Wisconsin man charged with theft of classic back issues

ABC-WISN reports a man from Milwaukee was arrested for robbing a portion of old comics from a storage:

A Milwaukee man is accused of stealing a comic book collection worth more than $10,000 from a Hartland storage unit, including a rare X-Men issue valued at $9,000.

Even in the age of e-readers and digital books, paper comic books haven't lost their allure. Mitchell George at The Turning Page comic book store in Milwaukee said Monday he can only imagine the shock a Hartland man is feeling after his comic book collection was stolen from his storage unit in Hartland, including the first issue of X-Men, No. 1, from 1963, valued at $9,000.

"Yeah, that's a big one," George said, noting the special place X-Men hold in the hearts of many comic book collectors.

"The X-Men was one of the first comics to touch on, like, social issues a little bit, all the X-Men, they get their powers being born different," George said. "A lot of the older stuff like the original X-Men and stuff, that was the first appearance of those characters, people really didn't take care of them because they didn't know they were going to be valuable or anything in the '60s and '70s, so a lot of them were destroyed, lost to time, so now all those books end up being a hundred to a thousand, to many thousands of dollars."

Trouble is, by the turn of the century, such themes were no longer explored plausibly, and now Marvel's since turned to pushing woke ideologies that don't help or suit the themes X-Men and other Marvel books dealt with in the past at all.

The victim in the Hartland case called police when he realized 20 of his valuable X-Men comics and the first five issues of Firestorm were missing after he retrieved his collection from FreeUp Storage on Highway 83.

According to the criminal complaint, he was able to identify them in listings on Facebook and eBay, which led to the storage unit manager, 32-year-old Justin Hefter Wieloch. [...]

He's now facing felony burglary and theft charges.

According to the complaint, detectives found many of the missing comics at Wieloch's Milwaukee home — but not the crown jewel, X-Men No. 1, which had already been sold.

Due to the high value of the stolen comic books, he could face more than 20 years in prison if convicted.

This sounds similar to embezzlement, since as it turns out, the storage warehouse manager is the guilty party. Fox6 has more:

Police said a search of Hefter Wieloch's home turned up all but four of the missing comic books. Investigators said the defendant ultimately got a little more than $8,000 for "X-Men #1" on ebay.

On Hefter WIeloch's cellphone, police said he texted his girlfriend, "The comic is worth enough to buy a new house." Police found pictures of the comics taken at "FreeUp Storage" on Hefter Wieloch's phone.

Very sad the man turned out to be a cheap crook unsuited to managing a storage. The ownership of FreeUp Storage announced they fired him from employment after his arrest. I'm sorry the owner of the comics had to lose at least 4 of his back issues, which the defendant would do well to pay compensation for.

That said, it's still unbelievable how many people are still investing in the speculator market instead of donating the back issues to museums and other archives that can give them the spotlight and audience they need. I really wish speculators would consider.