Found out the Avengers #1 print run was way smaller than I thought

I was reading an old Overstreet guide at a flea market and saw that the 1963 Avengers #1 had a print run of around 480,000 copies. That sounds huge, but then I looked up how many of those were actually distributed to newsstands back then and it was maybe half that, with tons getting returned and destroyed. Some sources claim only a few thousand survived in decent shape, which explains why a high grade copy sold for over $750,000 at auction last fall. That makes me wonder if modern comics with 100,000+ print runs will ever have that kind of scarcity, even if the market crashes. Do you think it's the print run or the cultural impact that drives these prices more for old books like this?

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irisg5720d ago

My uncle used to tell me about buying comics off the spinner rack at the drugstore and how half of them got wrecked just from kids flipping through them with sticky fingers. He had a copy of X-Men #1 that his mom threw out when he went to college, and it would probably be worth a fortune now. That whole thing about returns and destruction is real, my uncle said stores would literally rip the covers off unsold books and send them back for credit. So yeah when you think about how many actually made it to kids and survived, it makes sense why so few are left. We just didn't know to keep them nice back then, they were throwaway fun.

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