Comic Book Investing - High Risks and Low Gains :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

A fewer years ago, the popular media of the United States focused on the fishy record book world for one dramatic, tragic event - the death of sexually transmitted disease. After months of hype, the long-awaited death issue, panelling 375, was released, packaged in a black bag bearing a blood-red logo, complete with a black arm band. The books price presently skyrocketed. Thousands of people who normally paid no attention to the comic world swarmed local shops, driving the books value to upwards of thirty dollars overnight. Over the next few weeks, the book could be found with a price tag of as high as $100. Today, Superman 375 is valued in Wizard The suck to Comics at a disappointing, anticlimactic ten bucks. What happened? To start, the book was printed in gigantic quantities. After the first few weeks of sales, when new shipments of the issue arrived in comic stores, the books price began to brush aside. The long-term value of the book was also adversely modify in two ways. First, Superman returned to the comic scene, alive and well, a simple four months later. This may have been a surprise (or an outrage) to many of the non-collectors who purchased the book, just now was not much of a shock to the average fifteen-year old Superman fan, well acquainted with the dead today, back tomorrow mentality of the genre. Finally, the black package or polybag, while supposedly designed to preserve the book, was actually made of a cheap, slightly-acidic plastic that would eventually turn the issues once-white pages to a plaque-like brown. Thus, collectors were forces to decide between modify their copy of Superman 375 by opening it or by charge it in its corrosive wrapping. Both paths ultimately led to a drop in the books value. Sadly enough, this sort of hype with no follow-through occurs on a near-monthly basis in the world of comics. Major publishing houses routinely emphasize the collectibility of their output, hoping to snag the attention of young co llectors eager to validate their quest by earning a bit of cash on the side. The simple righteousness is that the vast majority of the comics that are produced today are highly incredible to become valuable, mostly because of one simple, undeniable fact. Todays comics are published in enormous quantities. A typical issue of The Amazing Spider man will have a print run between 300,000 and 500,000 copies.