Matt Murdoch Should Have Been A CPA

The first time I used a comic book as a coaster for a drink I felt pretty…smart. For years I’d obsessively put all my comic books into little plastic bags. But even though I could barely get past signing my name on a high school math test, the numbers I’d been reading in trade publications and newspapers made sense. If there were two or three million copies of Spiderman, X-Men, Spawn, or X-Force in circulation, but an audience of only 100,000 hardcore comic book readers, all of whom were bagging and storing everything they could get their hands on indiscriminately, than the future value of any new comic book I purchased was exactly zero.

Old habits die hard, and while I couldn’t be bothered to keep my comic books in little baggies, it took me awhile to take it to the next logical step: throwing them in the trash when I finished reading them. Heresy? Maybe. However, a comparison of the market prices (and returns) for original artwork versus the value of the actual comic books themselves is enlightening.

Recently, the cover that Frank Miller drew for Daredevil 188 was sold at an auction for $101,575. If a collector had a little bit of foresight back in 1982, he could have bought the artwork for about $1,500 and a copy of the comic book for $0.60. Our hypothetical collector would have seen a return on his "investment" of 6771.67% if he bought the original cover artwork. A quick check on eBay shows that the top price for a copy of Daredevil #188 is $50, but there are also copies of that issue being sold for as little as $2.24, for a return on investment of 8333.33% and 373.33% respectively.

That doesn’t sound bad, but at best, the actual comic book itself is worth only 0.05% of the value of the original artwork. If you were the owner of a retail establishment that specialized in selling comic books, you would have to sell 2,031.5 copies of that particular issue of Daredevil at $50 a pop before you saw the same amount of money commanded by one single page of original artwork by Frank Miller!