- (gasps) The death of Superman.

I can't believe I found one.

I'm going to sell it for millions and retire

early and put my kids through college.

Yeah, okay, maybe not.

(hard rock intro music)

Welcome to comic misconceptions, the show

that takes you into details about the things

you think you know about comics, I'm your host,

Scott Niswander and we're going to be doing

another kind of different style episode again,

this week because you really seemed to like

the last one we did about secret identities

and in light of this happening, I feel like

I really want to talk about it.

So, in case you haven't heard, your mint condition

of Action Comics number one, a comic book that

many would consider to be the most important

comic book ever made, recently sold for 3.2 million

dollars.

This no doubt has sparked some interest in the market

of collecting comic books.

You know, like when Buzzfeed tells you that

your Game Boy color is worth over $1500 so you

search through all of your things to find it

and put it up online to find out that it's really

only worth $20.

A very similar thing happened to comic books

in the 90s and the industry almost died completely

because of it.

So first off, full disclosure, if any bias is shown

during this video because I never really got into

the whole collecting comic books thing, I'm almost

all digital for a long list of reasons that I'll

probably make a video about sometime in the future,

but the main one being that I find having a lot

of physical copies of comic books lying around

to be pretty cumbersome.

My dad gave me a chunk of his collection when

I graduated college and I really do want to read

them all and I'm going to, but for right now,

they're just kind of sitting in my closet in a couple

of long boxes taking up valuable space.

Not that I don't appreciate it, Dad, if you're watching,

I do, thank you.

But, what I hear a lot from my friends who do

collect comics, is that digital comics, unlike

their physical copies, don't have any resale value,

and yeah, that's true, most if not all digital

comic book retailer use agreements, like Marvel

for instance, clearly state that you do not own

the digital comic book you buy, but rather have

unlocked a private viewing session to it.

But that doesn't inherently mean that your

physical comic book collection will be worth

thousands or millions of dollars, in fact, there's

a great article in Business Week that says that

comic books that you have just sitting in your

basement are, to be blunt, probably worthless.

Even if they tell stories of a few people who have

collected thousands and thousands of comic books

only to turn around and sell them for just a couple

hundred dollars.

The problem is that the media doesn't really

report these things because, well, they're not

that interesting.

Instead, the media promotes these rags to riches

stories of ordinary people finding rare and valuable

comic books and selling them for millions of dollars.

And this could unintentionally warp someone's

perception and make them believe that all comic

books have a high value.

This is exactly what happened in the comic collector

bubble of the 90s, but before we get into it,

I'm going to put on my imaginary generalization

cap that will let you guys know that I might

skip over some details that you think are important,

so if I do, please let me know in the comments and then

we can all kind of learn a lot more things that I

didn't have time for in this video community.

It all starts with the creation of the first

comic book shops.

You see, comic books were originally sold

on newsstands, but in the 70s, several stores

opened up that would sell back issues of comic books

as collectibles.

It wasn't long before publishers took their new

comic books off the streets and into these

specialty comic book shops, but more on this later.

Jump to the 90s where speculators were coming in

and seeing how people were buying and selling old

issues of comic books for many times their cover price,

especially hearing stories of golden and silver age

comic books originally a few cents at the time,

now going for six figures.

To them, that sounded like an amazing investment

opportunity, so they went out and bought multiple

copies of individual comic books in the hopes to sell

them one day and become rich.

That on its own might not be that bad, but here's

where the problem sets in.

People were buying more and more of these books

because they saw value in them and because

they were buying more and more, publishers were

printing more and more, and then you're selling

millions of books to half a million readers and you're

over-saturating the market, and that doesn't

really work out so well for investments.

Strongly generalizing once more here, the value

of something is determined by its supply relative

to its demand.

So, let's take a look at these two factors of the comic

book world of the 90s.

So first off, let's look at demand.

Now there are a lot of ways to create demand, but

I want to look at another failed collector industry

of the 90s, beanie babies.

One of the key factors in creating demand for beanie

babies was that they avoided being distributed

in main stream chain retailers in favor of small

gift shops.

This helped the product seem rare and prompted

people to buy soon as they could, thus creating

a high demand.

You can't just buy Quackers the duck anywhere,

so if you find one, you better buy that thing quick.

Sound familiar?

This is exactly like those comic book shops

we were talking about earlier.

Publishers were selling their comic books through

these small specialty shops because there wasn't

really anywhere else to sell them and this might

have made them seem rare to speculators which only

drove up the perceived worth of the comics,

but the reality was that they weren't rare at all,

this is where supply comes in.

There were millions of copies of these comic books

laying around and speculators hadn't caught on yet.

Publishers started putting out these variant covers

and shiny foil editions and all sorts of nonsense

that would make you believe that your comic book

was valuable and it was going to put your kids

through college some day.

So, here's an example from the collection that my dad

gave me, this is, Venom, Lethal Protector number one

from 1993.

It's got that nice shiny cover, just the way God intended.

The cover price for this comic was $2.95, but today

you can buy it on eBay for six cents or you can splurge

and get the whole series for just two dollars, which

is still cheaper than this one comic was back

when it first came out.

The Death of Superman in 1992 was a huge contributor

to the crash of the comic book industry.

People were buying this thing, three, four, five

issues, all for themselves thinking that they're

going to hold onto it, sell it for millions

because they have the last Superman comic ever made,

but it didn't really turn out that way, in fact,

today you can get four copies of that comic book

for around 20 dollars on eBay.

Some consider this to be the big tipping point

of the comic book crash.

Speculators had all these comic books that they

thought were valuable but they couldn't sell them.

If everybody already has three copies of The Death

of Superman, who's going to buy your copies?

These comic books were everywhere and because

of that, they weren't worth anything.

Suddenly comic book were in high supply but low in demand,

these speculators who were buying four, five, six

copies of comic books suddenly stopped buying them

altogether, but the publishers were used to printing

millions of comic books, so they still printed a lot

but now nobody was buying them and they're not making

enough return on their investment and the industry

was hit very, very hard.

So, why did the birth of Superman go for 3.2 million

but the death of Superman only goes for a few bucks?

Well, it's because Action Comics number one

is genuinely rare, as are all golden age comic books.

In the 40s, during World War II, people back home

really wanted to help with war efforts in any way

they could, and one of the best ways was by donating

all of their scraps, including paper to the war efforts.

Paper drives were held and anything deemed useless

scrap paper was sent to help the efforts, including

comic books, that's why the original 200,000 copies

of Action Comics number one, less than 50 exist

to our knowledge today.

Pair that with the fact that it was no only

the birth of Superman but the birth of the super hero

genre and you get a comic book that's worth a lot of money.

So, the idea of collecting comic books nearly

killed the medium itself.

But why am I even talking about this?

Am I trying to tell you to stop collecting comic books?

Absolutely not, chances are, if you are watching

this video, you have a genuine interest in comics.

The reason the market crashed was because of these

speculators who weren't buying them because they liked

comic books, but they were only buying them

as investments, and I think that's important.

Collecting something not because you want

to make money off it someday or prove that you

were a fan to your friends because you have a certain

issue or a toy or a holographic whatever, but just

because you have a real sincere love for it.

So, I don't really have a question that I want

to ask you this week.

Instead, I just want to know your thoughts

on collecting comic books and the industry crash

as a whole.

There was so much that I had to skip over for this

video, but I want to know what your opinions are

on it and I'll be right down there in the comments

all day today just talking with you guys, so

look forward to seeing you down there.

And if this is your first time hanging out with ys

here at Nerddync, we do weekly comic book videos

every Wednesday and I don't want you to miss

out on any of it, so please subscribe.

Once again, I'm Scott and I'll see you next week

for more things you thought you knew about coms.

See ya.

Doctor Doom was created in 1962 by Stan Lee

and Jack Kirby as were probably all of your favorite

classic Marvel characters, but it seems like these

two had different opinions about what Dooms face

looks like under the mask.

I want to believe that they both started out thinking

that Doom's face is hopelessly disfigured as we

can see in Fantastic Four number 10 when we

get this reaction of Doom removing his mask.