If you weren’t already anxious about the state of the U.S. economy, this news should do wonders for you: Some troubled stock-market investors reportedly are sinking their money into vintage comic books.
No, I’m serious.
If the early ’90s taught us anything, it’s that they’d probably be better off stuffing their cash in a mattress. However, The Wall Street Journal quotes a Kentucky retailer as saying “There’s kind of a buying frenzy” in Silver Age comics.
As evidence, The Journal points to the “Silver Age Comic Book Pricing Index” — I’m a reader, not a collector, but I didn’t realize there was such a thing — which seems to indicate that while Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is down, the buying and selling of ’60s comics is up.
Likewise, according to Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com, the market for original comic-book art is booming — in Europe, at any rate. That’s thanks, in large part, to the weak American dollar.
Writer Joseph V. Tirella points out that a European collector can snag Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott’s cover art for Fantastic Four #171 from the website of New York dealer Albert Moy for €23,809 ($32,095). An American buyer would have to pay $35,000.
Related: Portfolio.com’s slideshow of original comic art
October 6th, 2008 at 11:35 am
There’s a sucker born every decade.
October 6th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Actually, the early ’90s merely showed us that throwing money into unrare current comics that will never be in more demand than they are now is not a sound basis for longterm investing.
Investing in Silver Age books is, however, another matter. That’s not to say that they’re a sure thing or anything — the people who have nostalgia for that material aren’t always going to be, well, alive, much less buying. But they don’t exist in the numbers that later books do, and by now we have at least a sense of which books have some long-term interest.
Of course, what these people will end up learning is that buying retail, selling wholesale is not the most efficient way to make a living on anything…