Once I started collecting comics, I spent a lot of time in the stacks at the Monroe County Public Library. Back in the '80s the library didn't have any comics or graphic novels in its collection,1 but it had plenty of books about comics (including how-to books on collecting, encyclopedias of artists and writers, art books that contained samples of old comics, artists' biographies, reference books, etc.), and I read them all. One book that I kept returning to again and again was the 16th edition of Robert M. Overstreet's Comic Book Price Guide. It made a huge impact on me in two ways (neither of which were objectively positive, as I will explain below). For reasons that are about to become abundantly clear, I've always said I will not allow anyone to try to hypnotize me, because I am one of the most susceptible people on earth. Sure, I've become more independently minded as I've gotten older, but when I was a kid I tended to take everything at face value.
Exhibit A: Overstreet's Price Guide led me to believe that all comics are valuable. By "valuable," of course, I'm referring to a monetary value rather than a personal, emotional value. Most of the books I bought and read naturally obtained a personal value (as readily evidenced by the existence of this here blog), but now and then I did succumb to the belief that if I bought a particular book it would become worth big money later, and that belief was my only reason for buying it. By no means is Overstreet the only one to blame for (in his case, indirectly) planting this harebrained notion in hundreds of thousands of kids' (and even a few adults') heads in the last decades of the twentieth century,2 but it was the primary reason why someone like me bought not one but two copies of Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man 1. (More on that unfortunate occasion in a future posting.)
Exhibit B: The article that dominated the front of the Price Guide's 16th edition, which happened to coincide with Marvel's twenty-fifth anniversary, focused on Jim Shooter's comic book career thus far, culminating in his (then) triumphant reign as editor-in-chief at Marvel. As much rah-rah propaganda (Shooter's forte) as it was truly informational, the article went to great lengths to delineate all the ways in which Marvel's comics were infinitely superior to DC's comics--made all the more believable by the fact that Shooter began his professional career at DC. So if he says Marvel's better, they must be better, right? Yes, I was a gullible little kid, and this article single-handedly established my view of the two dominant comic book publishers in the '80s: Marvel good, DC bad.
But of course I exaggerate, for the purposes of my two points above. In fact, this book did provide me with tons of valuable information as well. Since I couldn't check it out of the library (as the latest edition of the price guide at the time, it was considered a reference book) I spent hours sitting in a wooden carrel, hand-writing list after list of comics I wanted to track down and buy someday (what I wouldn't have given for access to an affordable Xerox machine back then!). By poring through this book I also began to absorb the history of comics, albeit in an abbreviated, list-based form. Even today, if I start looking through an old copy of Overstreet's Price Guide, I'll spend a surprising amount of time browsing the black and white covers that line the top of each page. It's like spending time in the ultimate comic book shop--as long as you don't want to buy anything.
Pointless Footnotes
1 I'm happy to see, looking at the library's website now, that it not only lends comics but even promotes them on the front page.
2 Wizard deserves to shoulder most of that burden.
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