Wrong choice of word. It’s the world’s most “expensive” comic, not the most “valueable”.
I wouldn’t quibble if in the recent to decades pundits hadn’t done their very best to bring everything down to monetary worth.
apparently, the one percent love that sort of garbage about thresholds and whatnot. A fool and his money are soon parted, but sometimes you have to butter up the fool
No they have a point. There have always been rich people. But unless you’re Nic Cage who is both rich and a huge Superman dork, you probably hadn’t thought to buy expensive comics books until fairly recently. Collecting for investment definitely got a boost with the advent of 3rd party grading companies. Not only are you sure to get a copy with the proper grade, but you they keep track of the grades they give out, so you can see how many other copies have the same or higher grade than your book. It quantifies rarity, to a degree. Combined with comic characters going way more main stream over the last 20-30 years, means someone who probably never reads comics might be interested in something like this Action #1 or other key issues for its historical interest and investment potential.
On a side note - I love/hate the new grading companies they have now. As someone who used to obsess over condition, I have a few books that I would like to get graded some day. But the catch 22 is that once you do - you can’t read them again. It’s like capturing the last unicorn and putting in a metal cage.
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In other words, the money going to the Reeve Foundation is purely there to get people to open up their wallets more because it is “for a good cause.”
I hate when you see “charity auctions” and it turns out the charity is getting some fractional percent of the total proceeds, especially when it is one of those charities that has high overhead.
The comics grading company, which doubles as a sort of inventory of rare issues (which appeals to a librarian such as myself) probably has had some influence on the price, but I’m not sure that it’s necessarily to increase the price, since without it you don’t really have an idea how many copies of Action #1 or whatever are extant. You might have a rough idea, based on comics collectibles industry knowledge of big sales in the past, but you don’t know whether Nicolas Cage had kept his copy in a vault or let his young son drool all over it or whatever until it goes back on the market. And that would drive up the price of any copies (like this one) that do appear on the market. For copies as good as this particular one, there’s really no competition, but if you’re willing to go down a grade or two, you’ll know how many of those are around and base your bids accordingly. And I think that the price inflation also applies (to a much greater extent) to things such as Van Gogh paintings, whose number has been known for quite some time.
And as far as never being able to be read again, correct me if I’m wrong, but these aren’t really sealed permanently, are they? If you open the seal, all you’d have to do is be willing to have it re-graded and re-sealed.
Looks that way. I can see why the Reeve Foundation wouldn’t want to turn down a donation potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars, but it still feels a little exploitative.
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