Comic Book Values

I've been collecting comic books for nearly 20 years, and while I buy them because I love the stories and the art, there's one thing that I neglect: the comic book values. I've got a huge collection, but I really have no idea what it is worth. You might wonder why I even care if I'm not planning on selling it. There's the obvious reasoning of needing to have them covered by my home owner's insurance, but there's an even better reason to know: bragging rights.

Anytime you get a group of collectors together, they'll always end up trying to one up each other. That's just human nature and when it comes to comic book collectors, comic book prices are as good a measuring stick as any. Or, maybe you're just curious to know the value of your collection. No matter what your reason, finding your comic book value is not as straightforward as you may think.

First, you need to understand the different factors that will affect comic book prices. The most important factor is going to be the condition of the comic. Obviously, if pages are worn or ripped, it won't be worth nearly as much as one in mint condition.

The next factor in comic book values is the rarity of the issue. The older comics had smaller print runs and are more scarce. Since the late 80's to early 90's, once the back issue market really took off, print runs for issues increased to the point where comics from that point forward aren't going to be rare for a long, long time, if ever.

The third important factor in comic book value would be demand. Face it, even if you have a very old, mint condition copy of a comic and it is one of only three in the whole world, it isn't worth anything if no one wants to buy it.

There are obviously more factors in determining comic book prices, like the popularity of the character, the writer and/or the artist, but they are incredibly elastic and could change from day to day.

Now that you understand these factors a little bit better, you're still no closer to determining the true value of your collection. What you need now is a good comic book pricing guide. There are several out there and you can check one comic in all of them and get different comic book prices in each. So do you just pick the price you like the best? It'd be nice if it worked like that, but that's not really practical. The other problem with some of these is that they only give you prices for the most popular titles, so they might not give you the comic book values of your entire collection. That's why I use the Overstreet Comic Book price guide. It was the first price guide for comics and it remains the best and the definitive authority on comic book values.