Late isn’t the word. The Mighty Alex Sorensen sent me the following as a Happy New Years present on the 1st of January, I loved it and told him I’d slot it into an upcoming post… I find myself in an embarrassing situation, either I say Alex just sent it to me and post it today, and have Alex all cross at me, or I can own up to my lack of diligence on the matter and have you, the reader, judge my shortcomings. Honestly is the best policy so let the chips fall where they may. The thing that upsets me the most is that this drivel I’m spewing now is keeping us away from some great analysis so lets throw things over to Alex;
For reference, here’s a link to my Year’s End post Alex is referring to
2024 In Review
I just read Walter’s year end paragraph on 2024 and I concur.
I will delve a little deeper into collecting comic books over the past year.
The end of 2023 (yes, a year ago) left an individual residual median comic book growth of 5.37%, which, if there were no sales in 2024 this percent growth would carry through the year. This is the leftover growth from previous years but mainly 2023. After updating almost 8,000 comics throughout 2024 this median went to 5.33%. Practically the same. So nothing happened? Wrong.
The total value of these 8,000 comics (1981 contiguous list) went from $91M to $100M so adding the above percent growth of 5.33% to $91M illustrates that big books, in general, did well to make up the other $4M in growth. More on this below.
Low grade comics and highest grade comics led the way with mid-grades generally going down. Bronze and Silver superhero were a whole lot of blah. Do all the leftover collectors have all their keys yet?
Below is a synopsis of the Top 100 fastest growing books of 2024 by various categories with commentary.
Cover Artist
The Unknown artist led the way. This “person” was responsible for 22 books on the Top 100 list. This says more about the state of information that we actually have on these books. Next were the usual Matt Baker and LB Cole, actually these were #1 and #2. Third was Norman Saunders for Ziff-Davis’ Crime Clinic 4, 5 and GI Joe 10, fourth was Creig Flessel for five (5) 1937-1938 DC books that came out of the Christine Farrell collection, fifth was Bernard Baily for three (3) 1954 romance comics. Vince Colletta, Kinstler, John Buscema also had two of more books and were mainly cover art for the 1950s Romance genre.
Publisher
DC led the way with sixteen (16) books on the top 100 followed just behind by Charlton (1950s Romance), third was St. John (all Matt Baker), fourth was Ziff-Davis, fifth was Marvel/Timely/Atlas, followed by Dell, Fox (all Romance) and Star (LB Cole).
Title
The Top title of the year was Charlton’s True Life Secrets (3 issues), followed by Crime Clinic (2 issues), Private Secretary (2 issues), Ideal Romance (3), Love Diary (3), Detective Comics (3, #10, #220, #318) and New Adventure Comics (3). Adventure Comics 181 was also on the list but I did not include it with New Adventure.
Year
The Atomic Age leads the way. Top years were 1952, 1954, 1955, 1953, 1950, 1949, 1963 and 1938.
Genre
By now many of you know the top genre. Romance dominates with 41 book in the Top 100. Followed by Anthropomorphic Funny Animals (8 books), Superhero (11 books), War (7 books), Humour (8 books), Crime (3 books), Detective-Mystery (4), Horror-Suspense (4).
The Funny Animal books included eight different titles between 1943 and 1951 and there were no Disney books.
The Top 5 books overall went up by more than ten times their 2023 values and consist of Crime Clinic 4, Private Secretary 2, 1, Crime Clinic 5 and Sweethearts 25 (Charlton).
The highest valued book on the list is New Comics 1, which I have valued at $50,000 in mythical 9.2 nm-.
The latest book on the list is 1964’s Marvel Tales Annual 1 (Canadian version).
The largest dollar increases of the year were Superman 1 ($1.2M), Action 1 ($725K), Detective 27 ($325K), Pep 22 ($300K), The October first print of Marvel Comics 1 ($260K), Suspense Comics 3 ($160K), Detective 33 ($130K), Fantastic Four 1 ($125K), Whiz 2 and Flash Comics 1 were each at $120K. The November issue of Marvel Comics 1 was up $80K. This where the missing $4M mentioned in the introduction went.
The biggest decrease of the year was Captain America Comics #1 (-$110K), Detective 38 (-$72K), Detective 29 (-$30K).
Comic sales of Interest (I am sure there are other stories to be added)
Star Trek 3 (Gold Key)
Perhaps no other series has had so much ado about variants that do not exist. However Star Trek 3 from December 1968 does have a photo back cover variant and instead of ads it has a photo of Leonard Nimoy. This is a rare variant. On January 23, 2024 we had a CGC 9.6 with white pages sell for $11,400 at Heritage. This eclipsed the $1,800 sale for a 7.0 back in 2021. Big numbers! Then ComicConnect puts a CGC 6.5 (0.5 grade below the 2021 sale) with off white pages for auction on May 9th. This sold for…..$60. This may be the steal of the year, or maybe the amount of Star Trek collectors is much less than we think.
Patsy Walker 25
Here is a comic that was worth about $300 in 2021. It is now on the Top 100 fastest growing comic books for both 2023 and 2024. Today, in 9.2 near mint minus it sits at a conservative $2,350. This increase happened when a very fine copy sold recently for $2,880. And to keep it real a gvg copy also sold for $57 in 2024. Why would anyone want this comic? Kurtzman art is inside, but I have seen an increase in value for early female cover artists. This time it is Louise Altson’s painted depiction of a piano playing duet. She also did the cover for the next Patsy Walker issue which is also highly collectible.
Happy collecting and we need more collectors!
Mate, we judged your shortcomings a loooong time ago. There was no doubt that the longtime readers (and your factory landlord too) were always going to take Sorensen’s punctuality as a given in this particular situation!
You don’t have to be so matter of fact about it Spider