With only casual buyers to support that space on the shelf, it stopped being worth it for drug, grocery and corner stores to carry comics. As the direct market expanded, it slowly ate away at newsstand and spinner rack sales. Spinner racks often leave spine marks on comics and those in magazine racks get knocked around and bent. Stores not catering to condition-conscious buyers rarely had mint condition comics. Back issue bins allowed readers to travel backward in a way they rarely could before, but those comics had to be in as close to new condition as possible. With comic shows - and later, shops - came a focus on condition. The comic store became the venue for the serious comic fan. The move away from the comics code-compliant newsstand to the gatekeeper of the comic shop gave us revolutionary titles, such as Swamp Thing, Hellblazer and Watchmen. The key part of this development was the demand for more mature or even adult content. While comic stores had existed since the 1960s, it wasn’t until the 80s that publishers found a market large enough to begin distributing books specifically to what became known as the direct market. Nothing will ever be that rare and important again. But there are under 100 Action Comics #1s (a nasty side-effect of World War II-era paper recycling), the latest one discovered literally inside the wall of a house. These dreams of the million-dollar comic led to line-ups around the block for The Death of Superman in 1992.

You can draw a direct line from the first time there was a headline about the auction of high-value comic (likely Action Comics #1 in the 1970s) and the end of comics on the newsstands.įor every important and valuable comic, there are thousands that belong in 4 for a $1 bins. And just as the first miners sold their played-out stakes to the wave of suckers, those who were there in the early days of comic speculating sold high to late-comers. Since the days of the gold rush, dreamers have run to find their fortune.

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