I'm going to date myself here: When I started collecting comic books, there was absolutely no investment potential in them. New comics sold for ten cents. Once one was no longer new, the only place it would be sold was in a second-hand book shop and there, the going price was usually a nickel and most stores would sell you six for twenty-five cents.
In the mid-sixties, a soon-to-be-thriving market for old issues began to thrive. Shops and dealers began to sell old comics for more than their face value. I remember being up at Cherokee Books up on Hollywood Boulevard where its impresario Burt Blum would fan out a "poker hand" of five mint condition copies of Superman #1 he had for sale. I think they were twenty bucks apiece and that seemed outrageous at the time.
There was vast interest in old comics and most of the collectors I knew were way more interested in the content of the books, as opposed to their investment potential. Still, it was easier to rationalize spending money on what some then called "junk" if the "junk" you were buying was going up in value. Then again, I used to get annoyed when people thought that was the sole reason I was buying 'em.
I had a truly-impressive collection in my bedroom when I was fourteen or so — one whole wall had a bookcase that was filled with old comics. When my parents had visitors over, it was somehow required that the guests go in and see what Mark had. Almost invariably, the comment I heard was, "Wow, you should open a store!" They probably thought I was nuts when I'd reply, "I don't want to sell them. I want to read them."
Sometimes, I'd say, "I will never sell my comic collection" — a vow I kept for close to half-a-century. Actually, somewhere along the way, I modified it to "I will never sell my comic collection unless I really need the money" and I never really needed the money. But eventually, I needed the space and I realized it had been, literally, more than a decade since I'd looked at any of them. When I wanted to revisit an old issue, I almost always had some recently-published reprint that was easier and safer to handle and maybe even had better reproduction. There are also scans of many of them on my computer here.
What I loved about them was the content, not so much the physical (deteriorating) paper…so I turned a lot of them over to an auction house and they are now residing in someone else's collection, in some cases probably "slabbed" for future resale.
As I'm writing this, it dawns on me that I sold off most of the comic books in these photos about the same time I sold the house in which these photos were taken. It would be ironic if I'd gotten close to the same money for the comics as I did for the house but I didn't. However, if I'd bought even one of those first issues of Superman from Burt Blum back in 1967, I would have gotten more for the comics.