Since quality of the comic is essential to retaining the value of the piece the idea, in theory, is to keep the comic sealed so it stays in pristine condition. Comics were sealed in colored bags to “increase their value”. The idea was to get people to essentially buy the same comic multiple times to get the full set.Ī similar tactic was employed with polybags. Sometimes the covers could be put together too create one large panoramic image. This was publishers taking the same story and then repackaging it five or six times with different covers. To get the most out of these collectors, publishers turned to a number of tactics that seem questionable at best.įirst of all, variant covers become standard for any comic event of even moderate importance. There were people who were actively seeking out comics to save for a future date, some even buying specific issues in bulk. In the 90s, publishers realized that a significant portion of their revenue came from collectors. Some of the most valuable toys and cards in the world are ones where something is misspelled or inverted or some other abnormality. Today, we see this all the time with misprints. Of course the appearance of some of comics most famous characters were important, but the fact that so few existed in the world is what lead people to pay the price of a really nice car for them. Kids had bought them, read them, then trashed them because that’s what kids do. Detective Comics #27 and Action Comics #1 were so valuable because there were so few of them left. The most important quality of any collectible item is rarity. The Issue With Collectorsīefore we get into how collectors and the publishers catering to them contributed to “The Crash,” perhaps its best to point out why and how something becomes a valuable collectors item in the first place. It even caught the attention of the New York Times, who ran an article called “Holy Record Breaker” about the sale.Īll this to say that in the late 80’s and early 90’s, publishers were feeling invincible and collectors everywhere were looking to get the next big comic book that they could stash and then re-sell in a few decades to buy that dream home. These were outrageous sums of money for the time. Since Superman was still king of the DC hill at the time, a little while later Action Comics #1 sold for $82,500. For example, Batman had become such an iconic figure by 1993 that the comic he debuted in, Detective Comics #27, sold for $55,000. By this time, comics had been around long enough to have created some genuinely important firsts and for those firsts to be sufficiently valuable. Meanwhile, comics were coming to the forefront of the collector’s market as well. This is due in part to the fact that creators were finally earning the kind of compensation they deserve, which kept good talent in the building and turning out great art and stories. Meanwhile, DC’s perennial boxing partner Marvel was creating its own lasting stories with major crossover events like Secret Wars. The quality of the stories being told was at an all-time high, with DC Comics putting out memorable stories like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight, Crisis on Infinite Earths and Watchmen. In the 1980s, comics were experiencing perhaps their most popular and profitable periods ever. To truly appreciate the scale of what happened though, we should probably start before the crash itself. Individually, each of these would have been a blow to the profitability of the industry, but taken together they were catastrophic. But what happened to create such incredible fallout? How does a multi-million dollar industry lose that much steam over such a short period of time? The answer, it turns out, lies in a number of different factors. Fortunately, the world of comics survived the 90’s and today is thriving with new characters, stories and more ways to read comics than ever before. The market imploded, sales plummeted, people lost their jobs, and the industry as a whole became a cautionary tale. In the 1990s, the comics industry experienced a crash the likes of which has rarely been seen in other industries. To understand where we’re at now let’s go back to the most recent Comic Book Crash…the 1990s…oooh
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |