We see meteoric rises of hitherto unknown comics every now and then, but are they the real deal? Probably not.

An Educational Story...

Let me start with a story. Years back I owned a couple of Volkswagen Buses ('68 and '70 if you're curious) and fell a bit into the VW community. The VW community is pretty small, so you meet people that have huge collections of parts and cars and all kinds of stuff. One of these guys was named Burt, (name changed for anonymity), and he told me something pretty interesting about the rare 21-Window VW Bus that was bringing in 60k+ at the time (now it's even more). He said, "You know how that whole thing happened?"

I shook my head, thinking that the 21-window options were legitimately rare.

"It was two guys. They had a field full of those 21-window buses and restored one to perfect condition. Then they had two people bid it up at auction and BAM their field of rusty buses was now worth ten times what it was."

Burt would go on to tell me more details, that they'd restore the buses slowly so the market wasn't flooded with them to keep the price up. And my first lesson in market manipulation was complete.

Market Manipulation in Comics

Comic books rest in an unregulated market, which means people can get away with murder. Speculators, such as myself, social media influencers, and big shots in the comic industry can drastically influence the next hot commodity. It doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to see how someone might buy up a ton of the same book, hype it, and then dump it at a huge profit.

Does this happen all the time? We really can't know unless we had access to a lot of data currently unavailable to any single person. We could track eBay sellers, but there could always be multiple accounts. Also, we could try and check against the names and addresses of the sellers, but we'd have to have that information for every sale. Unless you're going to be buying them all, there's just no way to find out.

So what do we do?

We remain skeptical.

Staying Levelheaded in a Hype-Filled World

As we all know, the comic community is full of hype. That's part of the fun of being in it, to see books we've had sitting around worth pennies suddenly spike to jaw-dropping numbers. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's fun to know we guessed right.

That said, we have to be leery of these kinds of meteoric rises of obscure comics. It almost always means meteoric descents. As I wrote earlier, there's simply no way for us to know if a book has been manipulated; unregulated markets are like the Wild West in their lawlessness. However, we can use our mind to outweigh our FOMO and make the right decision, which in this case, would be to simply buy something else.

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