If you regularly hunt down high grade Golden Age comics you might have encountered the designation ‘File Copy’ on Ebay or some other internet auction sites. A “File Copy” is not an alternate cover or some rare printing of a specific comic, but instead a designation indicating that the comic you’re looking at was stored away in a filing cabinet rather than sent out to a newsstand and bought by a customer.
There were various reasons why this was done in the past. One reason was that the designated comic was an editorial copy or set of copies, often the personal copy of an editor (and of these issues, file copies from William Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman and even Stan Lee have turned up for sale). As an editorial copy, these comics might even contain editorial notes in the margins and so were not sent out for sale.
Otherwise, a comic publishing company might, for whatever reason, have been unable to sell a batch of its comics (this happened, for example, when the infamous 'Comic Book Trials' of the 1950s declared whole genres of comics as corruptive of youth). In this case, it was possible for entire print runs to be collected and filed away.
The great thing about file copies is that often they were never read or even thumbed through, but preserved fresh off the press. This means that, given their age, they are often examples of the highest grade possible for issues of the book at hand.
Some collectors, for whatever reason, think that all Golden Age comics are beyond the reach of the average buyer, that they can only be owned by very wealthy individuals. Nothing could be further from the truth. I own several Golden Age comics and have never paid over a hundred dollars for even the oldest of them (a low grade copy of Superman #79 from 1952, for which I paid a total of $72.95 including shipping). And although many file copies of key issues are very expensive to own, in general the laws of supply and demand hold sway for Golden Age comics and file copies just as they do for any regular Silver, Bronze or modern books you can think of.
What this means in practice is that if the demand is high (if there are dedicated collectors willing to pay the price) and the supply is low (as, for various reasons, it’s bound to be for almost all Golden Age comics), then you can have a very valuable comic on your hands. Since most collectors prefer high over low grade and high grade Golden Age comics are the rarest of all, the above holds especially true for file copies of Golden Age comics.
Vault of Horror #12 (April 1950) – First Stand-Alone EC Horror Comic
One of the most prestigious examples of a File Copy collection was the EC back catalogue owned by editor William Gaines. The so-called ‘Gaines pedigree’ was the result of the careful storage, in a closet, of an entire line of EC horror and crime comics by Gaines after his prosecution by the US Senate over the moral hazard of publishing these pre-code comics.
According to GoCollect.com the average 9.2 copy of Vault of Horror #12 by EC comics, with its highly collectible bondage cover, sells for an average of around $13, 000.00, with the last known sale of a 9.2 selling for $13,742.50 at Heritage auction. This gives the book a + 352% return on investment over the last sixteen years (meaning: its a good book to own). Now, compare these prices with the Gaines Pedigree edition. Gaines had only stored one copy of this classic comic in his collection, yet it sold on March 16, 2002 for $29,900.00, more than twice the going price.
Marvel Mystery Comics #5 (March 1940) – Classic Cover Art by Alex Schomburg
The ‘Chicago collection’ of George Olshevsky (or ‘Dinogeorge as he’s also known for the ‘Dinosaur Genera List’ website he maintains) is another case illustrating the value of file copies of Golden Age comics. Olshevsky, after abandoning a budding career as a computer programmer, became a historian of Timely and Marvel Comics. When an extensive set of file copies of Timely comics were sold to dealer Joe Sarno in 1974 in Chicago, Olshevsky was given the opportunity to hand pick file copies of the old Timely issues. Today these are among the best preserved Golden Age comics known to exist, but they only rarely make their way onto the market. When they do, they fetch considerable sums. An Olshevsky collection copy of Marvel Mystery Comics #5 with a grade of 7.5 (with white pages) and a classic Alex Schomburg cover featuring the original Human Torch, sold at Heritage Auction in 2003 for $9,775.00. With only 23 known copies recorded on the CGC census, the only previous 7.5 copy sold, fetched $2,629.00.
