Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/14/batman-no-1-sells-for-2-22-million.html
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I should not get angry about stuff that isn’t any of my business. It’s their money to spend, not mine. I just hope that if I am ever lucky enough to be that wealthy, I will see how that amount of money could change lives, save lives, and spend it toward those ends.
It’s their cash though, and me just being judgmental.
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2.22 million, huh? Is Two-Face in this issue, perchance?
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I wonder how much food and water he will be able to trade that for in the “after times.”
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Yeah, but it’s no Detective Comics № 27—that’s where the Bruce Wayne money’s at.
Amazing Fantasy #15 will always be my jaw-dropper when it was going for 3k back in the 90s.
Rich comic collectors have too much money nowadays.
(ain’t opening my bags and backs for a few years, and I sure as heck won’t sell them because they’re super fun!)
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I hear he had half a mind to buy it himself.
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At a basic level, I get the cultural significance of this comic issue, and the general appeal of comic collecting.
But man, when you’re talking about that much cash… $2 million is a staggering amount of money to pay for 30 pages of the cheapest pulp paper 1940 had to offer. What does it mean to own a two million dollar comic book? What value do you extract from owning it? Is it merely a totem to demonstrate one’s fandom? Even if you wanted to display it as a centerpiece of some sort of pop-culture museum, surely you’d be better off finding a more cost-effective copy?
Most luxury goods in that price range are hand-crafted masterpieces. $2 million for an original Picasso, a stradivarius, a home, or a lamborghini – that’s one thing. But for a ten inch, ten cent mass-produced printing, one that could be reproduced in better quality at the local Kinko’s…
You can’t help but conclude that money must be worthless to the sort of people bidding this much on this thing. Talk about “disposable income”.
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I’d post a funny pic of two-face, but that villain always creeped me out so I don’t even want to GIS it.
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Man, these slabbed and graded ones are really pushing up the premium prices. I guess in this case you can brag about having the nicest copy in existence.
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Hell yeah now I just have to wait another 40 years and I’ll be able to get a million bucks easy from my mint copy of Ambush Bug #1!
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I buy them to read, so this clearly isn’t my market. Give me a hard cover reprint for $30 of the first six issues and I’m good to go. But yeah, I hope that if I had that kind of money to blow on stuff I can’t even touch for fear of devaluing it, I’d spend it on things that are a bit more helpful to society. Who knows, I’m pretty sure I won’t ever be that rich.
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Something Two-Face adjacent perhaps?
Think of it as a way of getting some of the buyers excess capital back into circulation. Probably better for the economy to hoard comic books than to hoard money.
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Don’t forget that you can never even actually look at said printing, except for the cover
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My buffoonery has crumbled to chagrin. 
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A pristine copy of Action Comics No. 1, the first appearance of Superman in 1938, sold for a record $3,207,852 [in a 2014] auction on eBay.
So Superman > Batman has been proven!
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I figure it’s fairly likely that anyone who buys this isn’t doing it for the pleasure of owning it, but because it’s a commodity that they expect will increase in value. Not that that’s any better, really.
And with a painting (or even an etching), it has qualities that, arguably, can’t be reproduced with a print, whereas here there’s the irony that it’s a cheap print, where more recent reprints are potentially of much better quality than the original. But of course no one is buying this for the aesthetic qualities. They’re buying it because it’s a commodity, because they’ve fetishized an arbitrary bit of pop-cultural history, or just because it gives them a certain “bragging right” because of the cost (like those multi-thousand dollar burgers covered in gold leaf).
Hell, even if I were spending it on material goods just for my own pleasure, I could buy a lot of things that individually I’m sure would give me as much pleasure (if not far more) than the one comic does for that owner.
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