Yesterday, I reported on a cornucopia of comics from a closet in Virginia dubbed the Billy Wright Collection. This fruitful find contained 345 different books, including five of the six most valuable comics, such as Detective Comics #27, Action Comics #1, Marvel Comics #1, and more.
The collection went up for auction yesterday at Heritage’s Vintage Comics and Comic Art Signature Auction in New York City. The copy of Detective Comics #27 received the highest bid, selling for a little over $522,000. As for the other big draws of the day, Action Comics #1 sold for about $299,000, Batman #1 sold for about $275,000, and Captain America #2, a 1941 issue with Adolf Hitler on the cover, sold for about $114,000.
To give you an idea of how miraculous this find was, The Huffington Post talked to J.C. Vaughn, the associate publisher of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. Vaughn said that most of the comics from the golden age, which occurred from the late 1930s into the 1950s, were donated to wartime paper drives, normal wear and tear, or victim to mothers throwing them away. “Of the 200,000 copies of Action Comics #1 produced, about 130,000 were sold and the about 70,000 that didn’t sell were pulped. Today, experts believe only about 100 copies are left in the world,” he said.
Out of the 345 books found in the collection, 222 have sold so far for the total sum of $3,466,264. A full list of what was sold and how much it was sold for can be found over at Bleeding Cool. The remaining comics will be sold in online auctions on Friday and Saturday at Heritage’s website. These lesser books are estimated to go for around $100,000.
Hopefully, books from this impending digital age that we are being shoved into are valued near these prices by the time I hit Billy Wright’s age before he passed away. Maybe that way I can finally pay off my student loans. I mean, the death of Captain America has got be worth something in the future, right?
