Uncover the rise and fall of the great comic book bubble of the 1990s, where demand for comics soared, only to come crashing down spectacularly, decimating the industry.
Learn about the greed, fear, and speculation that fuelled this bubble, and how the illusion of easy money transformed comic book collecting.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:07] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:16] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about comic books.
[00:00:21] And more specifically, the great comic book bubble, when demand for comic books went through the roof, only to come spectacularly crashing down a few years later, almost completely destroying the industry.
[00:00:37] It’s a fascinating story, one of greed, fear, speculation, heroes and villains, generational wealth, and about how when someone tells you that something is a surefire, certain investment, well this normally isn’t the case.
[00:00:53] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about the comic book bubble.
[00:01:00] The legendary investor Warren Buffet once famously said “What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.”
[00:01:11] We humans are not very good at learning from the past, and especially not very good when we think that there is a once in a lifetime opportunity to become fabulously wealthy while not lifting a finger, or at least, not doing very much.
[00:01:30] Whether we are talking about the tulip bubble in 17th century Holland, the South Sea bubble less than a century later, or even just a few years ago, pictures of digital rocks selling for millions of dollars, speculative bubbles seem to be a fact of life.
[00:01:50] And they all go a similar way.
[00:01:54] The price of something increases very quickly, so more people plough money into it, they buy more of it, driving the price higher and higher, encouraging more people to invest, pushing the price higher again, until finally the price stops rising, starts to fall, people get scared and start to panic sell, and the price comes crashing down, leaving a bunch of people nursing serious losses.
[00:02:24] And in the 1990s, 1993 to be precise, that “something” was comic books.
[00:02:33] Now, comic books have been around for quite some time, with the modern “comic book” format emerging in the 1930s.
[00:02:42] They were, and still are, of course, an affordable source of entertainment.
[00:02:48] The initial target audience, in the US at least, was children and young adults, particularly young boys.
[00:02:57] They were available at newsstands, at a very reasonable price, and the idea was that they would be read by the child who bought it, perhaps passed around to brothers, sisters, and friends to enjoy, and then disposed of, thrown away.
[00:03:15] I mean, if you think of the magazines that you might have bought as a child, perhaps you have kept some of them, but I imagine that many will have ended up in the bin a matter of days after reading them.
[00:03:29] They were not built to last, and in fact were printed on some of the cheapest, flimsiest paper available.
[00:03:37] They tended to be feelgood stories of superheroes, characters who were relatively one dimensional - they were good, often patriotic people, they had to fight off baddies, but they always won, it was familiar and somewhat predictable.
[00:03:56] And this was the case for several decades, that was until the 1980s, when the nature of comic books changed.
[00:04:06] Plotlines, the stories in the books, became more complicated and sophisticated.
[00:04:13] No longer were they mere children’s fare; the narrative was complex and nuanced, something that was more for adults than children, or at least something with enough layers that an adult reader could enjoy it.
[00:04:29] In terms of titles from this period, there were comics like Alan Moore's "Watchmen" and Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", which both challenged the traditional boundaries of what was expected in a comic book.
[00:04:44] As such, an older generation started to buy comic books, there was demand from a different category of buyer.
[00:04:53] And this generation and this comic book buyer was rich, or at least richer than the kids that were otherwise buying comics with their pocket money or earnings from their paper round.
[00:05:05] I mean, they were adults, so almost by default had more money than kids.
[00:05:11] What’s more, the way in which comic books were sold changed.
[00:05:17] Previously, they had almost exclusively been sold at newsstands, alongside newspapers, sports magazines, cigarettes, you name it.
[00:05:28] As demand for comic books increased, there was a growth in dedicated comic book shops, places that only sold comic books.
[00:05:39] In 1989 there were under a thousand comic book shops in the United States, but by 1993, just four years later, this number would balloon to around 10,000.
[00:05:54] There were a few reasons for this, both on the supply and the demand side.
[00:06:00] On the supply side, the comic book publishers had previously kept quite tight control on who was allowed to sell comic books: the newsstands.
[00:06:11] The publishers also had an agreement with the newsstand owners that they would take back any unsold comic books, so if a newsstand didn’t sell all of a particular edition of a comic book, it could be returned to the publisher.
[00:06:27] This was clearly a good deal for the newsstands, but it was a logistical nightmare for the comic book publishers. They had to deal with the operational side of returned comic books, plus the cost of refunding the newsstands for their unsold copies.
[00:06:45] But as the publishers saw an increasing appetite for older and rarer editions of comic books, they came up with an idea: start selling them directly to the comic book shops.
[00:07:01] However this time, there would be no guarantee that they could be returned if they weren’t sold.
[00:07:08] This was clearly a good deal for the publishers, and it turned out to be also a good deal, initially at least, for the comic book shops. The comic book shops would keep everything in stock, allowing dedicated fans to sift through back editions and find the older ones that they wanted to add to their collection.
[00:07:31] And the business of running a comic book shop seemed like it was foolproof. All you needed to do was have a small space, you could guarantee that it would attract highly dedicated customers, and unlike a fruit and vegetable shop, your product would never go off, it would never go bad.
[00:07:52] In fact, the opposite would happen. The price of your inventory could go up, and you would have fans knocking at your door trying to buy your oldest and rarest items.
[00:08:06] Editions that might have been sold for a dollar when they were first published might be sold for $10 or $20 a few months later, a 10 or 20 times increase in price in a matter of months.
[00:08:21] And from the comic book buyer side, it seemed like easy money.
[00:08:27] After all, the barrier to entry was low, just the price of a comic book, and it seemed that all you needed to do was buy and wait for a few months to increase your money by 10 times or more.
[00:08:42] As with all bubbles, it started slowly. But as people started to see that this seemed to be a surefire way of making money, more and more people piled in.
[00:08:56] First it was the comic book fans, the people who really wanted to read the comic books.
[00:09:03] But instead of buying one copy to read, they might buy one copy to read, then another 5 or 10 copies to keep in pristine condition, anticipating being able to sell them a few months down the line for a healthy profit.
[00:09:20] And then came the people who were not comic book fans, but who smelled a money-making opportunity. A new type of buyer started skulking around comic book shops, often buying up dozens of editions in the hope that one of them would turn out to be a winner.
[00:09:40] Seeing this growing trend, the publishers did all they could to fan the flames of the bubble, and sell more comic books.
[00:09:50] The problem was that they couldn’t simply print more of the same comic books, as the main driver behind the price rises was rarity and scarcity.
[00:10:02] If 100,000 other people had the same comic book as you, well it really wasn’t that rare or valuable at all.
[00:10:11] So, the comic book publishers introduced several tricks to encourage people to buy more comic books.
[00:10:20] Firstly, they introduced crossover stories, where the narrative of one story would span multiple different editions and titles. Whereas previously a kid could have bought a single comic book for less than a dollar and followed the story of a superhero from the start to a satisfying conclusion, now they had to continue buying multiple copies, often even of different comic books, over a period of several months in order to read the full story.
[00:10:55] This got more money out of the people who were interested merely in the story, and it also forced the collectors to buy a copy of each part of the story, because nobody would be interested in buying an incomplete collection.
[00:11:11] Secondly, they introduced scarcity and rarity in the same comic book by selling limited edition versions with different covers. Inside, the story would be exactly the same, but there would be a limited number of different covers: holographic covers, glow in the dark covers, foil covers, die-cut covers, and so on.
[00:11:37] So a comic book that might have been printed, let's say 500,000 times, with 500,000 identical versions, might be printed with 10 different covers, making each one rarer and therefore more valuable.
[00:11:55] There were other tricks like printing an edition that came in a sealed plastic envelope, so the publishers knew that if a fan wanted to buy it to read and as an investment, they would have to buy two copies: one to open and read, and the other to leave in its sealed envelope so that it remained in pristine condition.
[00:12:16] They also simply printed more different comic books, introducing new characters and stories. In 1985, the publisher Marvel released 40 titles a month, each costing around 60 cents a copy. But by 1993, it was releasing 140 a month, with most costing $1.25 or more, so it was releasing 3 and a half times as many titles, with each title costing double what it had been a decade before.
[00:12:50] As you might imagine, there was a resulting dip in quality, as the focus was on producing as many different comic books as possible, rather than focussing on a few core characters and storylines. But, from a collector’s perspective, in the short term, it worked.
[00:13:09] Nobody knew which comic book or character would become popular in the years to come, so speculators would buy up a bunch of different ones in the hope that there would be gold hidden somewhere in there.
[00:13:22] And there were also big, flashy events, the most famous of which came at the very height of the bubble between the end of 1992 and mid-1993.
[00:13:34] DC comics, one of the oldest and largest comic book publishers, made waves when it announced in late 1992 that it would be releasing a crossover story on The Death of Superman.
[00:13:49] What, people said? Superman can’t die, that would be like killing off, well there was no parallel. Superman was Superman, he was an American cultural icon. He couldn’t die!
[00:14:05] It was all over the news, and fans queued up to get their hands on the first copy of the story, which sold 6 million copies, and despite how many were printed, second-hand copies were changing hands for $30 just a few months later.
[00:14:23] It was long and drawn out, the entire story of the Death of Superman taking place over 15 different editions in 6 different comic books. It took almost a year to unfold, from December 1992 through to October of 1993.
[00:14:42] And in the end, Superman does die, but he comes back to life again, so it was something of an anticlimax.
[00:14:52] The entire series got mixed reviews.
[00:14:56] Some said it was a nuanced and well-developed story while others, especially the more dedicated comic book fans, saw it as a gimmick, merely a way of getting people to spend a lot more money on comic books than they would have otherwise done.
[00:15:13] It did sell a lot of comic books, but it was the beginning of the end for the comic book bubble.
[00:15:21] And as with all bubbles, as soon as there is a whiff, just the slightest sense, that the tide is turning, things move quickly.
[00:15:32] Sales started to slow, both of first editions and second-hand editions.
[00:15:40] This meant that comic book shops had more inventory, more copies to sell, meaning that the resale price went down.
[00:15:49] As the price went down, collectors started to panic sell, hoping to offload their comic books before the price dropped further.
[00:15:59] As panic spread, more comic books flooded the market, and nobody wanted to buy an “asset” that was devaluing in front of their eyes.
[00:16:10] Comic book shops were forced to close down, as they were stuck with storerooms full of books that nobody wanted to buy.
[00:16:18] Thousands of people, almost 10,000 people to be precise, had opened up comic book shops up and down the country, but now with the market dried up, and no recourse to send their unsold books back to the publishers, they were forced to go out of business.
[00:16:38] Of the 10,000 or so comic book shops that existed in the United States in 1993, around 90% were forced to close down, as sales dropped by 75%.
[00:16:51] Earlier I referred to comic books as an “asset”. If you look up the dictionary definition of “asset”, you’ll find something like “a useful or valuable thing or person.”
[00:17:05] Most people realised that comic books might be fun to read, but most of them are neither useful nor valuable.
[00:17:14] Collectors who had filled their garages with boxes of unopened comic books in the hope that this would turn into their children’s college fund found that the comic books were not made of gold; in most cases they were barely worth the paper they were printed on.
[00:17:30] Now, of course this was sad news for people who had spent a lot of money on comic books, but this was a very isolated bubble when you compare it to things like the financial crash of 2007, or even events like the more recent cryptocurrency “bubble”, where tens of millions of people put large amounts of money into obscure cryptocurrencies in the hope of striking it big, only to find them worthless several months later.
[00:17:59] So, where does this leave the comic book industry today? Well, a lot of the junk that was published during the bubble is pretty worthless, but the rarest comic books still command sizable sums.
[00:18:14] In 2022, a single copy of Superman 1 from 1939 was sold for a staggering $5.3 million.
[00:18:25] It is in mint condition, the only known copy in the world to still be in pristine condition.
[00:18:32] It is somewhat ironic, perhaps, that the tens of thousands of children who bought it back in 1939, and paid 10 cents for their copy, would have read it cover to cover, enjoying every detail of the story and the artwork.
[00:18:50] 83 years later, the person who paid $5.3 million, in all probability won’t ever even touch the pages.
[00:19:01] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Great Comic Book Bubble.
[00:19:06] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:10] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:19:13] If you are a comic book fan, past or present, what are your thoughts or memories on this period? Do you have boxes of comic books stashed away in your garage or attic, and do you still hold some hope that there is gold hidden in there somewhere?
[00:19:28] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started: you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:40] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:45] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:07] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:16] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about comic books.
[00:00:21] And more specifically, the great comic book bubble, when demand for comic books went through the roof, only to come spectacularly crashing down a few years later, almost completely destroying the industry.
[00:00:37] It’s a fascinating story, one of greed, fear, speculation, heroes and villains, generational wealth, and about how when someone tells you that something is a surefire, certain investment, well this normally isn’t the case.
[00:00:53] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about the comic book bubble.
[00:01:00] The legendary investor Warren Buffet once famously said “What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.”
[00:01:11] We humans are not very good at learning from the past, and especially not very good when we think that there is a once in a lifetime opportunity to become fabulously wealthy while not lifting a finger, or at least, not doing very much.
[00:01:30] Whether we are talking about the tulip bubble in 17th century Holland, the South Sea bubble less than a century later, or even just a few years ago, pictures of digital rocks selling for millions of dollars, speculative bubbles seem to be a fact of life.
[00:01:50] And they all go a similar way.
[00:01:54] The price of something increases very quickly, so more people plough money into it, they buy more of it, driving the price higher and higher, encouraging more people to invest, pushing the price higher again, until finally the price stops rising, starts to fall, people get scared and start to panic sell, and the price comes crashing down, leaving a bunch of people nursing serious losses.
[00:02:24] And in the 1990s, 1993 to be precise, that “something” was comic books.
[00:02:33] Now, comic books have been around for quite some time, with the modern “comic book” format emerging in the 1930s.
[00:02:42] They were, and still are, of course, an affordable source of entertainment.
[00:02:48] The initial target audience, in the US at least, was children and young adults, particularly young boys.
[00:02:57] They were available at newsstands, at a very reasonable price, and the idea was that they would be read by the child who bought it, perhaps passed around to brothers, sisters, and friends to enjoy, and then disposed of, thrown away.
[00:03:15] I mean, if you think of the magazines that you might have bought as a child, perhaps you have kept some of them, but I imagine that many will have ended up in the bin a matter of days after reading them.
[00:03:29] They were not built to last, and in fact were printed on some of the cheapest, flimsiest paper available.
[00:03:37] They tended to be feelgood stories of superheroes, characters who were relatively one dimensional - they were good, often patriotic people, they had to fight off baddies, but they always won, it was familiar and somewhat predictable.
[00:03:56] And this was the case for several decades, that was until the 1980s, when the nature of comic books changed.
[00:04:06] Plotlines, the stories in the books, became more complicated and sophisticated.
[00:04:13] No longer were they mere children’s fare; the narrative was complex and nuanced, something that was more for adults than children, or at least something with enough layers that an adult reader could enjoy it.
[00:04:29] In terms of titles from this period, there were comics like Alan Moore's "Watchmen" and Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", which both challenged the traditional boundaries of what was expected in a comic book.
[00:04:44] As such, an older generation started to buy comic books, there was demand from a different category of buyer.
[00:04:53] And this generation and this comic book buyer was rich, or at least richer than the kids that were otherwise buying comics with their pocket money or earnings from their paper round.
[00:05:05] I mean, they were adults, so almost by default had more money than kids.
[00:05:11] What’s more, the way in which comic books were sold changed.
[00:05:17] Previously, they had almost exclusively been sold at newsstands, alongside newspapers, sports magazines, cigarettes, you name it.
[00:05:28] As demand for comic books increased, there was a growth in dedicated comic book shops, places that only sold comic books.
[00:05:39] In 1989 there were under a thousand comic book shops in the United States, but by 1993, just four years later, this number would balloon to around 10,000.
[00:05:54] There were a few reasons for this, both on the supply and the demand side.
[00:06:00] On the supply side, the comic book publishers had previously kept quite tight control on who was allowed to sell comic books: the newsstands.
[00:06:11] The publishers also had an agreement with the newsstand owners that they would take back any unsold comic books, so if a newsstand didn’t sell all of a particular edition of a comic book, it could be returned to the publisher.
[00:06:27] This was clearly a good deal for the newsstands, but it was a logistical nightmare for the comic book publishers. They had to deal with the operational side of returned comic books, plus the cost of refunding the newsstands for their unsold copies.
[00:06:45] But as the publishers saw an increasing appetite for older and rarer editions of comic books, they came up with an idea: start selling them directly to the comic book shops.
[00:07:01] However this time, there would be no guarantee that they could be returned if they weren’t sold.
[00:07:08] This was clearly a good deal for the publishers, and it turned out to be also a good deal, initially at least, for the comic book shops. The comic book shops would keep everything in stock, allowing dedicated fans to sift through back editions and find the older ones that they wanted to add to their collection.
[00:07:31] And the business of running a comic book shop seemed like it was foolproof. All you needed to do was have a small space, you could guarantee that it would attract highly dedicated customers, and unlike a fruit and vegetable shop, your product would never go off, it would never go bad.
[00:07:52] In fact, the opposite would happen. The price of your inventory could go up, and you would have fans knocking at your door trying to buy your oldest and rarest items.
[00:08:06] Editions that might have been sold for a dollar when they were first published might be sold for $10 or $20 a few months later, a 10 or 20 times increase in price in a matter of months.
[00:08:21] And from the comic book buyer side, it seemed like easy money.
[00:08:27] After all, the barrier to entry was low, just the price of a comic book, and it seemed that all you needed to do was buy and wait for a few months to increase your money by 10 times or more.
[00:08:42] As with all bubbles, it started slowly. But as people started to see that this seemed to be a surefire way of making money, more and more people piled in.
[00:08:56] First it was the comic book fans, the people who really wanted to read the comic books.
[00:09:03] But instead of buying one copy to read, they might buy one copy to read, then another 5 or 10 copies to keep in pristine condition, anticipating being able to sell them a few months down the line for a healthy profit.
[00:09:20] And then came the people who were not comic book fans, but who smelled a money-making opportunity. A new type of buyer started skulking around comic book shops, often buying up dozens of editions in the hope that one of them would turn out to be a winner.
[00:09:40] Seeing this growing trend, the publishers did all they could to fan the flames of the bubble, and sell more comic books.
[00:09:50] The problem was that they couldn’t simply print more of the same comic books, as the main driver behind the price rises was rarity and scarcity.
[00:10:02] If 100,000 other people had the same comic book as you, well it really wasn’t that rare or valuable at all.
[00:10:11] So, the comic book publishers introduced several tricks to encourage people to buy more comic books.
[00:10:20] Firstly, they introduced crossover stories, where the narrative of one story would span multiple different editions and titles. Whereas previously a kid could have bought a single comic book for less than a dollar and followed the story of a superhero from the start to a satisfying conclusion, now they had to continue buying multiple copies, often even of different comic books, over a period of several months in order to read the full story.
[00:10:55] This got more money out of the people who were interested merely in the story, and it also forced the collectors to buy a copy of each part of the story, because nobody would be interested in buying an incomplete collection.
[00:11:11] Secondly, they introduced scarcity and rarity in the same comic book by selling limited edition versions with different covers. Inside, the story would be exactly the same, but there would be a limited number of different covers: holographic covers, glow in the dark covers, foil covers, die-cut covers, and so on.
[00:11:37] So a comic book that might have been printed, let's say 500,000 times, with 500,000 identical versions, might be printed with 10 different covers, making each one rarer and therefore more valuable.
[00:11:55] There were other tricks like printing an edition that came in a sealed plastic envelope, so the publishers knew that if a fan wanted to buy it to read and as an investment, they would have to buy two copies: one to open and read, and the other to leave in its sealed envelope so that it remained in pristine condition.
[00:12:16] They also simply printed more different comic books, introducing new characters and stories. In 1985, the publisher Marvel released 40 titles a month, each costing around 60 cents a copy. But by 1993, it was releasing 140 a month, with most costing $1.25 or more, so it was releasing 3 and a half times as many titles, with each title costing double what it had been a decade before.
[00:12:50] As you might imagine, there was a resulting dip in quality, as the focus was on producing as many different comic books as possible, rather than focussing on a few core characters and storylines. But, from a collector’s perspective, in the short term, it worked.
[00:13:09] Nobody knew which comic book or character would become popular in the years to come, so speculators would buy up a bunch of different ones in the hope that there would be gold hidden somewhere in there.
[00:13:22] And there were also big, flashy events, the most famous of which came at the very height of the bubble between the end of 1992 and mid-1993.
[00:13:34] DC comics, one of the oldest and largest comic book publishers, made waves when it announced in late 1992 that it would be releasing a crossover story on The Death of Superman.
[00:13:49] What, people said? Superman can’t die, that would be like killing off, well there was no parallel. Superman was Superman, he was an American cultural icon. He couldn’t die!
[00:14:05] It was all over the news, and fans queued up to get their hands on the first copy of the story, which sold 6 million copies, and despite how many were printed, second-hand copies were changing hands for $30 just a few months later.
[00:14:23] It was long and drawn out, the entire story of the Death of Superman taking place over 15 different editions in 6 different comic books. It took almost a year to unfold, from December 1992 through to October of 1993.
[00:14:42] And in the end, Superman does die, but he comes back to life again, so it was something of an anticlimax.
[00:14:52] The entire series got mixed reviews.
[00:14:56] Some said it was a nuanced and well-developed story while others, especially the more dedicated comic book fans, saw it as a gimmick, merely a way of getting people to spend a lot more money on comic books than they would have otherwise done.
[00:15:13] It did sell a lot of comic books, but it was the beginning of the end for the comic book bubble.
[00:15:21] And as with all bubbles, as soon as there is a whiff, just the slightest sense, that the tide is turning, things move quickly.
[00:15:32] Sales started to slow, both of first editions and second-hand editions.
[00:15:40] This meant that comic book shops had more inventory, more copies to sell, meaning that the resale price went down.
[00:15:49] As the price went down, collectors started to panic sell, hoping to offload their comic books before the price dropped further.
[00:15:59] As panic spread, more comic books flooded the market, and nobody wanted to buy an “asset” that was devaluing in front of their eyes.
[00:16:10] Comic book shops were forced to close down, as they were stuck with storerooms full of books that nobody wanted to buy.
[00:16:18] Thousands of people, almost 10,000 people to be precise, had opened up comic book shops up and down the country, but now with the market dried up, and no recourse to send their unsold books back to the publishers, they were forced to go out of business.
[00:16:38] Of the 10,000 or so comic book shops that existed in the United States in 1993, around 90% were forced to close down, as sales dropped by 75%.
[00:16:51] Earlier I referred to comic books as an “asset”. If you look up the dictionary definition of “asset”, you’ll find something like “a useful or valuable thing or person.”
[00:17:05] Most people realised that comic books might be fun to read, but most of them are neither useful nor valuable.
[00:17:14] Collectors who had filled their garages with boxes of unopened comic books in the hope that this would turn into their children’s college fund found that the comic books were not made of gold; in most cases they were barely worth the paper they were printed on.
[00:17:30] Now, of course this was sad news for people who had spent a lot of money on comic books, but this was a very isolated bubble when you compare it to things like the financial crash of 2007, or even events like the more recent cryptocurrency “bubble”, where tens of millions of people put large amounts of money into obscure cryptocurrencies in the hope of striking it big, only to find them worthless several months later.
[00:17:59] So, where does this leave the comic book industry today? Well, a lot of the junk that was published during the bubble is pretty worthless, but the rarest comic books still command sizable sums.
[00:18:14] In 2022, a single copy of Superman 1 from 1939 was sold for a staggering $5.3 million.
[00:18:25] It is in mint condition, the only known copy in the world to still be in pristine condition.
[00:18:32] It is somewhat ironic, perhaps, that the tens of thousands of children who bought it back in 1939, and paid 10 cents for their copy, would have read it cover to cover, enjoying every detail of the story and the artwork.
[00:18:50] 83 years later, the person who paid $5.3 million, in all probability won’t ever even touch the pages.
[00:19:01] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Great Comic Book Bubble.
[00:19:06] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:10] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:19:13] If you are a comic book fan, past or present, what are your thoughts or memories on this period? Do you have boxes of comic books stashed away in your garage or attic, and do you still hold some hope that there is gold hidden in there somewhere?
[00:19:28] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started: you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:40] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:45] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:07] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:16] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about comic books.
[00:00:21] And more specifically, the great comic book bubble, when demand for comic books went through the roof, only to come spectacularly crashing down a few years later, almost completely destroying the industry.
[00:00:37] It’s a fascinating story, one of greed, fear, speculation, heroes and villains, generational wealth, and about how when someone tells you that something is a surefire, certain investment, well this normally isn’t the case.
[00:00:53] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about the comic book bubble.
[00:01:00] The legendary investor Warren Buffet once famously said “What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.”
[00:01:11] We humans are not very good at learning from the past, and especially not very good when we think that there is a once in a lifetime opportunity to become fabulously wealthy while not lifting a finger, or at least, not doing very much.
[00:01:30] Whether we are talking about the tulip bubble in 17th century Holland, the South Sea bubble less than a century later, or even just a few years ago, pictures of digital rocks selling for millions of dollars, speculative bubbles seem to be a fact of life.
[00:01:50] And they all go a similar way.
[00:01:54] The price of something increases very quickly, so more people plough money into it, they buy more of it, driving the price higher and higher, encouraging more people to invest, pushing the price higher again, until finally the price stops rising, starts to fall, people get scared and start to panic sell, and the price comes crashing down, leaving a bunch of people nursing serious losses.
[00:02:24] And in the 1990s, 1993 to be precise, that “something” was comic books.
[00:02:33] Now, comic books have been around for quite some time, with the modern “comic book” format emerging in the 1930s.
[00:02:42] They were, and still are, of course, an affordable source of entertainment.
[00:02:48] The initial target audience, in the US at least, was children and young adults, particularly young boys.
[00:02:57] They were available at newsstands, at a very reasonable price, and the idea was that they would be read by the child who bought it, perhaps passed around to brothers, sisters, and friends to enjoy, and then disposed of, thrown away.
[00:03:15] I mean, if you think of the magazines that you might have bought as a child, perhaps you have kept some of them, but I imagine that many will have ended up in the bin a matter of days after reading them.
[00:03:29] They were not built to last, and in fact were printed on some of the cheapest, flimsiest paper available.
[00:03:37] They tended to be feelgood stories of superheroes, characters who were relatively one dimensional - they were good, often patriotic people, they had to fight off baddies, but they always won, it was familiar and somewhat predictable.
[00:03:56] And this was the case for several decades, that was until the 1980s, when the nature of comic books changed.
[00:04:06] Plotlines, the stories in the books, became more complicated and sophisticated.
[00:04:13] No longer were they mere children’s fare; the narrative was complex and nuanced, something that was more for adults than children, or at least something with enough layers that an adult reader could enjoy it.
[00:04:29] In terms of titles from this period, there were comics like Alan Moore's "Watchmen" and Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", which both challenged the traditional boundaries of what was expected in a comic book.
[00:04:44] As such, an older generation started to buy comic books, there was demand from a different category of buyer.
[00:04:53] And this generation and this comic book buyer was rich, or at least richer than the kids that were otherwise buying comics with their pocket money or earnings from their paper round.
[00:05:05] I mean, they were adults, so almost by default had more money than kids.
[00:05:11] What’s more, the way in which comic books were sold changed.
[00:05:17] Previously, they had almost exclusively been sold at newsstands, alongside newspapers, sports magazines, cigarettes, you name it.
[00:05:28] As demand for comic books increased, there was a growth in dedicated comic book shops, places that only sold comic books.
[00:05:39] In 1989 there were under a thousand comic book shops in the United States, but by 1993, just four years later, this number would balloon to around 10,000.
[00:05:54] There were a few reasons for this, both on the supply and the demand side.
[00:06:00] On the supply side, the comic book publishers had previously kept quite tight control on who was allowed to sell comic books: the newsstands.
[00:06:11] The publishers also had an agreement with the newsstand owners that they would take back any unsold comic books, so if a newsstand didn’t sell all of a particular edition of a comic book, it could be returned to the publisher.
[00:06:27] This was clearly a good deal for the newsstands, but it was a logistical nightmare for the comic book publishers. They had to deal with the operational side of returned comic books, plus the cost of refunding the newsstands for their unsold copies.
[00:06:45] But as the publishers saw an increasing appetite for older and rarer editions of comic books, they came up with an idea: start selling them directly to the comic book shops.
[00:07:01] However this time, there would be no guarantee that they could be returned if they weren’t sold.
[00:07:08] This was clearly a good deal for the publishers, and it turned out to be also a good deal, initially at least, for the comic book shops. The comic book shops would keep everything in stock, allowing dedicated fans to sift through back editions and find the older ones that they wanted to add to their collection.
[00:07:31] And the business of running a comic book shop seemed like it was foolproof. All you needed to do was have a small space, you could guarantee that it would attract highly dedicated customers, and unlike a fruit and vegetable shop, your product would never go off, it would never go bad.
[00:07:52] In fact, the opposite would happen. The price of your inventory could go up, and you would have fans knocking at your door trying to buy your oldest and rarest items.
[00:08:06] Editions that might have been sold for a dollar when they were first published might be sold for $10 or $20 a few months later, a 10 or 20 times increase in price in a matter of months.
[00:08:21] And from the comic book buyer side, it seemed like easy money.
[00:08:27] After all, the barrier to entry was low, just the price of a comic book, and it seemed that all you needed to do was buy and wait for a few months to increase your money by 10 times or more.
[00:08:42] As with all bubbles, it started slowly. But as people started to see that this seemed to be a surefire way of making money, more and more people piled in.
[00:08:56] First it was the comic book fans, the people who really wanted to read the comic books.
[00:09:03] But instead of buying one copy to read, they might buy one copy to read, then another 5 or 10 copies to keep in pristine condition, anticipating being able to sell them a few months down the line for a healthy profit.
[00:09:20] And then came the people who were not comic book fans, but who smelled a money-making opportunity. A new type of buyer started skulking around comic book shops, often buying up dozens of editions in the hope that one of them would turn out to be a winner.
[00:09:40] Seeing this growing trend, the publishers did all they could to fan the flames of the bubble, and sell more comic books.
[00:09:50] The problem was that they couldn’t simply print more of the same comic books, as the main driver behind the price rises was rarity and scarcity.
[00:10:02] If 100,000 other people had the same comic book as you, well it really wasn’t that rare or valuable at all.
[00:10:11] So, the comic book publishers introduced several tricks to encourage people to buy more comic books.
[00:10:20] Firstly, they introduced crossover stories, where the narrative of one story would span multiple different editions and titles. Whereas previously a kid could have bought a single comic book for less than a dollar and followed the story of a superhero from the start to a satisfying conclusion, now they had to continue buying multiple copies, often even of different comic books, over a period of several months in order to read the full story.
[00:10:55] This got more money out of the people who were interested merely in the story, and it also forced the collectors to buy a copy of each part of the story, because nobody would be interested in buying an incomplete collection.
[00:11:11] Secondly, they introduced scarcity and rarity in the same comic book by selling limited edition versions with different covers. Inside, the story would be exactly the same, but there would be a limited number of different covers: holographic covers, glow in the dark covers, foil covers, die-cut covers, and so on.
[00:11:37] So a comic book that might have been printed, let's say 500,000 times, with 500,000 identical versions, might be printed with 10 different covers, making each one rarer and therefore more valuable.
[00:11:55] There were other tricks like printing an edition that came in a sealed plastic envelope, so the publishers knew that if a fan wanted to buy it to read and as an investment, they would have to buy two copies: one to open and read, and the other to leave in its sealed envelope so that it remained in pristine condition.
[00:12:16] They also simply printed more different comic books, introducing new characters and stories. In 1985, the publisher Marvel released 40 titles a month, each costing around 60 cents a copy. But by 1993, it was releasing 140 a month, with most costing $1.25 or more, so it was releasing 3 and a half times as many titles, with each title costing double what it had been a decade before.
[00:12:50] As you might imagine, there was a resulting dip in quality, as the focus was on producing as many different comic books as possible, rather than focussing on a few core characters and storylines. But, from a collector’s perspective, in the short term, it worked.
[00:13:09] Nobody knew which comic book or character would become popular in the years to come, so speculators would buy up a bunch of different ones in the hope that there would be gold hidden somewhere in there.
[00:13:22] And there were also big, flashy events, the most famous of which came at the very height of the bubble between the end of 1992 and mid-1993.
[00:13:34] DC comics, one of the oldest and largest comic book publishers, made waves when it announced in late 1992 that it would be releasing a crossover story on The Death of Superman.
[00:13:49] What, people said? Superman can’t die, that would be like killing off, well there was no parallel. Superman was Superman, he was an American cultural icon. He couldn’t die!
[00:14:05] It was all over the news, and fans queued up to get their hands on the first copy of the story, which sold 6 million copies, and despite how many were printed, second-hand copies were changing hands for $30 just a few months later.
[00:14:23] It was long and drawn out, the entire story of the Death of Superman taking place over 15 different editions in 6 different comic books. It took almost a year to unfold, from December 1992 through to October of 1993.
[00:14:42] And in the end, Superman does die, but he comes back to life again, so it was something of an anticlimax.
[00:14:52] The entire series got mixed reviews.
[00:14:56] Some said it was a nuanced and well-developed story while others, especially the more dedicated comic book fans, saw it as a gimmick, merely a way of getting people to spend a lot more money on comic books than they would have otherwise done.
[00:15:13] It did sell a lot of comic books, but it was the beginning of the end for the comic book bubble.
[00:15:21] And as with all bubbles, as soon as there is a whiff, just the slightest sense, that the tide is turning, things move quickly.
[00:15:32] Sales started to slow, both of first editions and second-hand editions.
[00:15:40] This meant that comic book shops had more inventory, more copies to sell, meaning that the resale price went down.
[00:15:49] As the price went down, collectors started to panic sell, hoping to offload their comic books before the price dropped further.
[00:15:59] As panic spread, more comic books flooded the market, and nobody wanted to buy an “asset” that was devaluing in front of their eyes.
[00:16:10] Comic book shops were forced to close down, as they were stuck with storerooms full of books that nobody wanted to buy.
[00:16:18] Thousands of people, almost 10,000 people to be precise, had opened up comic book shops up and down the country, but now with the market dried up, and no recourse to send their unsold books back to the publishers, they were forced to go out of business.
[00:16:38] Of the 10,000 or so comic book shops that existed in the United States in 1993, around 90% were forced to close down, as sales dropped by 75%.
[00:16:51] Earlier I referred to comic books as an “asset”. If you look up the dictionary definition of “asset”, you’ll find something like “a useful or valuable thing or person.”
[00:17:05] Most people realised that comic books might be fun to read, but most of them are neither useful nor valuable.
[00:17:14] Collectors who had filled their garages with boxes of unopened comic books in the hope that this would turn into their children’s college fund found that the comic books were not made of gold; in most cases they were barely worth the paper they were printed on.
[00:17:30] Now, of course this was sad news for people who had spent a lot of money on comic books, but this was a very isolated bubble when you compare it to things like the financial crash of 2007, or even events like the more recent cryptocurrency “bubble”, where tens of millions of people put large amounts of money into obscure cryptocurrencies in the hope of striking it big, only to find them worthless several months later.
[00:17:59] So, where does this leave the comic book industry today? Well, a lot of the junk that was published during the bubble is pretty worthless, but the rarest comic books still command sizable sums.
[00:18:14] In 2022, a single copy of Superman 1 from 1939 was sold for a staggering $5.3 million.
[00:18:25] It is in mint condition, the only known copy in the world to still be in pristine condition.
[00:18:32] It is somewhat ironic, perhaps, that the tens of thousands of children who bought it back in 1939, and paid 10 cents for their copy, would have read it cover to cover, enjoying every detail of the story and the artwork.
[00:18:50] 83 years later, the person who paid $5.3 million, in all probability won’t ever even touch the pages.
[00:19:01] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Great Comic Book Bubble.
[00:19:06] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:10] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:19:13] If you are a comic book fan, past or present, what are your thoughts or memories on this period? Do you have boxes of comic books stashed away in your garage or attic, and do you still hold some hope that there is gold hidden in there somewhere?
[00:19:28] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started: you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:40] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:45] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
