This column is breaking format to honor this week’s release of the 50th annual edition of “The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide”. I briefly covered a couple OPG milestones from 1970 and 1980 earlier this year, but this time I’m giving you a detailed look at the whole history of the industry bible.
Beginnings
Comic book collecting first took hold as a popular hobby in the 1960s. There were fans prior to that to be sure – there was a Captain America fan club in the 1940s, and EC had its Fan-Addicts in the 1950s. The Sixties, though… they saw the dawn of the Marvel Age with its interconnected continuities and continuing stories that encouraged readers to collect and save the whole line. They saw the first specialty stores open where back issues were treated respectfully instead of as interchangeable half-price sales. It saw coverage of the medium in academic works like Richard Nye’s “The Unembarrassed Muse” and nostalgic works like Jules Feiffer’s “The Great Comic Book Heroes”. Newspapers and magazines ran human interest stories about how much some old comics sold for high prices. It was definitely a sub-culture – the stigma from the Senate hearings was still strong – but comic collecting had grown enough to be a recognized sub-culture.
With early comic stores few and far between, fans found other ways to buy things from their want lists. The most common method was through fanzines like “Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector”. It offered its 2,500 subscribers a forum for buy/sell/trade deals through want lists and sale lists. There was no standard format for these ads, with some instructing buyers to request a catalog, some asking buyers to submit a wantlist and a budget, and some listing available issues with a note to act fast because stock was turning over constantly. Nor was there a standard way to describe the condition of the comics for sale, with an A-F scale, a 100 points scale, and carelessly assigned adjectives like “nice” that meant different things to different people. Some of the ads listed prices for their stock, and comparing them to one another (and to other fanzines) was the best way to figure out what a collection might be worth.
In the midst of this chaos, young collector Bob Overstreet was frustrated. Other hobbies had official price guides and regular grading scales. Why didn’t anyone make one for comic books? He said this at conventions and swap meets, and listeners always agreed such a guide would be useful, but no one was interested in creating it. Toward the end of the decade, Overstreet got tired of waiting for someone else to act on his great idea and decided to just do it himself.
The first guide
Overstreet partnered with Jerry Bails, a fellow fan who had a wealth of experience in developing fan publications and important industry connections. They based the format on “Red Book”, a guide to coin values, and combined its condition terminology with their own descriptions to give readers a firm foundation for the prices they were given. That’s why we call published pamphlets in top condition, which have never been anywhere near a mint facility, “mint condition”. Their definition for top condition was a bit more loose than what we think of today, though. Slight discoloration and dates pencilled onto the cover were permitted.
Overstreet and Bails (listed as “associate editor”) sorted through dozens of fanzines, dealer catalogs, and convention booths, manually tallying and organizing all their data points. Overstreet used some data Bails had previously collected for his “Collector’s Guide to the First Heroic Age” to make sure his listings were as complete as possible. The final result was a simple entry for each comic telling readers the value in Good, Fine, and Mint. A few included notes about an issue’s content or creators.
When the first edition was released in 1970, it started with a “message from the author”. The next six pages were written by Bails and Bill Spicer, covering a wide range of topics that might be of interest to someone reading the book, including a history of comics, of fandom, and tips for collecting. That was followed by 218 pages of alphabetical listings with three to five illustrations per spread. It ended with nine pages of ads for fanzines, dealers, and buyers. No price guide, for any hobby, had ever carried ads before.
Continued below
The publication of a formal guide was an important and necessary step for comic collecting to transition from a fad to a legitimate hobby, but Bails later saw it as the moment when fandom lost its innocence. The guide was the demarcation between the time when comics were only valuable to those who read them, and when non-reading outsiders could participate and speculate as investors. By 1973, publishers had recognized this fact and began to act on it.
Starting with the second edition in 1971, the guide was available in both soft and hard cover formats. The softcover price rose to $6 and continued making incremental increases until hitting $9.95 in 1980, where it remained steady for five years.
In 1976, the audience for the guide had grown enough for Crown Publishers to pick it up for bookstore distribution. Overstreet had commissioned a bicentennial-themed cover from Will Eisner, which featured the artist’s signature positioned prominently in the center of the image. Crown recognized Eisner as a creator whose product was difficult to move (graphic novels were outliers in the book market then) and requested the signature be removed, but Overstreet kept it.
By 1978, the OPG had gained enough notoriety within the industry to receive special consideration from publishers. When DC abruptly canceled a large volume of titles following weather-related distribution troubles, they were left with a significant number of completed but unpublished material. To preserve their copyrights, DC xeroxed the pages and bundled them into two large (400+ pages) volumes they dubbed “Canceled Comics Cavalcade”. There were 35 copies produced – one for each of the 33 creators involved, one for the copyright office, and one sent to Overstreet to prove its existence.
The OPG staff joined the digital age in 1980 when they began tracking price changes with a computer instead of paper spreadsheets. That same year, the Associated Press interviewed Bob Overstreet about his guide, providing a huge boost in awareness. Circulation rose 40% and necessitated a second printing. The timing coincided with a new round of price increases that saw the MSRP for the softcover rise to $25 in 2003, where it plateaued for a time.
Guide supplements
Of course, the “Price Update” didn’t just fade quietly into the night. After two decades of being unrivaled in the industry, the OPG was losing ground to the ultra-successful “Wizard”. In response, the “Price Update” was retooled into “Overstreet’s Comic Book Marketplace”, which was renamed “Overstreet Comic Book Monthly” as of its third issue (probably to avoid confusion with the long running “Comic Book Marketplace” magazine from Gemstone). Two years later, it was retooled again and relaunched as “Overstreet’s Fan”. Under both titles, the slick magazine featured news on comics, toys, and films, interviews, and an up-to-the-minute price guide. They were also both “Wizard” clones, down to the format of some sections and the jokey word balloons added to photos. “Fan” folded after its 24th issue in June 1997, and this time Overstreet gave up.
Continued below
On September 2, 1994, Gemstone Publishing bought the assets, liabilities, and intellectual property of Overstreet Publications. Aside from a new publisher logo on the spine, nothing about the guide changed.
In 1997, a lasting downturn in the market led the OPG to adopt its first gimmick: variant covers. It started with just two, but in 2001 a third variant was added to distinguish bookstore editions. The bookstore variant had a less comic booky, more professional appearance. In 2009, the bookstore variant was replaced by the Hero Initiative benefit cover. For the 45th edition in 2015, Overstreet offered four standard variants and a Hero Initiative cover, but mercifully dropped back to just three standard ones in the following years. In 2016, the A and B covers were connecting images by Amanda Connor, a trick OPG has only tried once (so far). Some of these variants have been limited in quantity, but historically (according to the guide) there’s very little difference in their aftermarket values.
Format wise, the OPG was offered in a “Big Big” spiral-bound version in 2001. This large print version lacked the market reports and some other editorial content, but it was much handier for retailers and dealers. In 2003, the spiral binding was replaced with square binding, and the format was temporarily retired after 2008. Demand saw its triumphant return (with spiral binding) in 2012.
Content wise, the economy around the year 2000 forced the OPG to admit a truth it had so far ignored – comic book values could fall. For its first 30 years, the OPG reported that values had risen or remained steady with few exceptions, but the fallout from the speculation boom in the early 1990s and the subsequent bust put the lie to that philosophy.
The new century also prompted the some other changes inside the guide. The increasing presence of the internet inspired an annually updated directory of fan websites that was soon rendered pointless by the advent of search engines. Meanwhile, the rise of CGC led to a coordinated revision its grading standards and a formal adoption a ten point scale. In 2006 (#36), the Guide started honoring creators with its Hall of Fame, which began with 4 inductees, jumped to double digit additions in a few years before settling down to about five annual inductees. The next year (#37), the guide introduced a color section.
To celebrate its golden anniversary, Gemstone has a couple special publications to go with the guide. A facsimile edition of the first guide was released earlier this year in both hard and soft covers. It’s obviously more of a novelty now than a functional guide, but over the years the guide itself has become collectible and nice copies of the original have auctioned as high as $9,000.
The second item, “Overstreet @ 50”, a 320-page illustrated book about the history of the guide, written by Bob Overstreet. It was scheduled to be out earlier this summer, but COVID delays have moved its release to November 17. I’m sure it’ll be full of information of interest to anyone able to make it to the end of this article.
The guide itself will be out this Wednesday, September 2. If you haven’t bought a new one in a while, or if you’ve never bought one at all, this special anniversary edition is sure to be a good time to see what you’ve missed.
