D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November
2008
Saving the Day
Is that my spider sense tingling or the Dow dropping?
It's a little disconcerting to realize that my smartest investment decisions were made when I was eight years old. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the stock market has been far outperformed lately by comic books.
Who knew that I was a junior Warren Buffet? All I cared about when trekking down to Lewis Drug every Tuesday to plunk down my 12 cents was whether Spider-Man would survive this month's pulse-pounding battle with the Green Goblin and live to fight another issue. I wasn't thinking about long-term capital gains.
But the Journal reports that the Silver Age Comic Book Pricing Index (SCPI) of 32 frequently traded 1960s comics was up 14.2 percent in the 18 months ending in July. By comparison, the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index was down 11 percent in the same period. And that was before this fall's dramatic Wall Street swoon. (I wonder if Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson has considered socking that $700 billion bailout fund into old issues of X-Men and Incredible Hulk instead?)
I dug a bit further at the SCPI's own Web site, www.comicpriceindex.com, which seems to be presided over by someone called "CycleGirl." (How times have changed! There were no girls collecting comic books back when I was 10. If there had been, I might have led a very different boyhood indeed. . . .) It seems that the SCPI was launched in 2002, with its starting value set at exactly 1000. So the recent index value of 1611 represents a total appreciation of 61.1 percent in six and a half years.
My own childhood collection, carefully boxed and toted around the country to the chagrin of countless movers over the years, probably isn't quite as sterling as the 32 classic comics tracked by the SCPI. When Fantastic Four #1 arrived at Lewis Drug in November 1961, I was as yet too young to properly appreciate it; my tastes in comic books, if any, still ran more to Donald Duck and adaptations of my favorite TV westerns. But I think I can count five issues on the SCPI list that I did snap up when I was a kid, plus another couple I missed by only an issue.
So I've probably done all right with this unwitting investment — certainly better than in my 401(k) rollover account. Why, I wonder, doesn't Vanguard or T. Rowe Price offer a Silver Age Comic Book Investors Shares Fund? Heck, I could be already retired and living like Bruce Wayne, instead of bothering all you nice folks with my childhood memories!
I can't really take full credit for my youthful investing sagacity, however. I'd be toting around worthless boxes of Loony Tunes and Rawhide comic books, if anything at all, if my friend Bill hadn't introduced me to superheroes way back when.
This was when we were both kids, of course, and dinosaurs ruled the earth. TV was still in black and white, at least in our house, and Warren Buffet had yet to make his first gazillion dollars.
My parents had only recently moved from the house on Jefferson Avenue in Sioux Falls, where they lived when I was born, to a new house on Lincoln Avenue, on what then was the remote outskirts of town. It was just four blocks farther west than our old house — I could still walk to school — but to me it felt like we'd moved to the edge of the world. All my friends had lived on that block of Jefferson Avenue!
The friendship possibilities on Lincoln Avenue did not seem promising. Two boys about my age, the Olson brothers, did live right next door to our new house, but we were obviously not simpatico. As best I could tell, the Olsons' idea of fun involved throwing rocks, wrestling in the dirt and bullying younger kids — presumably with the intent of throwing rocks at them and wrestling them in the dirt. Playing cowboys or building new civilizations in my basement out of Tinkertoys were evidently not in their playbook. I longed for the halcyon days of my youth back on Jefferson Avenue, where the kids knew how to play.
Happily, however, one day as I stood observing the Olson brothers as they threw rocks and wrestled, hoping they'd be adequately diverted to keep from bullying me, this new kid showed up. Bill, who turned out to be just one grade behind me and only nine months younger, had recently moved into the neighborhood — a block still farther west, where I was pretty sure the buffalo still roamed. Together, we began heckling the Olsons. After awhile, bored by their churlish imperviousness to our wit, Bill and I headed to his house over on the frontier.
(This was a time, I must explain to younger readers, when children still played outside and meandered unsupervised through neighborhoods without fear of abduction or Internet predators. My parents had only the vaguest idea of where I was on summer afternoons, until my mom called me for supper. Today, I realize, this sort of child rearing would get you reported to social services.)
At his house, which turned out to be remarkably free of buffalo, Bill had comic books. Not the lame comic books I'd hitherto perused, but "book-length super thrillers" by "mighty Marvel" featuring "Action! Action! Action!" Oh, sure, I was familiar with superheroes from TV cartoons and the old George Reeves "Superman" show. But these superheroes were different. They were, well, not entirely super.
When he wasn't busy being Spider-Man, Peter Parker was a lot like how I imagined I might be if I avoided the Olsons long enough to become a teenager — nerdy, awkward, bespectacled. (Indeed, my high-school yearbook picture could have been lifted from an old Spider-Man comic, only with a much more tragic haircut than Peter Parker ever suffered.) Daredevil was blind, for gosh sakes, but that didn't stop him from being the Man Without Fear and swinging around Manhattan in red tights eternally dappled with dramatic black shading. The Fantastic Four bickered like a dysfunctional family, and the orange-rock-bedecked Thing really wanted to go back to being just plain old Ben Grimm.
Eventually I broadened my comic-book horizons beyond the tormented Marvel Comics characters and sampled the more traditional Superman, Batman and their ilk — especially when the Batman TV show (BIFF! POW!) aired. But I was most loyal to Spider-Man and Daredevil, to the mutant outcast X-Men and other Marvel heroes who didn't quite fit in. (The Olsons, I imagine, read Superman if anything at all.)
When we leaped around my backyard, gleefully unsupervised, I'd be slinging imaginary webs or swinging from a line shot out of Daredevil's billy club. Devastating crimson beams shot from my eyes when, like Cyclops of the X-Men, I raised my protective glasses and unleashed my power. (Another eyeglasses-wearing hero! But how did Cyclops see where to aim his eye beam? Without my glasses, I couldn't blast the broad side of a barn.) Some summer afternoons, if I got really mad, I'd transform from the skinny, meek and, yes, bespectacled Bruce Banner into the rampaging Hulk. Villains simply didn't stand a chance anywhere near my block of Lincoln Avenue.
Today, I confess, I take a certain smug satisfaction in the Hollywood big-screen success of Spider-Man, the X-Men and, most recently, Iron Man. I could have told you, back when I was eight, how appealing these characters were. Movie audiences, en masse, are discovering what I've known all along.
Not surprisingly, too, most of those 32 comic books from the 1960s tracked in the Silver Age Comic Book Pricing Index were published by Marvel. Spider-Man leads the list, starring in seven of the issues indexed and showing the sharpest appreciation (12.7 percent just since the start of 2007).
None of that really does me any good, of course, since I have no intention of selling those prized comics of my boyhood. Maybe someday, when she inherits them, our daughter can sell them to finally pay off her college loans.
I'm sure that Bill — with whom I remain friends, long-distance, a gazillion years after that first superhero summer afternoon — would understand. Just as you can't put a price on friendship, the memories of when a skinny, glasses-wearing, gawky boy could swing through the backyard on a spider-web and save the day are worth more than anything in Warren Buffet's stock portfolio.
David A. Fryxell conceals his true identity by posing as the
mild-mannered editor of Desert Exposure.