I was a comic book collector. I was not only a voracious reader, but I was collecting for prestige, wealth and the fame of owning a Batman 428. I wanted to get my hands on the Dark Knight first printing series in the 80’s and eventually moved onto collecting Amazing Spiderman runs. I made those trips to my local comic book store and the other local comic book store, and finally down the highway with my parents driving me to another comic book store in order to get the rare finds I called them up to find out if they had a back issue.
But one of the move valuable comics I bought wasn’t because of age and scarcity, WHICH IS TRULY HOW YOU VALUE COMIC BOOKS, but because I was contributing to the great collapse of the comic book collecting market in the 90’s. Let’s go back to that magical dream time of the 1990’s with Ace of Base, West Coast rap, and Doc Martens.
THE BOOM OF COLLECTING COMIC BOOKS
The comic book industry experienced a boom in the 1990s, with several titles like X-Men, Spider-Man, and Batman selling millions of copies. However, the industry’s success proved to be its downfall, as publishers and collectors flooded the market with multiple copies and millions of printings, which led to a saturation of the market and a decline in the value of comic books. During the 1990s, several factors contributed to the oversupply of comic books. First, publishers saw the success of popular titles like X-Men and Spider-Man and began printing more copies to meet demand.
However, the high print runs led to a glut of comic books, with too many copies available to satisfy the market’s demand. Additionally, publishers began creating multiple covers and variants of the same comic book, often with little difference in content. This practice was intended to entice collectors to buy multiple copies of the same comic book, with the hope that the different covers would become valuable in the future.
COMIC BOOK COLLECTING GOES BOOM
This approach only further flooded the market with more copies of the same comic book, contributing to the oversupply of the market. The result was a crash in the collectors market for comic books, as the oversupply of copies and the lack of scarcity drove down the value of comic books, including X-Men. This was a painful lesson for publishers and collectors alike, who learned that oversupply and over-reliance on gimmicks could lead to the collapse of a market that had been built on scarcity and collectability. The oversupply of comic books in the 1990s, driven by high print runs and multiple covers, contributed to the crash of the collectors market and a decline in the value of comic books like X-Men.
MY COLLECTING ACCIDENTALLY WORKS
New Mutants 98 was sitting there on a random Friday in February 1991, with a cool looking cover and a new character being introduced. He was wearing red, had a lot of word dialogue bubbles, and shot guns and had a sword and took on the entire New Mutants team. He lost, and was at the time written off by me as another masked vigilante/mercenary in the Marvel Universe as assassins and cool bad guys were all the rage. He identified himself as Deadpool, and he quickly fell into a rotation against the X-Force and mutant teams as a minor villain sometimes good guy.
The rest of the Deadpool story you know…
But my story was built on the idea that these little funny books were going to be worth something, since the explosion of comics in the 80’s brought some high dollar valuations. So foolishly, I began multiple copies of most of the books I liked. I decided to plunk down the extra cash and buy 2 copies of New Mutants 98 and bag them both carefully. One day they will be worth something! Current estimates on a 9.0 Grade of NM 98 vary from $500-$1000, not a bad little investment from my $1.00 cover charge I paid.
COMIC BOOK COLLECTING RISING FROM THE ASHES
Yes, the Comic Book Collecting market died, but was reborn with the Disney and Fox movies that are proliferating and or saturating your attention span these days. But there was a time that it could have disappeared into some obscurity like Little Debbie snack cakes, Ecto Cooler, and that Dungeons and Dragons cartoon with a cliffhanger that haunted my childhood for decades.