It’s been a while since I posted here…I have been busy working on my Disney Postcard blog and just don’t have the horse power to support multiple blogs! But, I want to make an effort to support this blog a little more regularly and see where it goes. So…off we go!
In my previous post I was looking at X-Men issues in and around issue 137. There are a LOT of those issues that are graded. It would be a bit of a stretch to call any of them rare. But what of the earlier issues in the run? The story is indeed rather different!
I took a look at the data for CGC books graded between issue 38 and issue 66. Most comic fans know that issue 66 is the last original X-Men book from the Silver Age…issues 67 thru 93 are reprints and issue 94 starts the “new” X-Men. What do we see in this data?
For starters, it’s fairly obvious that there are significantly fewer CGC graded X-Men books between issues 38 and 66 than for later bronze age books. Maybe this is not that surprising. But the fact that there are, on average, 150 CGC graded copies for issues between issue 38 and 66 vs. an average of 815 CGC graded copies for issue 94 thru 142 is surprising. Bottom line…Silver Age X-Men are significantly more rare than the Bronze Age books from the run.
In addition to this…you can see the obvious disparities in rarity between various of these issues. Looking for a CGC 9.8 copy of X-Men 42? Not gonna happen…there are none (probably due to the cover being predominantly black). As a matter of fact, CGC 9.8 copies are not common in this range, with an average of only ~6 copies for each issue. That’s not a lot.
Do you find this data surprising? Let me know if you do, or don’t. In the near future, I am going to take a look at some other titles and see what the data shows. A look at Fantastic Four would actually make a fascinating comparison, because the Bronze Age FF books are not anywhere near as popular as the Silver Age books (this is the opposite of the X-Men case, where popularity for the title exploded in the Bronze Age).
Until next time…