Classic Rant #680 (February 23, 2012): Comics Unleashed

I have documented here the fact that I was a comic book collector as a child, voraciously collecting, reading and cataloging my comic book collection as if it was gold.

I still have that collection, although I don't collect anymore, and the collection spans from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s.

But I guess you have to be lucky, which I am not. My collection probably isn't even worth $10,000, but another collector's collection was worth millions.

Michael Rorrer, who discovered his late great uncle Billy Wright's collection last year while cleaning out his great aunt's home in Martinsville, Va., hit the motherlode of comic books.

He hit what amounted to a $3.5 million lottery win.

The bulk of his great uncle's collection was filled with some of the most prized comic books on the planet, including the first appearances of Superman and Batman. In total, 44 of the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide's top 100 issues from comic book's Golden Age--the late 1930s through the war years--were in this collection, and they were sold at auction yesterday.

Among the prized comic books in this collection were Detective Comics No. 27, featuring Batman's debut, which went for $523,000; and Action Comics No. 1, featuring Superman's first appearance, which went for $299,000. And there were many others.

Heck, one comic book in this collection went for much, much more than the 2,000 comic books in my collection would probably go for collectively!

It's not fair, it's just not fair.

I collected those comic with a passion that I haven't had for too many things in my life.

I kept my comics in basically good shape, and they've been stored away in a closet in my parents' house for more than 40 years.

But they aren't worth that much, I have found out.

But if you have a spare $10,000, I can give you a great starter collection of comics from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

It will be more than worth it.

So come on, somebody must be interested.

Well, I guess not, but they are for sale, and I hope one day that something spurs someone on to buy these comic books from me.

It was my childhood, and really, you can't put a price on those years.