Transcript
Intro
Stephan Shipe: Welcome back to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. Today we’re answering two very different listener questions that both come down to how we define value.
Joining me for today’s discussion is Dr. Deon Strickland, financial advisor and our in-house economist. Thanks for being here, Deon.
First, how to approach setting a wedding budget when money isn’t the constraint — and why the real challenge is less about numbers and more about meaning. Then a look at the trending documentary Tune Out the Noise, and whether the Efficient Markets Hypothesis still holds up in today’s environment of higher inflation and interest rates — and what it means for long-term investors.
And finally, a conversation with Vincent Zurzolo, CEO of Metropolis Collectibles and ComicConnect, an auction house specializing in high-end vintage comic books and original art. His company holds multiple Guinness World Records for comic sales in the millions.
We’ll talk about how passion and scarcity shape value in the world of high-end vintage comics. Let’s get started with question one.
Question 1 – Wedding Budget Gifting
Listener: My daughter’s getting married, and my financial situation is such that I could spend almost any amount on the wedding without affecting my retirement plan, but that actually makes it harder to decide what’s reasonable. I could set a budget of $75,000, $150,000, or even $200,000, none of which would impact my finances, but all of them feel somewhat arbitrary. How do you go about setting a wedding budget when it’s not about affordability, but about what’s appropriate?
Stephan Shipe: I think what we need to look at is the difference between some arbitrary number that gets thrown on it and a values-based budgeting approach to this.
In other words, how are you establishing — of all the different components that go into a wedding — what is the most valuable, and how do you assign a monetary value to something that’s very emotional? So when you see this, Deon, how do you think about setting a budget?
Deon Strickland: Well, I think one thing is you have to go back, right? It’s not just thinking about the wedding, but if you’re thinking about the relationship you’ve had with your children — what kind of values you’ve set, what’s been important to your family from the time they were little kids — they are who they are because of all the collective decisions you’ve made, both the monetary decisions you’ve made as a family, what kind of vacations you’ve taken, how much time you’ve spent with them. All those things are already in the mix.
And so when you get to this point and you’re trying to set a budget, it’s not independent of all the other decisions you’ve already made. So I think it’s a really valid point you made when you say, let’s talk about values — but the values have already been set. You just have to maintain the trend.
You have to maintain the trend, and it’s not necessarily an easy thing because there’s lots of pressure. Let’s say your kid is the fifth kid to get married, or tenth kid to get married, and so they’ve been to a lot of weddings already and they’ve seen all these weddings, they’ve seen what they look like. That’s enormous pressure on you. The “keeping up with the Joneses” effect is a real economic thing.
We know that people’s utility — I hate to use that word, but it’s the word that comes to mind — is not set independently of not only your family, but what others have done. So I think when you’re setting those values here, that’s why it’s potentially a particularly thorny question.
Stephan Shipe: So in this case, this would be one of the rare occurrences of actually going out and comparing to the others — looking at the other neighbors.
Deon Strickland: Yeah, the neighbors, so to speak, and their weddings and friends from high school and college, and see what the pricing is there.
Stephan Shipe: Yeah, to get an idea of what’s normal.
Deon Strickland: Yeah, because all of a sudden you find out, is the wedding going to occur in your hometown or are we going to have a destination wedding, right? Are we going to leave where we are and end up, in the United States or potentially even abroad? I think all those things get played into the mix.
And then like you said, when you’re trying to set that budget, it’s really about those values that you have and what message you want to send to not only your child but the people you are going to have at that wedding. And I don’t mean from a monetary, “look what I can do.” I mean simply that you have a place in your community, you have a place among your friends, and you want to be consistent with who you are.
And we always want to do that. We don’t want to do something that’s unusual for yourself, right? Because then everybody’s like, “Well, what happened to X? Did they get lost in trying to keep up with the Joneses?” Because it can happen — that definitely happens.
Stephan Shipe: So where would you — if you were looking at this budget, unlimited budget essentially in this scenario — where are the areas that you think more align with the values that have been set before, and areas that maybe you could cut or dig deeper into something? Does that make sense?
Deon Strickland: Yeah, no, I really do. Is it the number of people that you have — does that increase? Or is it the budget for the cake that can increase? I think it really does depend on those personal values. For example, maybe your family’s just an enormous foodie family. So food and dinner have been really important to you and your family.
We’re a family that looks to make unusual things together, and we go out to unusual restaurants. And it’s not because we’re trying to set a trend — it’s simply that a lot of our joy comes from food. If that’s the case, I know people make fun of food at weddings all the time, like “can it be good?” I think the answer to that question is yes, it can be good. And two, then that’s going to be expensive, right?
So for example, let’s say you want a raw bar at your wedding. You want seafood towers for the table — that’s going to give you a wildly different number than if you have cheese and crackers. Or let’s say the band. Am I going to have a ten-piece band that draws a crowd of 2,000 people when they play, or am I going to have, you know, the “wedding singer” band? That’s a different question and a different number, but that would also align with those values.
Stephan Shipe: I like that idea because I could see travel being the same thing. If travel’s been a big part of the family, then a destination wedding makes a lot more sense than randomly assigning a destination wedding when travel maybe has never been something that’s been a part of it.
Deon Strickland: Right. If Hawaii is enormously meaningful to your family, then it might make sense to have a wedding with 50 people in Kauai as opposed to 250 people at your local country club. And I think as economists, we don’t really like to use words like bad and good. And so I look at that and think to myself, you know, it’s just what brings you joy.
And if being on a beach in Kauai as the sun goes down — that sounds pretty cool, let’s be honest with ourselves — but that’s not going to be as meaningful to some people as having all their friends be able to share it with them.
Stephan Shipe: Now do you think the values decision across children changes as well?
Deon Strickland: Ooh. You mean within the same family?
Stephan Shipe: Yeah, within the same family in the sense of how does that then dictate the changes of budgets across weddings? Because one of the things that commonly comes up is saying, set a budget and be ready for that budget to be used for all the children, so that way you don’t set a precedent that’s too high or too low and then have any of the dynamics. But based on this, it’s not the number — it would be the values.
Deon Strickland: That’s right. But wow, that is — that’s a really gnarly take in the sense that —
Stephan Shipe: That’s why you’re here. You’ve got to answer the tough one.
Deon Strickland: Thank you. I can only say it’s not the same exact thing, but we always talk about these values decisions — same thing as your kid turns 16 or 17 years old and you’re going to get them a particular car. I can speak from personal experience in this regard that I bought my first child a particular car, and then when it came time to get a car for my second child, the second one looked up and figured out what I spent on the first one.
And so there was definitely some sort of notion of, “You’re certainly not going to reduce what you’re going to spend on me relative to what you spent on the other one.” So I do think you’re correct, but I think that would be one of those situations where, yeah, you have to set the threshold with the first child, potentially.
But I think it would be really hard to go back and say, “Well, Kauai was really important for your sister, but for you it’s going to be something else entirely.” That would be a difficult conversation.
Stephan Shipe: I think there could be a combination — I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. So you could have a situation based on what you’re saying where the budget stays similar, but the type of wedding would reflect the values and the importance of things.
Deon Strickland: Absolutely.
Stephan Shipe: And that could work out.
Deon Strickland: Absolutely. But it would be, in all honesty, very difficult to have a budget that was comparable necessarily in a destination wedding to a really unusual place as opposed to your standard country club.
Stephan Shipe: — a lot of seafood, right?
Deon Strickland: Yeah, a lot of seafood towers. Everybody gets a seafood tower to make things work out. I don’t think that’s going to work.
Stephan Shipe: Perfect. All right, let’s move on to our second question today.
Question 2 – Tune Out the Noise and Efficient Markets Hypothesis
Listener: I recently watched the documentary Tune Out the Noise, which discusses the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. Is that theory still valid today? Have events like the 2008 financial crisis or the recent inflationary period weakened its relevance? And is passive investing still a sound strategy in a higher interest rate environment?
Stephan Shipe: Let’s start with the basics. For those who haven’t seen the documentary, it’s a great documentary. Tune Out the Noise gets into the idea of really the golden age of financial research, which was the 1960s — the first time the data was able to be used.
I always joked with classes that this was a time you could do anything in finance and get a Nobel Prize. They were handing out Nobel Prizes like candy during this time because you could take all of this data, run something like a standard deviation and an average, and you’ve got portfolio theory in the fifties. You go into a basic regression — that starts the CAPM. And even things like the Black-Scholes model, you start talking about distributions and normal distributions along those lines.
That all led to the concept of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which was essentially that markets are correct — that if you’re pulling in all of this information from a lot of different sources and a lot of different investors, then the prices that are reflected there are accurate. Which means you can’t have any sort of excess returns from active management.
And that was groundbreaking at the time because it went against everything that was Wall Street and finance — that you had a guy who could pick your investments for you and that they were going to be great. And then the news comes out with all the research that that may not actually be true, especially when you start adjusting for risk, that returns are actually better if you just bought and held the market.
So, Deon, what were your big takeaways from this, and do you think it’s still relevant?
Deon Strickland: I think it’s true. I remember as a PhD student, sort of the urban legend was that at least initially, we were going to get enough computing power where we’d be able to fully describe the stock market. And if we could fully describe the stock market, then we’d be able to predict — and investing would become this really boring exercise because we could fully describe the data.
And I think really what happened with the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and those early days of research — and I’m not sure they were handing out prizes like candy — but those early days of research showed two things.
Number one, people began to realize that markets were not predictable, that you get innovations, and those innovations cannot be predicted — and that they go across all markets. And as a result, no matter how clever you think your money manager is, your money manager is incapable of fully bringing in all the randomness and everything else that you observe out there.
And the second thing is precisely that — the reason markets are efficient and the reason you should index invest is that no one can fully bring in all that’s going on. Because if I could, I would go pick stocks that were going to have these positive, really localized things happen to them.
But what we learned is that no one can do that. You can’t identify the stocks that are only going to do well because of things that are unique to them — what you and I would call unique risk. And what they really did in the sixties was document that. They showed that the innovation that moves stock prices is common shocks — shocks to the macro system — and no one can predict macro shocks.
It’s like the 2008 crisis. Now we look back at the 2008 crisis and say, “Oh, it’s completely obvious; we should have been able to predict that.” Well, if I could have done that in 2008, I’d be much wealthier today than I am, because while later on it made complete sense to me, at the time I couldn’t see it.
And so I think passive investing and the Efficient Market Hypothesis are even more relevant in an era where we potentially are exposed to more global shocks — AI shocks, these huge potential innovations. I think it’s even more so the case to be a passive index investor. Because if I could pick the winners, I would — but I can’t. And if you can’t pick winners versus losers, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis is not only relevant, it should be the way we invest.
Stephan Shipe: So if someone’s listening to that, one of the common misconceptions I always hear is that the market’s efficient, so that means there are no big returns — I’m just going to have to handle the average. But there are ways to have a higher return; you just have to have the risk that goes with it.
That’s all it’s saying — it’s not saying that you can’t have high returns, just that you can’t have returns that outmatch the risk you’re taking on. Which goes against the active management idea. So do you think it’s possible for the world to be too indexed? If we have too much passive investment — if everyone just goes and buys a Vanguard index fund and everyone gets into all of these things — then what happens?
Deon Strickland: That, I think, is possible but unlikely. And the reason is because we trust competition. So the last time I looked — and it’s been a little while — if you held the S&P 500, you’re going to beat about 75 percent of active managers by being a passive investor.
And let’s say really too many people start buying index funds. As a result, we would observe that in the shrinkage — you’d fall in the rankings. But that would incentivize the active managers to be even more creative, to be aggressive. And so I think what we really depend on is that notion of competition.
Active managers — if they start to do better because there’s less price efficiency — then I think you’d see them begin to outperform again, and you’d have the natural flow of investor assets away from indexing and maybe toward active management. So there has to be this tug and pull. But I don’t think we’re there yet.
Stephan Shipe: Yeah, right. Because if you look at price efficiency, it’s still very high in markets, and so I don’t think we’re there yet, for sure.
And that also would ignore the fact that people are buying companies because of the actual company itself, not just the stock price. So you look at things like activist investors — someone who wants to hop in, buy a large percentage of the company. That seems a little different than the active manager picking stocks who can’t exert a lot of control over the direction of the company.
It ignores founder shares, it ignores all of this. It’s this disconnect — which I’ve never really liked — of looking at the market as “I have a portfolio of stocks” and then forgetting that those stocks are actual small pieces of ownership in a company. So with a larger ownership, there could be structural shifts to the company that would then rely more on management skill maybe, as opposed to stock-picking skill. Does that make sense?
Deon Strickland: Yeah, what you’re saying is that there’s a whole literature out there which says, for example, for hedge funds — which are a different kind of active manager than your standard active manager — there are certain hedge funds that earn a liquidity premium. They’re willing to hold assets that aren’t very liquid; they take these long-cycle bets.
Yeah, I can buy that — because that’s a bet that most investors simply can’t take. I mean, I don’t know about you, but you and I would find it difficult, I think, to make pure generational bets, right? We’re not going to pay off for 30 years; I might need some of that return before the generation passes.
And so I think yes, there are definitely cases where we think that’s going to get built in. But I think there’s still really good evidence that the active manager who is building a portfolio with 30 or 40 positions in stocks that trade on the NYSE — I don’t think there’s good evidence yet that that’s doing anything differently than it did when Fama and the others in Tune Out the Noise were doing that fundamental research.
And you also asked about inflation and interest rates, and it’s so funny. Today you hear all this noise — “inflation is so high, interest rates are so high.” And I’m like, well, only if you started investing since the 2008 crisis. If you go back and look prior to 2008, today doesn’t look that different than it did historically. So I think it’s still a winning strategy.
Stephan Shipe: How do you separate out the fact that when you look back at the Fama-French models and the ideas of where risk came from — we just talked about how you can’t decouple the risk and return — one of the main findings was that a tilt toward small-cap value should end up having your highest risk.
If you looked at the classic 25 portfolios of mixes of size and value, if that’s the case, how do we explain the past five-plus years of extreme returns on large-cap growth? And if somebody’s been looking at this saying, “Well, small-cap value’s where the risk is,” how is it possible that over five years we could have outsized returns for large-cap growth?
Deon Strickland: That is a problem. And I think you and I — we’ve talked about this before, not this specific question, but about the value premium and the size premium. And I think one of the things driving this, personally, is that large-cap…
I think a really interesting thing in the current market is that in terms of the innovation going on in AI and the like — where before you could be a small cap and be on the cutting edge of innovation — innovation is occurring in firms that, say, have not EBITDA because they’re not profitable, but you’re looking at companies that are sort of unicorns, these mythic billion-dollar firms before they make a profit.
Well, today a billion dollars doesn’t buy you an AI bet. If you’re a company that wants to make a bet on the current innovation, it takes enormous resources to make these bets. And so I think one thing that we’re seeing that’s unusual now is that large-cap growth is where we’re seeing a lot of these bets on what could be a fundamental change in the economy — in terms of how we organize productive assets — occurring at just an enormous level.
I can’t remember what the number is off the top of my head, but if you look at AI — let’s see, I think it’s xAI that’s building these two giant hyperscaler data centers outside Memphis — it is literally billions and billions and billions of dollars to build each one.
So small-cap value — I think small-cap is still a risky bet because you’re betting on these macro exposures. Can small-cap survive? Can a company that’s on the cutting edge of something survive a macro shock? Whereas today, a lot of those bets are taking place at the bleeding edge, and it takes how many billions of dollars to make the same bet today that small companies were making, like when Amazon started?
You’re talking about a really small amount that was necessary to invest relative to today to take that bet. Today, you can’t make a bet on AI with a hundred million dollars — you’d really have a hard time making that bet.
Stephan Shipe: So we could be seeing a shift in who’s holding the risk — that maybe right now, the large-cap growth companies are the ones taking a proportionally larger measure of risk compared to small-cap stocks, which is the justification for their higher return.
Deon Strickland: Yeah. Innovation risk today and higher returns associated with innovation risk, in my opinion, are occurring at the bleeding edge of size. Think about Nvidia, right? Nvidia passed $5 trillion in market cap. So you’re looking at the company that’s providing the backbone of this bet being the most valuable company in the world. That is a different take.
I don’t know if I can go back and find that same kind of asymmetry in the markets — but it still doesn’t even change what Tune Out the Noise tells us.
Stephan Shipe: Right. Exactly. It doesn’t change that. I will say I’ve got a little bit of concern that because it’s occurring in large-cap value, I might have exposure there that I wouldn’t have had 30 years ago. So I’m not sure what to do about it, to be perfectly honest, but I do worry about it a little bit.
Deon Strickland: Yeah, because the growth story — that seems easier to explain. The market-cap version is a lot harder. But the growth story — that’s been the story everyone’s excited about. A company’s stock price goes up, market value goes up compared to the book, and that leads to potentially harder falls out into the future.
You go back since the sixties and you look at innovations in IT, in television, electricity — I think back in the twenties and thirties, there was like, “Oh, this electricity thing, it’s wonderful.” And you go back and think about that — there was a lot of investment. Or when IT, remember, what’s it called — the dark fiber? Remember that?
People invested what at the time was absurd amounts of money in building fiber because they thought the internet was going to be the big thing. And it turned out to be a big thing. But still, there were millions, if not billions of dollars in current dollars poured into fiber that was dark — meaning it wasn’t being used — for a very long time.
Stephan Shipe: The timing factor.
Deon Strickland: Yeah. The timing factor.
Stephan Shipe: It gives to your point — anytime there’s major innovation, we don’t know who the winner is going to be. You can call the industry and say “electricity is going to be great,” but to be able to determine which company times it correctly, to actually be prepared for it — especially in capital-intensive industries, which is the same with dark fiber and now today with the data centers.
Deon Strickland: I completely agree with that. If I could identify who was going to win AI, I would be famous.
Stephan Shipe: And if not, you buy the index.
Deon Strickland: Yeah. If not, you buy the index.
Stephan Shipe: Perfect.
From the Field – Interview with Vincent Zurzolo
Stephan Shipe: And for today’s From the Field conversation, we explore how a childhood hobby can evolve into a serious market for collectors and investors alike.
Today we’re joined by Vincent Zurzolo, president of ComicConnect, an auction house specializing in high-end vintage comic books and original artwork. He’s here to share insights into the world of serious comic collecting — how values are set, what drives demand, and how this market has evolved into a very unique segment of alternative investments.
So Vincent, welcome to the podcast. First, start off — tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this world.
Vincent Zurzolo: I’ve loved comic books since I was a very little boy. Before I could even read, I was looking at my big brother’s comic book collection, and I would just be mesmerized by the pictures of these superheroes and the villains.
When I got a little older and I could fish out a nickel here and a dime there from the couch cushions — or beg my mom and dad for some change — I’d go out to the local candy store and pick up a couple of comic books.
This continued all through my childhood, and then in school with my friends in elementary school. I remember, just like kids traded baseball cards, we traded comic books.
Fast forward — I’m around 15 years old, and a neighbor across the street who was like a big brother to me, who was 19 at the time — we were collecting comic books together. We’d drive into Manhattan and go to the Forbidden Planet comic shop and pick up some comics here and there.
He said, “You know, we should start buying collections.” And I said, “I have no idea how to do that.” Now, he was a very successful coin dealer, and his father was one of the biggest stamp dealers in the country. So we took the same principles that helped them become successful in their categories and applied them to comic books.
Back in the day, there was a weekly newspaper called The Comic Buyer’s Guide. It was fantastic — there were ads, there were articles, people buying and selling. We put out a quarter-page ad, and we’d get lots of leads and calls from people all over the country, and we’d buy collections.
I also became known in junior high and high school as the “comic book kid.” So anybody who had comic books would come to me and say, “Hey, my uncle’s got a collection out in Queens,” or “There’s one over there.” We’d drive out and pick up collections, then start wholesaling them out to store owners and dealers that we knew. And we were able to actually take a few books for ourselves and improve our collections.
It was a lot of fun. I did that all through high school and through college. Upon graduating from St. John’s University, I met up with a friend at a convention — he was also a comic book dealer who lived in Rockaway Beach, where I grew up. He said, “Hey, I go into Manhattan. I sell out on the streets. Do you want to come with me?”
So I said, “Sure, I’ll join you. It sounds interesting.”
The entire summer after I graduated, I would drive out with him and we’d park in the financial district right near Wall Street. I would set up two card tables with eight boxes of comic books and sell comics out there.
It was a great way to cut my teeth in the real world of selling comic books — a really fantastic way to build a business and start working full time in comics.
Back in the early nineties, there were packages — people were selling three comic books in a bag to Walmarts, BJ’s, and Costco. So I would find warehouses of comic books and sell, let’s say, a hundred thousand comics and make two pennies a piece — two grand.
I think they sold probably somewhere between 600,000 and a million comics in about a year.
I was also building my business at conventions and working my way up the ladder. That was 1993, and in 1999 my partner — who was a friend of mine at the time — asked me if I wanted to merge companies together.
We are now the largest dealership for vintage comic books in the world. We have an inventory of over 150,000 comic books. For me, going from a kid who was scraping together nickels and dimes from his parents’ couch cushions to being the co-owner of the world’s largest dealership for vintage comics has been an incredible experience.
Then, in 2007, we started ComicConnect — our consignment and auction company. From that point forward, we’ve hit a ton of world records. We were the first company to ever sell a comic book for a million dollars — Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman.
A month later, we broke that record with another copy, a little higher grade, for $1.5 million, and so on and so forth. At one point or another, we’ve held world records for a variety of different comic books and other pop culture memorabilia, original comic art, and more.
In 2023, along with my other partner, David Quinn — a veteran comic book writer — we put out our own comic book called The Addiction. This is the brand new #1, which you can buy at theaddiction.co, and this is our convention exclusive. We’ve had some really fantastic luck — we just did New York Comic Con and had a very good outing for the new series, the new #1.
So every aspect of the world of comics and collectibles, I’ve tried to hit. I’ve hosted a radio show about comic books, been a guest on many news programs, been on reality shows, and was the co-founder of the longest-running comic book convention in New York City, Big Apple Conventions.
I’m sure there are a few other things I’m missing, but I’ve tried to just explore and do as much as I possibly can.
Stephan Shipe: Your story is very clear — how your passion has continued to build into different areas of commerce. What drives other people? Is it that same idea — passion? Is it a hope for investment and appreciation?
When you look at people — especially when we’re talking about $500,000, $600,000, or million-dollar-plus purchases — these are serious collectors of comic books and artwork. What drives them?
Vincent Zurzolo: I’ll try to paint you a picture. There are a lot of different people from different walks of life that come into comic books. I think — and hope — that most of them have a love of superheroes in one way or another.
I’ve met some people who strictly do this for money — and that’s it. It’s just another widget. They do cards, they do video games, they do art, they do movie props, they do comic books. They do a little bit of everything, and some people are able to do that.
Now, if you ever told me when I was in my teens that one day I’d have close to a dozen billionaires in my phone contacts, I would have said, “What’s a billionaire?”
But we have people from all different walks of life and income levels who love comic books. It’s really interesting to see people who are billionaires looking for very specific items. And it’s quite fun and cool to deal with that type of client — where money is no object, but they can still be price-conscious.
So you have all that, and then we deal with people who are teenagers in school, just trying to buy something cool for their collection.
What I love to see is the evolution — I had one client years ago who started off buying from me when he was 16 years old. Eventually he told me he was going to go to medical school, and he did. He went to college, medical school, became a doctor, and continued buying from me. Obviously his budget kept going up as he became more successful.
You see people from all different walks of life. I have one client — to him, his father was Superman, so he collects Superman. Another client told me that as a kid he always wanted to help people and realized he’d never have superpowers, so what could he do? He became a police officer. That’s really cool — his way of being helpful to society was to become a cop.
He loves comic books and still collects to this day. You really see that with lawyers, doctors — all different types of professions that tie back into a person’s passion for comic books.
Stephan Shipe: You mentioned that people call looking for a specific comic, or they haven’t been out. When we look at financial market portfolios, usually we’re looking at diversification — you want to have a variety of things. Is that more common, or is it more common that somebody says, “I’m going to collect a specific type of comic book”?
Is it more valuable to be concentrated — where you have the entire collection of a certain item — as opposed to having the best of a variety of different areas?
Vincent Zurzolo: Recently, we auctioned off a collection called The True North Collection in our last ComicConnect Event Auction 63.
This gentleman purchased nothing but number one issues — first issues or first appearances of comics. He had a collection that was just shy of 200 books, but he had the first Batman, first Captain America, first Marvel Comics, first Spider-Man, first Fantastic Four, first X-Men, Avengers, Daredevil, and so on and so forth.
That was his way of collecting, and he was very excited and proud to be able to show his family — many of whom doubted his sanity in investing in comic books — that he turned a huge return on his collection, which was really great to see.
Some people collect what we call first appearances or key issues.
Other people collect runs — they’re called completists. Somebody who wants to have Spider-Man #1 and up, X-Men #1 and up, Batman #1 and up — things like that.
Then you have people who collect classic covers. Some people collect Christmas covers, sports covers — all different types of things.
Other people collect by grade. Some collect by pedigrees, which means original-owner collections are sometimes notated with a pedigree nomenclature.
For instance, the greatest pedigree collection is the Mile High Edgar Church Collection, which includes 20,000 books from the 1930s to the 1950s. Every single comic is in incredibly high grade.
Many of these books had pencil coding on them that differentiate them from other comic books, and people can tell an Edgar Church book from other pedigrees.
What’s interesting about pedigree collections is that these comic books often sell for multiples of what a non-pedigree would sell for.
So there are a lot of different ways to collect.
Me, myself — I collect key number ones, and I also just collect comic books that I like. That’s another thing some people do.
If you saw my collection, you’d go, “Oh, that’s a great book, that’s a great book,” but then you’d see all this other stuff and there’s no rhyme or reason. But I don’t think I have to do anything other than what I enjoy doing with comic books.
Stephan Shipe: Mixing the passion there for sure. You mentioned grading — what role does grading have? Authenticity, different options — how does all that come into play when you’re talking about protecting or even enhancing the value?
Vincent Zurzolo: About 25 years ago, my partner Stephen Fish pitched a company called CCG — and CCG owns NGC, a coin grading company — and we pitched them the idea of grading comic books.
They said, “Okay, sounds great, but we need a grading scale.” So my partner created the 10-point grading scale that’s used throughout the industry in comics.
There are different interpretations of what the grading scale is, but in general there’s an understanding of what types of defects put a comic book into a different numeric grade.
There’s also nomenclature grading attached — so a 9.8 is a Near Mint, a 5.0 is a VG/Fine (Very Good/Fine), and so on and so forth.
Being able to grade a comic book and also tell if it’s restored or unrestored is a very valuable skill set. But the third-party grading that came about through what is now CGC has allowed the average layperson who’s interested in getting into collecting to buy comic books without worrying about whether the book’s been restored, tampered with, or misgraded.
You have this understanding that “this is the grade,” and people respect that in the industry. That’s really valuable.
But it varies, and sometimes it’s not feasible to spend the money getting something graded if it’s relatively inexpensive. There’s a whole host of reasons.
Stephan Shipe: So put some numbers on that for me. Let’s say I’ve got a first-edition or first-appearance Spider-Man comic book and I want to have it graded. What does that cost? And what would be the difference — like what’s the delta between a grade of 7.5 to 8.5, or 8.5 to 9.5?
I know there’s a lot that goes into that, but just put me in the ballpark.
Vincent Zurzolo: First thing — for CGC, any comic book that’s a thousand dollars or more, you’re paying 4% of the market value. So you estimate the market value — and usually, if you’re within range, they’re not going to call you and say, “Hey, you undervalued this by a lot.” They’ll just grade your book.
Now, in terms of values, there’s no set calculation for every book that says if it’s an 8.0, it’s this, or if it’s a 9.0, it’s that. But you can tell by going online and looking at our sold section on ComicConnect.com.
There are also online price guides — one’s called GPAnalysis.com, and another is GoCollect.com. Both are valuable tools for people to understand market values.
For instance, on a Spider-Man #1, you might have a book that’s worth $30,000 at a 7.5, $35,000 at an 8.0, and $40,000 or $45,000 at an 8.5. It fluctuates.
Different books behave differently, because sometimes when you get past a certain grade, the number of copies in the census — how many exist in the world that have been graded — becomes so low that the price jumps up quite a bit, even though they might only be a half-point apart in grade.
Stephan Shipe: When you have these seven-figure comics — million-dollar comic books — what’s driving that more? Is it the grade or the rarity of it?
Vincent Zurzolo: When you ask about what drives a price to go up, it’s a matter of supply and demand. It’s also a matter of how important a comic book is in the grand scheme of things.
For instance, Action Comics #1 from 1938 — the first appearance of Superman — there are probably around a hundred copies known to exist in the world, both restored and unrestored, even incomplete.
To give you some perspective, a slightly restored 9.0 recently sold for close to $800,000. I sold a moderately restored 9.0 for $550,000. I sold a cover for $375,000 — just a cover. I sold the interior of a comic for about $200,000.
It is the most in-demand comic book in the world of comics — the best book you could possibly own.
Then I would say the second comic book to that would probably be Detective Comics #27, which is the first appearance of Batman, which came out a year later.
After that, you have Marvel Comics #1, which is the first original Human Torch and the first Sub-Mariner anti-hero in a comic book. You have Captain America Comics #1, and Whiz Comics #2, which is the first Shazam — originally known as Captain Marvel. Later, when DC bought him and Marvel already had their own Captain Marvel, they called him Shazam.
Those are some of the silly and fun things we get to think about in the world of comic books.
Stephan Shipe: When you look at the future — when you think about how comics have evolved — what are the main trends that you lead people with? You see all of the pricing and different types of collections that have been at the shows. What does that look like for the next ten years in comic books?
Vincent Zurzolo: I think comic books continue to grow in collectability and in the investment aspects.
Of course, we had a huge bull market during the pandemic, as did every other collectible, and since then it’s slowed down. But I’ve been in the business 40 years — we’ve seen peaks and valleys all the way along. My advice is if you’re in one of those valleys, just hold. It’ll come back up.
I often tell people that comic books should be looked at as medium- to long-term investments.
In terms of trends over the next 10 years — it’s hard to say exactly what will happen. What we’ve seen happen in the past is that a genre, say horror comics, becomes really popular and expensive. Then they plateau and maybe even come down a little bit. Then something else takes the main stage in collectors’ minds.
In terms of trends, one thing I’ve found very interesting — especially as a publisher now and creator of new comics — is the advent and interest in digital comic books.
We sell our comic book The Addiction on the Vivi app. Vivi is kind of like an NFT — it’s a digital comic book you can read on your computer, phone, or tablet. You also have an app that projects a VR version of your comic book that looks like it’s actually on your desk or table. You can use your phone to flip through the pages and read it. It’s really cool — it becomes a unique item.
These have a marketplace where they sell. For instance, we just released our new #1 on the digital app, and the rarest version — there are different covers with different quantities — let’s say there are 2,000 books in total. There are commons, uncommons, rares, ultra rares, and secret rares. The secret rare is the smallest quantity, and the common is the largest.
Our secret rare just came out last week at $7 — it’s already selling for $60. So it’s kind of cool.
Now, what do I see in terms of trending in the future? I definitely think print will always be around. I think print comic books will always be around.
But digital has a great place in the world because it gives international fans the ability to buy without worrying about tariffs, customs, or shipping costs. And they don’t have to worry about damage — they live on your phone.
There are a lot of different aspects to comic books and trends, but I don’t have a crystal ball. All I can tell you is that what I see, in a general way, is that the best of the best — the cream of the crop — continues to go up.
Stephan Shipe: I can’t thank you enough for being here today. This has been a very interesting conversation — I think our listeners will find it fascinating as well. So thank you so much.
Vincent Zurzolo: My pleasure. And if anybody wants to learn about comic books, please take a look at our websites — MetropolisComics.com and ComicConnect.com. If you’re interested in reading new books, TheAddiction.co.
Thank you, everybody, so much. And remember — whatever you collect, make sure you enjoy it. It’s really important to enjoy it.
Stephan Shipe: Thank you, Vincent. Take care.
Outro
Stephan Shipe: That’s our show. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in this podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only, and is not intended to constitute financial, investment, or other professional advice. The opinions expressed are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated organizations. Investing in financial markets involves risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Before making any investment decisions, you should consult with a qualified financial advisor who can assess your individual financial situation, objectives, and risk tolerance.