Comic Back Issue Speculation: Still Worth the Hype or Nope?

The UK Times wrote more about the topic of the speculator market, and the old back issues that’re held hostage to the cyclical sales mindset. And in the following about Spider-Man, they say:

More than 60 years on, the world is still marvelling – not just at Spider-Man’s awesome might but at his impressive market value. In 2021 a copy of the same magazine sold in the US for $3.6 million (£2.7 million). It cost 12 cents when it was bought in some suburban drugstore 62 years ago. At the time, that was the highest price paid for a comic book, but since then the record has been smashed on several occasions – a solid indication of the rising global market in collectable comics. Last year, a copy of Action Comics from June 1938, which introduced the Superman character to the world, sold for $6 million at auction. And just this week, a copy of the first comic dedicated entirely to Superman, dating to 1939, astonished the collectibles market when it went for $9.12 million.

I’m afraid it’s just at the market value, considering what a joke sales of monthly pamphlets have become. Does anyone truly marvel at how Joe Quesada destroyed the Spider-marriage? And the damage to Spidey didn’t stop there. How can anybody consider it a celebration when artistic value’s been massively damaged and left unrepaired? Also note how none of these press sources today ever delve into sad moments like those from the past 2 decades, nor anything else that brought down comicdom, and you see how the inflicted damage will continue apace.

Superman’s debut belongs to what collectors and dealers call the golden age of comic books – the pre-war or wartime era when other patriotic, all-American characters such as Wonder Woman and Captain America arrived on the scene and spent their early years fighting Nazi stormtroopers and the Imperial Japanese Army. Spider-Man is a product of the so-called silver age of the 1950s and 1960s, when new-minted superheroes were allowed to be more flawed and personally conflicted, and when they deployed their powers primarily as crimefighters. Batman, though he first appeared before the Second World War, found his métier in the 1950s when he became a kind of masked special constable, constantly at the beck and call of the Gotham City Police Department.

Is that a joke? “Allowed”? Back then, while there were problems with censorship, which tragically made a comeback in the past decade, personality flaws weren’t something anybody in the business knowingly objected to. That was something that was up to the writers/artists to decide if they wanted to emphasize. During the Golden Age, most stories were at least half the length of what followed during the 50s/60s, and Action Comics, in example, was more an anthology of several entries, some lasting longer than others, like Superman’s. And in those early years, it’s not like anybody was immediately interested in emphasizing what became more common in the Silver Age. At that time, working on the kind of publication deadlines that they did, the primary objective was entertainment value, and they succeeded well with that. They make it sound, again, like comics characters are real people instead of fictional figures, and as I’ve said before, I find that galling. I think that part about Batman being an unofficial “employee” of the GCPD is also exaggerated, because there were times when he’d be seen investigating crimes without their immediate request back in the day too.

It is likely that prices for silver-age comics have been boosted in part by the popularity of the Marvel movie franchises, according to Jamie George, Stanley Gibbons Baldwin’s specialist in collectable comics, trading cards and video games. “It’s difficult to point to a causal link, but there are definitely people who buy comics speculating that when a movie hits, that comic’s going to go up in value,” he says. “The Iron Man movies were great, so were The Avengers, and prices for those books seem to have risen. When an Eternals movie was first rumoured to be coming out, I saw many collectors buying issue one of the comic book – from July 1976 – because they figured they would be able to sell it at a profit.”

Obviously, the movies had some influence on encouraging speculators. But the alleged value went down once the movies’ popularity subsided. And it wouldn’t be surprising any value the Eternals back issue were assumed to have didn’t work out well following the film’s failure. Most annoying about this otherwise fluff-coated item is what got one of the interviewees to try reading:

Many comic enthusiasts are men who bought and read the comics as teenagers. “Jonathan Ross is one of the biggest collectors in the UK,” Pace says, adding that Nicolas Cage and Eminem own collections in the US. As middle-aged men, all three are the core demographic. The urge to collect comics is at least partly a nostalgic form of escapism. But Pace also stresses the visual impact of the best comics. “The first book I ever picked up was Batman, The Killing Joke, which was published in 1988,” he says. “I never read as a kid, couldn’t stand it, but that comic had an iconic cover depicting the Joker with a camera held to his face. I just loved the artwork, so read the comic constantly.”

Once again, a very sad situation where somebody was hooked on the medium not just because it was a Batman book, but also because one of the most notorious supervillains in comicdom was on the cover. Of course, if it had been a Superman comic with Lex Luthor emphasized, that too could be dismaying. Same with supervillainesses like Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, and there are Marvel supervillains where a similar point could be made that villain worship is troubling. That the interviewee would imply a comic like the Killing Joke is literally the “best” is ludicrous at worst, ditto that the reader apparently only got into the hobby because of something like the Joker, and what the comic in question emphasized. It’s not difficult to guess he never cared for Stan Lee’s creations at Marvel, if at all, unless maybe Bullseye in Daredevil is what he considered delightful. Amazingly, the article does reference a certain issue from the 50s, though in a context that ignores the present, and says:

Still others concentrate on what are known as pre-code comic books. In 1954 a psychologist named Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent in which he argued that comic books were causing a storm of juvenile delinquency. The criticisms in the book spooked some comic publishers who, to reassure advertisers, agreed to adhere to a code of conduct. The code stated, among other things, that “good shall triumph over evil and the criminal shall be punished for his misdeeds” – hence all the depictions of rueful gangsters being bagged up by Batman and Spider-Man. It also said that “females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities” – a bid to censor what were known in the trade, somewhat lasciviously, as headlight covers. Those comics are now, of course, eminently collectable.

Interesting they bring this up, because the past decade had serious problems with mainstream publishers censoring female imagery, making it sexless. Does it concern anyone involved that such a horrid mentality made a comeback of recent, and is still affecting mainstream comicdom in some way or other? If not, there’s no point complaining about the past if they don’t have a problem with it in the present. And near the end:

But is it art? Should comic books be seen as a sophisticated design genre on a par with other mass-produced ephemera such as, say, interwar adverts for ski resorts, the futurist posters of the Russian Revolution or the postage stamps that have long been Stanley Gibbons Baldwin’s stock-in-trade?

If anybody truly recognized comics as art within the context of entertainment and education value, they wouldn’t be reducing it all to a joke of speculation market sales. Nor would they be ignoring modern issues with censorship, destruction of established characters and franchises, and above all, how writing and art in mainstream today is otherwise very bad, and held hostage to the worst editorial mandates, including company wide crossovers. There’s also no discussion of how, less than a decade after Jack Kirby’s passing, Marvel under Quesada and Bill Jemas spared no expense in humiliating one of the finest icons for patriotism and crimefighting adventures, Capt. America. No one’s held accountable for how the Marvel Knights imprint turned the Star-Spangled Avenger into an apologist for anti-American propaganda, and today, it’s become farcical how Marvel’s editors/writers repeatedly make efforts to replace Steve Rogers under the cowl with diversity tokens, including Falcon and Dani Moonstar. Nor does anybody ask how that alone even so much as amounts to a talented story. So why do these papers even waste time talking about speculator market value? The modern pamphlets definitely won’t see the big sums of their Golden Age predecessors so easily, that’s for sure.

Originally published here