Mark Evanier's Blog, page 7

ASK me: Old Comic Book Pricing is

Tim B. sent me this one…

You've mentioned many times on your blog that when you started collecting comic books, you bought a lot of your collection at second-hand book stores for a nickel each or six for a quarter. So you lived through the period when the prices for old comic books began to go way up from that. What were your thoughts when that began happening?

Some disappointment. It was a great deal of fun to go to those stores…and not just for old comic books. I loved used book shops because you never knew what you might find. At that point in my life, I was not entirely certain what existed to be found. I usually browsed the book shelves along with the little display where they kept the old comics.

But the back issue comic books themselves held such joy for me that I considered them way underpriced when I was buying them for five cents each. When I could find an old issue I didn't have of Superman or The Fox and the Crow for a buck or two, I didn't hesitate to pay that. And as the prices went even higher, I was getting into the industry and it somehow seemed less important that I locate every issue of every comic book.

I'm not sure I can explain why. As I began attending comic book conventions, I didn't scour the halls looking for missing issues. Meeting the creators of the comics and listening to them became more important to me. One of the reasons I don't go to cons much these days, apart from San Diego and WonderCon, is that I'm not going to meet anyone at a con who wrote or drew a comic book I loved as a kid.

Your question brought two incidents to mind. One was that there was a used book shop downtown that I frequented in the six-for-a-quarter days and then somehow, I didn't go there for a couple of years. One day — this would have been around early 1970 just before the first issue of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide was published — I was in the area so I popped in. The same proprietor person ran the place but instead of piles of old comic books priced to move at a flat price, he now had essentially the same comics bagged and boarded and on file…and priced for ten or twenty times what I could buy them for elsewhere.

The "prize" of his offerings was what he had graded as a "mint condition" copy of Fantastic Four #13. It was nowhere near what any experienced dealer would have called "mint" but it was in better shape than my copy so I thought of buying it —

— until I saw the price he'd put on a sticker on its bag. I don't remember what it was but I remember thinking, "Wow, that's about ten times too much!" I put it back and the man, who'd seen my Sticker Shock, got really insulting about it. He said something like "Obviously, you aren't a true collector because you don't realize what old comic books are going for these days!" But that was something I did know about. I was then a frequent patron at the comic book shops up in Hollywood — Cherokee Book Shop, Collectors Book Shop, Bond Street Book Shop and until they sold out to their competitors, Argosy Book Shop.

If you had a comic book priced at three times what Cherokee sold it for, your price was four or five times above what you could pay elsewhere. We had a brief back-and-forth over his pricing and this guy just thought I was the stupidest kid to ever wander into his musty emporium.  I walked out without buying anything and the next time I drove by the place, it was — like most old book shops were before long — outta business. If he'd stuck around for ten or so more years, he might have gotten his prices…but not then.

The other story that popped into mind when I got the above question involved a comic that DC put out late in 1965 — Superman #183. Here, I'll show you the cover…

And in case you can't read it on your screen, I'll enlarge one part of that cover…

Can you make it out now? This is a 25-cent comic book that DC put out of Superman reprints at a time when the only "press" comic books were getting was about how people — some of them grown adults — were going into places like Cherokee Book Shop and paying what seemed then like astronomical prices for old comic books. I mean, you might pay a couple hundred bucks for a copy of Batman #1!!!

DC stuck some old Siegel-and-Shuster reprints into this issue — being careful to remove the then-forbidden names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster — and they had Superman on the cover talking about how collectors were paying "$30.00 and up for a perfect copy!"

A year or two after this issue came out, a grown adult — I'd guess in his late twenties — walked into a meeting of our comic book club which met every Saturday at a public park in West Los Angeles.  He announced loudly that he was willing to pay "good money" for copies of Superman #183.  He was not interested in anything else but he paid a buck or two for any copies of Superman #183 that were on the premises.  He haggled a bit, only offering the lower price for what he considered not "perfect" copies.  His odd shopping spree seemed based on two dubious premises…

Dubious Premise #1: DC had recently published a comic book that sold for 25 cents on the newsstands and collectors at the time were eager to pay $30.00 and up for copies of that 25-cent comic book.  I mean, Superman said so right on the cover and if you can't believe Superman…?

Dubious Premise #2: Everyone else was too stupid to realize what a gold mine this was.  You buy a comic book for a quarter and promptly turn around and sell it for $30+.  He was the only one smart enough to pounce on this opportunity.  Even those collectors who then would pay $30 and up for a copy of Superman #183 didn't realize stupid people were still selling them for a tiny fraction of that amount.

This was a grown man operating on those two Dubious Premises.  We had twelve-year-old members laughing at him.  And yes, a mint copy of that comic now sells for a thousand bucks and up but so do a lot of other comics he could have bought at the time.  When he paid a buck for a copy then, he thought he'd made an immediate $29 dollar profit (at least!) off someone too dense to read what the cover said.

I don't know what happened to that guy.  We never saw him again.  Part of me kinda hopes he's reading this blog post and thinking, "You idiot!  I have ninety copes of that book and some day soon, I'll sell them for a million bucks each!"  Or maybe he's sobbing that he let them go in 1978 for a measly twenty bucks.

ASK me: Old Comic Book Pricing

Tim B. sent me this one…

You've mentioned many times on your blog that when you started collecting comic books, you bought a lot of your collection at second-hand book stores for a nickel each or six for a quarter. So you lived through the period when the prices for old comic books began to go way up from that. What were your thoughts when that began happening?

Some disappointment. It was a great deal of fun to go to those stores…and not just for old comic books. I loved used book shops because you never knew what you might find. At that point in my life, I was not entirely certain what existed to be found. I usually browsed the book shelves along with the little display where they kept the old comics.

But the back issue comic books themselves held such joy for me that I considered them way underpriced when I was buying them for five cents each. When I could find an old issue I didn't have of Superman or The Fox and the Crow for a buck or two, I didn't hesitate to pay that. And as the prices went even higher, I was getting into the industry and it somehow seemed less important that I locate every issue of every comic book.

I'm not sure I can explain why. As I began attending comic book conventions, I didn't scour the halls looking for missing issues. Meeting the creators of the comics and listening to them became more important to me. One of the reasons I don't go to cons much these days, apart from San Diego and WonderCon, is that I'm not going to meet anyone at a con who wrote or drew a comic book I loved as a kid.

Your question brought two incidents to mind. One was that there was a used book shop downtown that I frequented in the six-for-a-quarter days and then somehow, I didn't go there for a couple of years. One day — this would have been around early 1970 just before the first issue of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide was published — I was in the area so I popped in. The same proprietor person ran the place but instead of piles of old comic books priced to move at a flat price, he now had essentially the same comics bagged and boarded and on file…and priced for ten or twenty times what I could buy them for elsewhere.

The "prize" of his offerings was what he had graded as a "mint condition" copy of Fantastic Four #13. It was nowhere near what any experienced dealer would have called "mint" but it was in better shape than my copy so I thought of buying it —

— until I saw the price he'd put on a sticker on its bag. I don't remember what it was but I remember thinking, "Wow, that's about ten times too much!" I put it back and the man, who'd seen my Sticker Shock, got really insulting about it. He said something like "Obviously, you aren't a true collector because you don't realize what old comic books are going for these days!" But that was something I did know about. I was then a frequent patron at the comic book shops up in Hollywood — Cherokee Book Shop, Collectors Book Shop, Bond Street Book Shop and until they sold out to their competitors, Argosy Book Shop.

If you had a comic book priced at three times what Cherokee sold it for, your price was four or five times above what you could pay elsewhere. We had a brief back-and-forth over his pricing and this guy just thought I was the stupidest kid to ever wander into his musty emporium.  I walked out without buying anything and the next time I drove by the place, it was — like most old book shops were before long — outta business. If he'd stuck around for ten or so more years, he might have gotten his prices…but not then.

The other story that popped into mind when I got the above question involved a comic that DC put out late in 1965 — Superman #183. Here, I'll show you the cover…

And in case you can't read it on your screen, I'll enlarge one part of that cover…

Can you make it out now? This is a 25-cent comic book that DC put out of Superman reprints at a time when the only "press" comic books were getting was about how people — some of them grown adults — were going into places like Cherokee Book Shop and paying what seemed then like astronomical prices for old comic books. I mean, you might pay a couple hundred bucks for a copy of Batman #1!!!

DC stuck some old Siegel-and-Shuster reprints into this issue — being careful to remove the then-forbidden names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster — and they had Superman on the cover talking about how collectors were paying "$30.00 and up for a perfect copy!"

A year or two after this issue came out, a grown adult — I'd guess in his late twenties — walked into a meeting on our comic book club which met every Saturday at a public park in West Los Angeles.  He announced loudly that he was willing to pay "good money" for copies of Superman #183.  He was not interested in anything else but he paid a buck or two for any copies of Superman #183 that were on the premises.  He haggled a bit, only offering the lower price for what he considered not "perfect" copies.  His odd shopping spree seemed based on two dubious premises…

Dubious Premise #1: DC had recently published a comic book that sold for 25 cents on the newsstands and collectors at the time were eager to pay $30.00 and up for copies of that 25-cent comic book.  I mean, Superman said so right on the cover and if you can't believe Superman…?

Dubious Premise #2: Everyone else was too stupid to realize what a gold mine this was.  You buy a comic book for a quarter and promptly turn around and sell it for $30+.  He was the only one smart enough to pounce on this opportunity.  Even those collectors who then would pay $30 and up for a copy of Superman #183 didn't realize stupid people were still selling them for a tiny fraction of that amount.

This was a grown man operating on those two Dubious Premises.  We had twelve-year-old members laughing at him.  And yes, a mint copy of that comic now sells for a thousand bucks and up but so do a lot of other comics he could have bought at the time.  When he paid a buck for a copy then, he thought he'd made an immediate $29 dollar profit (at least!) off someone too dense to read what the cover said.

I don't know what happened to that guy.  We never saw him again.  Part of me kinda hopes he's reading this blog post and thinking, "You idiot!  I have ninety copes of that book and some day soon, I'll sell them for a million bucks each!"  Or maybe he's sobbing that he let them go in 1978 for a measly twenty bucks.

Today's Bonus Video Link

This was a bit on Stephen Colbert's show about a year ago that I missed at the time. But when I recently came across it, I found it very funny…

Mushroom Soup Monday!

It's been a few months since I had a day that promised to be so busy that I posted a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup here. As you undoubtedly know, this is a time-honored Internet tradition, practiced on this site and nowhere else, that says "Don't expect a lot of posting here today, people!" I'll be back when I can get back.

If you're looking for something to occupy your time, watch John Oliver's report for this week. One of the most important ones he's ever done…

Today's Video Link

Richard Harris on Johnny Carson's show. A great anecdote…

ASK me: Ka-Zar #1

From Billy Suratt…

Ka-Zar #1 (1970) reprinted Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original story from X-Men #10, along with some other stories and a new cover by Marie Severin and either Herb Trimpe or John Verpoorten (depending on what source you believe).

Somewhere along the line, it became somewhat infamous for allegedly having profanity snuck into the background of the cover, above Zabu's posterior. Some say it was unintentional. Some say it's an urban legend. Some say it was Verpoorten trying to stick it to the Comics Code. Some say they can't even make out the alleged profanity.

Any insights, contemporaneous or otherwise? I'm curious when this alleged shenanigan first came to light and what kind of reaction (if any) it might have generated at Marvel. I'd also love to know if you have any favorite examples of artists legitimately sneaking things into backgrounds, as many have been known to do from time to time.

I happen to have an actual contemporaneous insight into this one. In the summer of 1970, my then-partner Steve Sherman and I went back to New York to visit the offices of DC Comics and Marvel Comics for the first time. (We also spent some time in the offices of MAD magazine, in the office of Steve Ditko and at that year's Comic Art Convention.  See badge below.)

The issue of Ka-Zar you ask about came out in April of that year and the alleged dirty word was spotted by many in fanzines and at our old comic book club.  Marvel got a fair amount of mail about it and when we were up at the Marvel offices not long after it came out, Steve couldn't resist asking Marie Severin about it.  Marie was a very nice and honest lady so I believed her anger was genuine when she complained about people seeing things that weren't there.  Even though she hadn't inked the cover and done those particular brush strokes, she'd drawn it in pencil and colored it and she caught some flak from "the people upstairs" at Marvel.

She was undoubtedly referring to the business-type managers who actually weren't upstairs.  The official address of Marvel then was 625 Madison Avenue and that's where the "suits" worked — but the comic book editorial offices were squirreled away in a surprisingly-tiny office in a building at 635 Madison Avenue.  And here's an interesting By-the-Way: The offices of National Lampoon, which was a pretty popular magazine at the time, were then at 635 Madison.

So I think it was just one of those things that wasn't intended.  I also think John Verpoorten, who inked it and who was then Marvel's Production Manager, had enough sense to not put something like that in intentionally.  Because of his position in the company, he would have been held somewhat responsible for anything offensive that got into a Marvel comic even if he hadn't put it there.

I don't have any "favorites" of people sneaking that kind of thing into a comic book because they're pretty sophomoric.  But there have been a lot of witty things in the margins and backgrounds of different comics, absolutely none of which come to mind at the moment.

Today's Video Link

Hey, let's watch one of my favorite musical movie moments. Here from The Harvey Girls (1946) is "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe." It's a big, overproduced ode to a railroad line performed by Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Marjorie Main, Virginia O'Brien and anyone else who set foot on the MGM lot that week, even though they didn't film most or maybe any of this on the lot. Note that from the 4:50 minutes mark in this clip through the moment when the conductor shouts "All aboard!," this is one continuous take of two minutes and twenty-five seconds during which Ms. Garland and a whole lot of people hit their marks at precisely the right moment. Pretty impressive, I think…

Today's Video Link

Three Little Beers is another of the better Three Stooges shorts…in my opinion.  And since this is my blog, I'm linking you to it here.  Enjoy the film, you knuckleheads…

Sin City Sadness

We continue to watch what's happening in Las Vegas with great interest and horrified expressions. There's also a little sense of "It was obvious this was going to happen." Grosses are down everywhere, an awful lot of hotel rooms that should be filled this time of year are not, and rumors abound of existing hotels closing or planned ones being unplanned. This will surely drive the Unemployment Numbers — already the highest in the nation — further into pain-filled levels and banking agencies have reported a record number of residents behind on their rent or mortgage payments.

Perhaps the best indicator that something is wrong is that all the airlines that fly to and from Vegas are cutting back on flights. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the rest of 2025 will see an average of 95,000 fewer seats to Vegas each day than there were at this time last year. For a town whose industry is built around The Tourist Trade, that's just devastating.

I've written here about visitors staying away due to the ghastly price-gouging…and Vegas experts have taken to referring to what's happened to prices there as "The Gouge." I should have also mentioned what The Man Called Trump is doing to tourism in this country, especially driving away tourists from Canada. That's one of the reason all the economic indicators are way, way down. Unfortunately, while prices in Vegas are dropping, they've got long way to go before they'll make things more attractive.

One other interesting trend in Vegas: A lot of casinos are cutting back on — and a few are eliminating altogether — table games. Those are the games like Blackjack, Roulette, Craps and others that depend on the presence on a casino employee who must be paid. I'm sure those games will never disappear from the city but they're disappearing from some smaller casinos and the big ones are opting for more poker and slot machines.

There was a time not so long ago when going to Dealer School and getting your diploma to preside over those games was about as close to a "guaranteed to always have a good job" job as you could have in the state of Nevada. Not so these days. Can the robot Elvis Impersonators and hookers be far behind?

Today's Video Link

A few days ago, I linked you to a TV special that one of my heroes, Stan Freberg, produced and wrote and starred in in 1962. Its goal, you may recall, was to sell canned Chinese Food. Well, here's a special he did for Public Television in 1980 with some of the same actors. The goal of this one was to sell the idea that the U.S. Government spends too much money…and Freberg, being Freberg, appropriately spent way too much money to make the special.

It's called The Federal Budget Revue and all the numbers cited in it about how much the government spends are all laughably low today — but the principle is pretty much the same. The budget for the year 1980 was, as Stan notes in the show, $600 billion dollars. The budget for 2024 was $6.75 trillion. Trump will probably spend $600 billion playing golf, building his silly ballroom and refurbishing that "free" airplane he was given…