It’s time to Price your comics!

I’m the features editor and one of the "unnamed" authors of Comics Values Annual, our 2009 edition just hit the stands and I received my copies the other day. I’ve been doing this for some 15 or 17 years and I (as you can imagine) enjoy it very much.

Needless to say as we were putting the issue to bed in the closing moments of 2008 and the prior to the newness of 2009 was upon us we paused to look around at the world outside the “All in color for a dime” world of superheroes, Sci-Fi adventures, ghouls, vampires, zombies and other monsters that go bump in the night, to see what was happening in the real world around us. Even as our new President–Elect was gathering together his new cabinet about him and before we knew the fullness of the betrayal of the consumer trust by the the corporate robber-barons who inhabited Wall St. and the Fortune 500 boardrooms prepared to down-size us working-class poor into a state of destitution resembling Jack “King” Kirby’s beloved Kamandi’s post-apocalyptic America we couldn’t help but to wonder aloud, what was to become of collecting.

For truly, how can one look at the headlines of the past several months of 2008 and wonder how a person can possibly spin that they are out of work, their hedge fund has collapsed, their 401K is gone, and their sub-prime mortgage is past due even consider buying old comics? Well, the truth of the matter is that often times in the past, whenever the stock market goes down significantly, much of the available investment money goes to collectibles. Still, those of us working diligently at CVA, we still saw a sharp advance in prices on the top comic collectibles. Still, the question of the day was really “Do the owners choose to sell at this time?” Personally, we do think that the new comics in the marketplace will be soft in value for the foreseeable future.

This is why we continue to produce this price guide (well, that and the money we are paid to do so...
mostly for the money
). Anyway that’s the mental state I was in at that time, and now I can see the issue in print. It contains an interview with Marvel Assistant Editor, John Barber (who works on Wolverine’s titles), and we have a beautifully-rendered cover by Mark Sparacio

You can see the cover off to the right, and attached to this post. I strongly urge you to go out and purchase one for yourself. I know I would, but I get mine for free.