From: dan@spiff.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Dan Parmenter)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc
Subject: Re: Elvis Stamp--Parallels?
Date: 3 Jan 93 20:28:53 GMT
Article-I.D.: spiff.DAN.93Jan3152853
Organization: /home/fsg/dan/.organization

Or the Adjectiveless Spider-Man #1, or any Batman book these days or
any Robin book or hell, pretty much the whole damn industry buys into
speculator frenzy.  It's been that way since the seventies at least,
when the majors got over their policy of avoiding new first issues by
introducing new characters in old books and then changing the name
(this was done for a number of reasons that are irrelevant to this
duscussion).  Once DC figured out that they could make money on first
issues they introduced quite a few more each loudly trumpeted as a
"First Issue! Collector's Item!", a crass form of marketing that is
still used to this day, ad nauseum/infinitum.  At least in those days
DC didn't give you multiple covers/formats/etc, just one damn comic
book.  

Many collector markets are like this.  There are dozens of off-brand
baseball card companies that issue cards for rookies, on the theory
that one of them is bound to become famous and the card will skyrocket
in value.  Sometimes companies seem to invent things just so they'll
be collected.  I often wonder if there was as much of a market for
novelty plates as there seems to be now.  The collector's plate
marketing approach  seems to be more or less like Image Comics':
market a bunch of crappy garbage as "collector's items" and then go
so far as to publish a magazine that confidently predicts that the
worthless garbage will be worth a mint.  A few quick-witted people
make money early on, the rest are stuck with a bunch of worthless crap
and the pyramid scheme lumbers on.

I'v heard the current boom in comics speculation compared to the
"insider trading" scene as well, that essentially it was the same
approach on a massive scale, get people to invest in things that
*might* make money.  What people fail to realize in comics and other
collectibles is that what makes a comic book (or other collectible
thing) desirable to a collector is some due to some inherent value
that the object has.  Action Comics #1 is worth a lot of money because
of its worth as a historical document of Superman's first appearance.
Everyone knows that Superman isn't actually dead and so consequently it
doesn't have the honest, visceral appeal of Action Comics #1, which is
still a great read, even today.  In 50 years, no one will remember the
"Death of Superman", but they'll remember Action Comics #1.  

I always gave WaRP graphics oodles of credit for keeping every issue
of Elfquest in print for quite a few years, even after the early color
volumes appeared, specifically to confound the collector's market and
make the comics easily available.  Of course nowadays they commit the
sin of continually fucking with the product and declaring each new
veersion of the old series as the "definitive" version, but then I
gave up on that outfit years ago.

- Dan
--
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| Dan Parmenter       |"I'm waiting for a time, when I can do without these  |
| dan@gnu.ai.mit.edu  | things that make me feel this way all of the time"   |
|                     |                            - Spiritualized           |
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Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc