If you want to know about the dark intersection of economics and psychology, it helps to know something about the history of comic books.
In the late 1990s, comics legend Alan Moore wrote a great little series called Top 10, which was set in a city where everyone - absolutely everyone, from the cops to the crooks to the accountants to the pest exterminators - was a superhero.
The pages were crammed with dozens of gags by artist Gene Ha. One panel featured a battered-looking pan-handler who held a cardboard sign asking for spare change, saying "Veteran of the Circulation Wars."
The circulation wars are also known as the Great Comics Crash of 1996.
The crash was an economic one which destroyed numerous small comics shops and several entire comics publishers, tarnished reputations, and left erstwhile "investors"
with box after box of foilcovered back issues worth less than the paper they were printed on. The history of the crash is almost a history of comics as a format.
In the beginning, the 1930s and '40s, comics were cheap, extremely popular, and were bought from news stands. Kids bought them for 5ยข. Superman was huge, Captain Marvel was huge, Batman was huge. There were radio and film and TV adaptations.
Superhero comics, once a portion of a market that included romances, westerns, war titles, and others, increasingly dominated the industry, largely due to self-imposed censorship.
Customers changed. Kids who grew up reading about Superman or the Fantastic Four kept reading. Writers crafted storylines more suited for teenagers, then for adults.
Creators, the writers and artists, wanted more control, and more of a share of the profits. In the early 1990s, a host of superstar artists split off from Marvel and DC, the two biggest publishers, and founded Image Comics, which immediately rivalled the big two in size and popularity.
While this was going on, old comics were becoming more valuable, and nothing was more valuable than the first appearance of an iconic character. In 1974, you could buy Action Comics #1, with Superman's first appearance, for $400. In 1984, it was $5,000. In early 1992, $82,500.
So there were a lot of adult readers, with a lot more than nickels to spend. There were a lot of new titles coming out as whole new publishers emerged - so there were new first editions, with new characters! Surely they'd be valuable some day!
This resulted in speculators, some of them not even fans, going bonkers and buying 10 or 20 copies of some issues. The publishers then fed into that mania by repeatedly rebooting titles so that it said #1 on the cover, or creating "variant covers" for the same issue - one title notoriously came out with 13 different covers - collect them all! This all ended like all economic bubbles do, with everyone realizing that 10 million copies of a cruddy comic with cruddy art weren't going to be worth beans. Stores went out of business, Marvel went through bankruptcy.
Things got better. Superhero comics still don't sell as well as they used to, but the variety is creeping back into the field - Saga, a deranged science fiction comic, is one of the best published today.
Superheroes are popular, and Marvel and DC are getting rich from making movies and TV tie-ins (not many radio plays this time).
Best of all, no one today believes they'll make their fortune buying and hoarding comics. The buyers today actually want to read the darn things.
Matthew Claxton is a reporter with the Langley Advance.
