I'm going to tell you something you probably don't know, but you should. Those comic books you left at your parents' house when you moved out? It's highly unlikely that they're worth anything. So when you see a story on the news about how a guy sold his collection for a million bucks, please be aware that you probably won't be that lucky.
Because that guy had key issues. Do you know how hard it is to have a comic book from the last thirty years be worth something? You can get a nice payout for the first appearance of Harley Quinn, for example. Or a first edition issue one of The Walking Dead (which I do have, signed by both author and artist). That's the kind of thing worth something. Everything else? Good luck getting ten bucks for the lot, even if there are a thousand books in your collection.
So why are the Golden Age comics worth so much? They certainly sold a lot of copies, right? Well, the reason for that is because when those old people moved out of their parents' house, their parents threw away their comic books, thus limiting extant copies by a lot. Your comic books? Everyone in your age range kept their issues because they figured that someday they would be worth something. Whoops. One of the oldest rules in collecting things is that the more limited a supply of something is, the more money it's worth.
So here's where my horrible thought comes from. You actually *can* get a lot of money for your collection, but you have to do something. Let's use, say, The Boys #1 as an example. I'm not sure how much it's really worth now, but a cursory look at Google shows that it's around seventy to eighty bucks. Not bad. In fact, it's pretty good for a fairly recent comic book.
But you don't want to sell your copy for that much money. You want to sell it for six figures. You can lie your way to that cash, but the chances of succeeding are extraordinarily low.
Which is why you have to hunt down as many copies of that book as you can and destroy them. Rip 'em up, shoot 'em up, set 'em on fire, put 'em through shredders. Whatever you must do, make sure that they are utterly and irrevocably damaged. I have no idea what the original print run for this issue was, and Google is very unhelpful on this point, but you have to find as many as possible. Because if there's only, say, a hundred left, they will be very valuable. Imagine how much more valuable it would be if there's only 50. Or twenty. Or ten.
Or one. Your copy. But make sure you're very careful with it because you're not the only one who thought of this plan. And I, too, have this issue in my collection.
Watch your back.
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