Got Comics?
Cool story about a very early comic book collector and an unexpected windfall to his heirs.
From the
UK Globe and Mail
Holy windfall, Batman!
Tom Crippen knew he faced a daunting task after the death of his father, an inveterate pack rat who never threw anything out. It wasn't just the stockpiles of old opera programs, paper clips, Christmas cards, baseball caps, paperbacks or souvenir coffee mugs.
Mainly, it was the awesome collection of 11,000 comics that had colonized the family garage and basement.
The shelves were just piled high with comics, said Mr. Crippen, a freelance editor living in Montreal. I knew they were worth money, but I thought, $50,000, maybe $100,000.
Mr. Crippen was wrong. After painstakingly dusting off and cataloguing the comics a process that took four months he called in the experts to the family home outside New York.
And Holy windfall, Batman! the superheroes delivered.
The cache of vintage comics, many of them rare and in immaculate condition, were evaluated at $2.5-million (U.S.).
When they told me, it just made my jaw drop, Mr. Crippen said. The comic books were literally worth more than the house itself.
The Dad started buying comics at age eight and kept them all in good condition. He kept collecting and had his mother continue buying them when he went away to Grad School. The collection spans fifteen years.
Unfortunately, not all is right in Gotham:
Unfortunately, this comic-book story does have a dark subplot. While he was poring over his father's comics, Tom Crippen noticed that, in such a methodical collection, vast numbers of copies were missing. The mystery began to unfold when the experts were called in. They told Mr. Crippen that, unbeknownst to the family, large numbers of his father's comics had been in circulation since the early nineties. Many bore distinctive marks, including a D on the front cover that earned them the name D collection.
No one is sure how the comics went missing. However, some of the comics were traced to a New York dealer who said he'd bought them in the early nineties from a man who'd entered his store. The Crippen family discovered that the seller's name was that of a contractor who'd been doing extensive renovations at the Crippen home at that time.
The Crippens are not pressing charges -- why spend this windfall on what would probably be a dry well. Still sorry to hear that scum like that walk the earth...
Probably a Democrat. (grin)
Posted by DaveH at August 20, 2006 7:49 PM