We Have Been Here Before

(Warning: rude words in the footnotes. Just in case you're, like, a minor, or someone who thinks a combination of vowels and consonants can actually physically harm a body)

It says here on this website - http://www.huffingtonpost.com - that a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 – first appearance of The Amazing Spider-Man with a hyphen, fact fans! - has been sold for over a million dollars. A MILLION DOLLARS! HOO HOO HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!![1]

Which isn’t really a great deal of money these days. You can’t retire on it, not if you want to live comfortably (insert your own political opinion here).

Can’t really say I’m surprised by the sale. Other key comicbooks have been sold recently for larger sums, and while some would say that the AF1 isn’t as deserving of the million-dollar price tag as the Action Comics 1 or the Detective Comics 27 that have hit the auctioneer’s block lately (and it’s at this point that I’m just going to assume that if you’re reading this you’ll have at least a rudimentary idea of the things I’m talking about, because if you don’t you’re going to get very confused very soon), I’d say it’s still very much a key issue[2] and one of the foundation blocks of today’s monolithic[3] Marvel Comics. Horses for courses, opinions are like pieholes[4], etc.

My take on it is that we’ve hit a point in the economic cycle where there are a number of relatively wealthy people who are aware of the resentment, bordering on hatred, that those who aren’t so fortunate hold for them (and rightly so if you ask this old Young Socialist). They’re also aware, as they’re quite probably from those professions where a knowledge of How Money Works is a prerequisite, that holding on to your money – the excess money, the money that’s over once you’ve bought the houses and the cars and the trophy women – isn’t as good an idea as it used to be.

 There’s a very real danger that we – and by ‘we’ I mean the developed capitalist world – is going to tip into a global depression that will make the last five years look like the opening day of Harrods’ Sale. There’s the first few hints of stagflation here in the UK, with the economy digging its heels in and just plain refusing to grow no matter how much that nice young man Mr Osborne  asks it to[5], and prices rising faster than that Japanese bamboo they used to use for unpleasant torture-y purposes.

 So the financially astute feller, knowing full well that we may well be looking at Weimar Republic-proportioned reductions in the value of coin, will be looking around for other ways to safeguard his hard-earned[6]. It’s the Alternative Investment Market, or rather the Alternative Alternative Investment Market. I last saw it in the early 1990s, when the Conservatives were beginning to head into the latter, decadent phase of their power and the medium-term effects of Thatcherist Monetarism were becoming evident; some were doing well, others who weren’t doing so well were making their disgruntlement known by rioting in Central London and throwing petrol bombs in Brixton.

General financial advice will tell you that it’s a good idea to put your money into bricks and mortar, and for the majority of people that’s true. For the majority of people the most important thing is to have a home for your family. But for some, the important thing is to keep hold of that excess money. And if the world does go to hell and you need a lottery win-sized amount of money to buy a pint of semi-skimmed, there’s no point in having your money in a bank where it’s going to be reduced by hyper-inflation to mere pocket change, and there’s not much fun to be had having a nice big house that’s surrounded by packs of feral schoolchildren willing to kill you and eat you as a packed lunch.

Instead, you need something that will retain a long-term value. Gold usually takes that position. Ideally though, you need something that’s easily portable, so you can take it with you and sit on it until things have recovered enough to make your goodies profitable again. A million dollars-worth of gold would easily exceed your luggage allowance on the last chopper out of Alderley Edge[7]. Several million dollars-worth of gold – ‘cause that’s what you’re going to need to transport – would need its own private jet. But a dozen or so comicbooks, although they certainly won’t be as easily liquidatable as gold, will slip into a briefcase, no problem.

I’m not saying that any of this is what’s actually happening; my economics knowledge is limited to one A-Level over thirty years ago and frankly, I’m ridiculously fond of taking the slightest of events and blowing it up into the kind of Doom that will inevitably come about as a result of any period of Conservative (or Conservative-led) government.

But, that said, there’s suddenly a couple of market-leading comicbooks out there, and now that the million dollar barrier has been breached, others will follow just as surely as Trevor Francis[8] was followed by Bryan Robson[9], prices will spiral ever higher, and before long we could be looking at the comicbook equivalent of Christiano Ronaldo[10].

But your boxful of X-Men #1[11] will still be worth sod all.

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[1] My band does a cover of The BBC Song from the end of Austin Powers: IMOM. Therefore I’m comfortable doing a cover of one of the jokes from that film.

[2] If AF #1 is worth over a million, what price Fantastic Four#1, the comic that started Marvel Comics  - possibly the entire comics industry – as we know it?

[3] Strictly speaking, monoliths are, as the name implies, single stones and as such would not have foundation blocks. I can indeed be pedantic in my own disfavour.

[4] ’pieholes’ indeed. The word is ‘arseholes’. Even if you’re American.

[5] Only kidding. The man is a cunt, and incompetent with it.

[6] Which is probably nothing of the sort.

[7] A part of Cheshire much loved by overpaid professional footballers. Footballers, mind. Not ‘soccer players’.

[8] Sold by Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest for £1,080,000

[9] Sold by West Bromwich Albion to Manchester United for £1,500,000, two months after footnote 6

[10] Sold by Manchester United to Real Madrid for £80,000,000, thirty years after footnote 6. Cheating, diving scum.

[11] That’s the Jim Lee X-Men #1 from 1991. Not the original 1963 Lee/Kirby X-Men #1 (worth a shedload) and certainly not the X-Men #1 from 2010 (go and buy toilet paper, it’s actually meant for you to wipe your arse on).