that can be easily reproduced which, lets face it, is most things.

Items such as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Dali’s The Persistence of Memory can not be reproduced. A print is just a fancy scan or photograph, it doesn’t have the texture of the paint on board of canvas. The only way you could come close to a recreation would be to have the artist paint it again using all the same materials, but even then, due to the nature of art making, there would be differences, even if only subtle, that would distinguish it from the original. A comic, though? Well, what you hold in your hands even in the first printing is a reproduction of original artwork or the original script, often shrunk from its original dimensions and altered in other ways.

There is no question that Superman #1 and Batman #1, and to a lesser extent Marvel Premier #10, are culturally important. But, to experience those stories, to admire the artwork and words that launched those characters into the collective consciousness, you don’t need the original copy because there are myriad reprints out there. It’s the experience and impact of what is contained within the pages of that original comic that is important, not the item itself. But you can’t put a price on experience, right?

Clearly, you can. Culturally significant items have had prices put on them since time immemorial. Sure, you can go to a museum and see some of those items for free, but if you want to actually own them? Well, you’ll need to stump up the shillings, mate.

Outside of comics another good example of the price being placed on culture, and by extension peoples’ experiences and memories of those experiences, is retro video games. Have fond memories of a particular digital adventure you went on as a child? Well, you can re-experience that for only a few hundred dollarbucks. Or, conversely, you could just fire up an emulator for free. The experience is the same (actually, it’s arguably better via emulation).

It’s hard to make a profit off of experiences, thus you we have to charge for the things that provide the experience. And charge top dollar at that, especially if it was the first time that experience was provided. We should be happy that we don’t have to shell out hundreds, if not thousands, worth of scratch to experience these things, and yet people still chase after those illusive items.

But then, I buy back issue comics, so maybe I’m not the best person to make this observation.

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