I could feel my checkbook quivering in fear as I pulled out all those X-Men.
There’s a half-joking observation I’ve made, in-store and later shared on Xwitter (R.I.P.) and repeated on Bluesky, in which I said that someone bringing in Grandpa’s collection used to mean Golden Age books when I started in this business, but now it usually means the same twelve or thirteen issues of Spawn everyone seems to have.
The dichotomy is not always quite that drastic. There were times at the previous place of employment in the ’90s when we’d be told on the phone “oh, I have a bunch of really old comics my grandpa used to own!” and they’d come in with, like, post-Liefeld X-Force.
And at my current (and hopefully final) shop, I’ve seen my share of older books, but more on that in a moment.
For years there was an opinion, one I believed first voiced to me by pal Dorian and that I shared, that there would soon be a huge influx of Golden Age books into the general funnybook population as their older owners…uh, went to that great quarter box in the sky.
And…I never saw it. At least not around here, not locally. I’ve had Golden Age books come in dribs and drabs, usually Disney books. But by and large if there was a sudden injection of these books into the secondary market, they all probably got snapped up from estate auctions or otherwise dumped out of the inheritors’ lives and went straight to gradin’ and slabbin’.
So I don’t see a lot of Golden Age books come through. Even 1960s Silver Age comics seemed like they were in short supply, though I’ve had some really good collections come through the door over the last couple of years. One collection held 1960s first issues on up through the 1970s of many major Marvel series (including an Amazing Fantasy #15 and an Amazing Spider-Man #1), a good handful of which were in beautiful VF to NM condition.
But that’s the exception. Most collections for sale that come in that have any age to them at all are generally 1970s-1980s. (I do see a lot of books more recent than that, too, of course.) “Bronze” and “Copper” Age books, as the Comics-noscenti would dub them…all those issues of Ka-Zar and Human Fly and Tarzan and sometimes even comics people would want, like X-Men and Spider-Man and Batman.
In other words, it was beginning to look like it was the Bronze Age collections who were now…um, divesting themselves of their own collection and not all having gone to live on a farm upstate to leave their relatives to do it.
I mean, I’m extrapolating a lot from my singular data collection point of “guy who once managed one comic shop and now owns another comic shop.” But it’s the trend I’ve been seeing over the past few decades, that as older collectors sell off their books, there is a general movement forward in time of the general age of their comics. Just, y’know, overall, when dealing with original owners buying books new off shelves and restricting back issue purchasing to the “more recent stuff” of their time.
I was thinking about this because yet another large collection made it into my hands over the weekend. A nice lady with eight longboxes that belonged to a recently passed family member brought them in for me to peruse and this is what I acquired:
That works out to about three longboxes’ worth of stuff, by the way. It was primarily 1970s through mid-1980s books (the most recent I believe being some issues of Crisis on Infinite Earths), with a smattering of 1960s books (a handful of Daredevil, some of DC’s space comics).
What was interesting was that this also appeared to be someone’s Investment Opportunity. To wit:
…that John Byrne Silver Surfer oneshot from 1982…
…this issue of Wonder Woman guest-starring the New Teen Titans…
…and shockingly, a whole bunch of part two of that “Days of Future Past” story from Uncanny X-Men. And believe it not, there were more copies of this comic than pictured here.
I realize those photos may be slightly reminiscent of this ancient post, but hoo boy, just look at those. It wasn’t all duplicates, but there was a whole lot of obvious speculation goin’ on. I didn’t buy the 1/3rds of a longbox full of New Teen Titans #16, featuring the Captain Carrot insert. And that issue of Wonder Woman pictured above? That’s only 10 copies out of the 30 or so I could have bought.
This is on top of another collection I bought not too long ago, which was another investment accumulation, filled with ’90s books like the X-Men #1 with the gatefold cover, of which there were about 20 copies.
Once again, I’m just one guy with one small comic shop, so I’m working with a small dataset here. But these collections, both owned by folks no longer with us, could be an indicator of a possible trend. As blogging brother Andrew put it on Bluesky:
Is there a burgeoning influx of investment books about to enter the market? In a way, we’ve already seen it with the dumping of heavily-speculated ’90s books that are basically just landfill waiting to happen, like Brigade or, well, most short-run and forgotten Image and Image-a-like titles. But that sort of thing isn’t going to affect the price of books that already hold no value in the seconday market.
But what’s going to happen when, say, collections with three dozen F to NM copies of Uncanny X-Men #142 start getting dumped on the market? A comic that traditionally is a pricey book suddenly theoretically facing an increase in supply.
Likely, I’m worrying about nothing…now. It’s possible even as speculation stocks from private collections show up in the back issue market, it may increase local supplies here and there, but no single book is going to be hit hard enough to affect value industry-wide. Especially since most comics collections are preserved poorly and NM copies can remain harder to acquire. Even this newest collection, where most of the duplicated investment books are nice, very few grade at a NM.
What I’m saying is that we’re not likely to have a repeat of the Heroes, Inc. situation, where an enormous warehouse find in the 1970s of uncirculated copies drove the price down to essentially nothing. But your local retailer may soon find himself with, say, four dozen copies of Moon Knight #1 (1980), or 50 copies of 2001: A Space Odyssey #8, and more similar acquisitions.
Maybe in the long run we’ll experience a repeat of the Shazam! Effect, where a heavily speculated book (DC’s Shazam! #1 from the 1970s) is dumped into bargain bins, where it primariy stayed for years. Then suddenly it was realized “hey wait, nice copies of this book are hard to find now!” and they were pulled out of the bins and if they could find any mint copies, those were slapped with premium prices.
Not that anyone’s going to dump Uncanny X-Men #142 into a dollar bin…I’m certainly not, and even as many copies as I’ve acquired I don’t expect them to last long. But maybe the day will come when even, say, Brigade #2 is a rare find in NM and my 152-year-old self will price it up at 50 space-credits and put in my case.
