The Four Color Media Monitor

The VT Digger gave a report about the comics collection of Christine Farrell, a late store manager who owned quite a collection of all sorts of comics dating back many decades. One that's now unfortunately being sold off to speculators:

What many visitors to Earth Prime Comics, one of Vermont’s first comic book stores, may not realize is that the shop’s late co-founder, Christine Farrell, wasn’t just another comic book fan. Farrell built one of the largest collections of DC Comics — the home of “the world’s greatest superheroes,” such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern — in existence, becoming a quiet legend in the world of comic art.

Farrell died in April, leaving behind a trove of treasures and memories for those in the comics industry, as reported by Seven Days.

In her Burlington home, comic books filled every corner, packed in boxes, wrapped in mylar sleeves or stacked high in piles. Farrell had tens of thousands of books, among them every DC Comics ever published, starting with 1935’s “New Fun Comics” No. 1. While some of her collection has already hit the market, the full DC Comics collection is set to be auctioned off later this month, with sales continuing in the months to come.

“It’s definitely unique. Only one other person in history had a complete collection,” said Lon Allen, vice president and comic art expert of Heritage Auctions based in Texas, the auction house handling the sale of Farrell’s comics. Another auction house has been selling the other full collection for the past few years, but those copies were of much lower quality, according to Allen.

“She went out of her way to buy higher grade copies,” Allen said, explaining that books are inspected for factors such as the condition of the cover, spine, pages and corners. The book is then given a grade, usually on a scale of 0.5 to 10, with 10 representing a perfect condition.

I certainly think it's amazing she owned only so many old back issues that're now close to a century old, but what we have here is again a situation where classic content is being commoditized on the auction circuit, instead of being donated to museums. And on that note:

“They were discussing what era some of the comics were from. ‘Is this 80s Marvel? Is this DC from the 60s?” Van Dyke said. “So it was very cool to have them be like, ‘Hey, check this out!’”

Although some Vermont comic artists are disappointed that Farrell’s collection will be dispersed instead of preserved in a museum for people to read, Van Dyke said everything is happening in accordance with her will.

“This is the course of action that she set up, that the estate was essentially gonna be liquidated,” Van Dyke said.

See, this is what's regrettable about the situation here. She may not have bought the classic issues so they could be added to museum projects, but rather, for speculators to have a field day with. How is that helping, when these back issues are bound to vanish into vaults in the basement? Why can't the issues retain visibility? Surprisingly enough, however:

Farrell did not own a single graded or certified book, Allen said, suggesting she read the comics she collected. When a book is certified or “slabbed,” it refers to the process of encasing it in a hard, tamper-proof plastic case to protect it from further wear or damage.

The formal certification and slabbing of comic books started in 2000 with the creation of the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), which is also grading Farrell’s comics collection for Heritage Auctions. It is an expensive process that comes out of the pocket of the person selling the comic.

“It makes me happy to hear that Chris’ collection is not in that state of existence,” Bissette said. “But it will also diminish the market value, in that people will bid on those comics and they will bid on them hoping on getting a copy of a given comic in good enough condition so they can slab and resell it at a higher price, so this is gonna be a highly speculative-driven auction process.”

Greg Gordiano, a Burlington comic artist and illustrator, describes the certification of comic books as a profit-driven scheme that has cast a cynical shadow over the entire collecting industry.

“Slabbing is so non-empathetic towards enjoying the books because once it’s in that plastic case, you can’t enjoy it,” said Gordiano. “You can’t even look at it. Zero pleasure.”

For Rick Veitch, a comics artist and writer mostly known for his work for DC’s “Swamp Thing,” the comics industry has become a collector’s market rather than a reader’s market.

“As an author of comics, I want readers, not hoarders,” he said.

Well I'm glad some sense is being brought in here, and pretty surprising to learn Mrs. Farrell may have actually read a lot of her collection. But that's why more needs to be done to voice objections to anybody doing business with profiteers, and encourage more business be done with museums and other archives instead.

But there’s hope. At the Center for Cartoon Studies in Hartford, an institution focusing on comics and graphic novels, young cartoonists are setting up small marketplaces where they are outside of the collectors’ market.

“They’re highly creative and following their individual visions and creating these sometimes handcrafted comics,” Veitch said. “You go to one of the marketplaces and the customers coming in aren’t comic nerds, they’re just regular civilians off the street who’re looking for something interesting and beautiful to read.”

But are the above cartoonists making use of the paperback/hardcover format? That's how you really get the message across these days convincingly, and it's regrettable there's still a considerable number of artists and writers out there who vehemently refuse to make the shift to the book market with products consisting of higher page counts than the 20-30 pages a pamphlet could contain, to say nothing of advertisements. If today's graphic novelists do make use of paperback, that's a step in the right direction. But the point must be made more widely, and there's only so many specialty news sites who won't make the case for paperbacking and hardcovering for comicdom, and seem very disinterested in actually doing so.

For now, those who care about the medium need to make it clear that auctioneering is only hurting the industry and making it a joke, and actually preventing the art form from maintaining visibility, if "collector's items" only get stored away in vaults. And future generations of specialty store owners should consider trying to make a serious shift to just selling paperback/hardcover products, if they really want to prove they're serious about promoting the art form for reading, for all ages.

Labels: dc comics, exhibitions, history, marvel comics, msm propaganda, museums, sales