The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer for the Kansas City Star spoke about what he thinks are the most important lessons for collecting comics, but that also includes the biggest problem I see from a modern view: doing it for profit. He begins by saying:

You’d think I’d have learned by now to stop hoping.

Yet every time I hear about a rare, valuable comic book found in a barn or an attic, I still can’t help but dream about the dollar signs. If only it would happen to me.

There's a lot of older comic stories I'd like to own too, but for the escapist value, not just the monetary value.

Not only did I categorize and alphabetize my collection, I also obsessed more than a little over their future value. I figured someday when I was down to my last few dollars, I’d sell my near mint condition stack and live off the profits.

While it's good to earn a living, I still believe that the comics should be collected for their storytelling and not solely for making money off of later on. Certainly not if the comics are just going to pass on into the hands of other people who'll likewise only care about them for their financial value in turn, and probably never bother to read them, which actually puts in question whether they think they're great from a storytelling perspective.

Today, I don’t think as many kids buy comic books, let alone think they’ll someday strike it rich off their collection. That’s what the experts told me too. For one thing, new comics cost anywhere from $3 to $4, which can eat up quite a bit of allowance. For the price of a couple of those comics, a kid can go see a summer superhero movie.

But one thing hasn’t changed from when I was in grade school: Collecting offers money lessons.

Kids can learn about spending, saving, researching prices online and even bartering. Deferred gratification? Collecting teaches that lesson too.

But what about learning how to review and write up an intelligent critique of the story inside, and whether it's good or bad, how well the writers and artists did, and how much re-readability value the story has? That's something comicdom falls way behind on, even today. Comics are still regarded like something where criticism all but doesn't apply, and this hurts them.

They've got it right though, that at this point, there's little chance modern collections will ever have much value, thanks mostly to the pandering for speculators in the early 1990s that caused a market collapse. Storytelling quality was largely abandoned in favor of variant covers, crossovers, events, and this helped lead to the jump in prices along the way. And there's the case of the very bad storytelling to boot. If a comic book issue happens to feature a terrible story, that could also guarantee that the pamphlet will never gain the money value it's assumed it could have. Truly, who would want to invest in a pamphlet if they knew there could be an embarrassing story inside?

IMO, story value should come first, and monetary value second. It's a shame that the newspaper isn't trying to encourage and inspire the concept of learning how to write objective opinions and critiques about comic book storytelling for journalism. Because that could help regain what the medium's lost all these years: good writing, and artwork.

Labels: msm propaganda, sales