Boom! Pop!

Let me tell you a story. And, to do so, I will use an analogy.

We'll start 5 years ago. Back then, the housing market was such that damn near everybody was buying houses, and for very little money. Then, they might fix them up, or they might do nothing at all, then turn around and sell the house for ridiculous amounts of money. This continued for a while, until suddenly, the markets shifted and all of those people who used to own houses worth enormous amounts of money were now stuck with homes worth far less. And now they had to pay for them.

Now, substitute 5 years ago for 15 years ago, replace "houses" with "comic books", throw in some adverbs, a Proper Name, and your favorite color and you have the Great Comic Book Bubble of the early 90's. It was truly an amazing time to be alive.

Suddenly, everyone was going to become fabulously wealthy from selling comics. People would flock to comic shops, some who've never read comics before in their lives, and load up on every foil stamped, holographic, gatefold, variant covered comic they could grab on to. And, God-forbid, they actually read those books! That way Madness lies! To do so would bend the spine or get grease on paper! No, better to seal the comics away in plastic and cardboard where nothing bad can ever happen to them until that great and glorious day when they went to sell their precious investment (for they were investments and NOT entertainment), and saw their $2 down-payment blossom into hundreds of dollars in profit.

Funny thing. Turns out that because the demand for comics was so high, the publishers printed more books. Basic supply/demand economics, really. So, all those people who were hoarding those books were just like EVERY OTHER PERSON hoarding their books. In the end, there were so many comics floating around that they were all barely worth the paper they were printed on (by the way, the paper DID get a lot better around this time - none of that cheap newsprint).

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I have 10 copies of X-Men #1 from 1991. 2 copies of each variant cover.

Sigh.