How Much are Your Comic Books Worth

Comic books tend to be an item that many people collect. Many others tend to enjoy them for the larger than life super heroes, the modern day epics about the struggle between good and evil. Yet there are others who collect their comic books for other purposes. Never reading the comic book, thinking that if they sit on it for a few years, they are going to make a boatload of money.

While there is the fact that there are many comic books that have been published that are worth money, likely there is a chance that any comic book published in recent years will not be worth much more than the paper it is written on. At another time, comic book printings were rather rarer and thus if someone had an original printing of a comic book from perhaps the 1930s or 1940s or somewhere around there, it would be a rather big collector item.

These days, a surplus of comic books are created to make sure all of the various local comic book shops and online comic book purchasing websites have more than enough. Therefore thousands of comic books flood the market, many of them first run issues. It is likely that many of these will not be a rarity given that there are so many out there.

The Speculators Market of the Nineties

Comic book collecting for the fact that comic books are worth some money really reached its peak in the 1990s. One of the more prominent comic books out that came out during that era was the Death of Superman. I do have a copy of that comic book, in fact many people do have a copy of that comic book. Everyone had the same idea to buy a comic of the Death of Superman and keep that guy in mint condition. Unfortunately, they did wonders of driving down the value of a comic.

Another thing was releasing brand new issue #1 with a reboot of several comic books. Obviously the idea for the comic book companies was that people would more easily buy a number one issue, as opposed to issue four hundred and something of a comic book. Of course this theory was flawed in several ways but that’s beside the point. Speculators bought  the comic book #1 thinking that they were going to make money, they were wrong.

When people realized that the market was oversaturated, sales dropped badly for a while. Marvel Comics preciously close to dying but just barely managed to hang on. Just imagine this market nearly killed such iconic titles such as Spider-Man, X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Hulk, Iron Man, and more. All over a group of overzealous collectors.

So Are Your Comics Actually Worth Something

Not unless you have an original printing of something like Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man, which has been known to sell big. Obviously original issues of early appearances of Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman might go for some big bucks if you buy the right buyer. The same goes for iconic villains like the Joker, Lex Luthor, Green Goblin, Red Skull, or others around those levels. It should note that this would be an original print of the issue, in mint condition, not a reprint.

Of course finding the right buyer is always going to be a problem. And in the end, comic books from these days are not going to be worth as much of the comic books from fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty or so years ago, because the market is oversaturated with too many first run copies.