A Guide To Start Investing

This comic sold for $345.

Why Invest In Comic Books?

The act of buying comic books as an investment is a relatively new thing to the comic book world. At first, comics were read, used, and tossed or shared among friends. Few were stored properly and survived today.

As comic books gained in popularity and the people who owned them got older, value began to be placed on comics. With the release of comic book characters into pop culture through movies and television however, there was a marked rise in the value of those classic comic books. Over time, some of those comic books, especially origin issues, can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, such as Action Comics #1 worth about half a million dollars.

Today, with companies like the Comics Guaranty Company and Ebay. even current comics are worth a considerable amount of money. Take an ebay auction where an Ultimate Spider-Man #29 went for $600. That’s 200 times the cover price. Or an All-Star Batman #1 that went for $345 only months after the comic out.

This puts the everyday reader of comic books in an interesting situation. Comics as an investment? Comic books are rapidly beginning to look like the stock market. With websites like the Lyria Comic Exchange modeled after just such a system.

What Does Investing In Comics Mean?

The dictionary describes investing as, “To commit (money or capital) in order to gain a financial return.” In its purest form, investing in comics means to look at comic books from a monetary standpoint. As a general rule, most comic books will go up in value. How much they go up can vary greatly. That can depend on many factors such as rarity, condition, and popularity.

Using comic books as an investment will require much from the collector. The investor will need money to buy the comic books and proper protection and storage to keep them safe. There is also an investment of time. The investor will need to follow the market and track their collection and value. A true “investor” in comics will also need a bit of detachment from their collection. I have comics that are worth some money and others that are worth not much at all, but I wouldn’t trade or sell them for anything because of their emotional value to me. The dedicated investor may need to part with some of their collection if the time is right.

Typically, most collectors will be part investor, part collector, and part romantic dreamer. Most collectors have some comics that are the prized possession of their collection and that makes it difficult to sell. Most people though, still enjoy seeing their collection rise in value.

So now that you are ready to start looking into the world of investing in comics, you will first need to find out about your collecting style and if investing is for you.