Barnabas Monkeypants

Starting when I was 13, I worked at my town’s comic book store (a teenage geek’s dream come true). It was the best job I could ever hope for, and I really honed my comic book trivia skills in those years (skills which have translated into … well, nothing in my adulthood).

I still love comic books, and although my collecting has gone down from a weekly flood to a monthly trickle, I can fondly remember all of the great things about buying them as a kid.

I still have a lot of comics (even after selling a few hundred in the past few months), some which are worth several hundred dollars. But while I know they’re worth something, I never bought them for investment purposes; instead, I bought them to read and collect.

While working at the store,  I wouldn’t tell other people to do the same, but I was often faced with customer questions about what I thought would be worth more in the years to come. I answered honestly, and pushed people into the direction of what would likely grow in value. (I think I gave pretty good advice, too.)

Unfortunately, while investing in comics was a minor part of sales at the shop early on, and I would only be asked that question once a month, by the early 90s, it was everywhere. Publishers started pushing the inherent value of comics, not by their quality, but by covers enhanced with metallic ink or cut-outs or bagged to include collectible cards.

And people ate it up. Rational individuals who never thought twice about buying for investment were coming in every week and buying 5, 10, 20 copies of a certain issue. I remember one person buying 25 copies of the issue of Superman where he died (only to be reborn again 8 months later) and telling me that he just paid for his kid’s college. (Looking at some recent eBay auctions, that same issue went unsold for $5, so I think the only university that lad will be going to is the school of dumb parents.)

There was a strange mob mentality as well, where people suddenly, emboldened by their soon-to-be-achieved wealth, started making things up, quickly pushing facts aside.

An example: X-Force #1, one of the worst comic books ever produced, was sold in a bag. In this bag was the comic book and one of five different cards. There were (and this figure is amazing to me) nearly 4 million copies printed. The distribution of the cards was equal, so there were approximately 800,000 with each of the five. Yet people swore that one of the cards, featuring the character Cable, was more rare than the rest. (That’s right: people actually used the term rare when discussing this product.) It wasn’t any more difficult to find at all, but people thought it was, so for about three weeks, everyone wanted the copy with the Cable card. (Again, looking at recent eBay auctions, I found one where all 5 covers went unsold for 99 cents.) They were sure of it, and nothing any rational person could say or do would change their mind.

Needless to say, a lot of collectors lost a lot of money, although it took several years for people to wise up to this.

So what does this have to do with Henry? Well, he wears Pampers diapers, each of which features a different Sesame Street character on the front (all of them have Elmo on the back). The five characters are: Baby Ernie (but not Baby Burt), Baby Big Bird (Little Bird?), Elmo (yes, he gets back and front), Zoe (who is new to me), and Cookie Monster. While I haven’t done a thorough survey, I get more excited when I grab a Cookie Monster diaper. And I can swear, swear, that there are fewer Cookie Monster diapers than the others.

In fact, when I do get a Cookie Monster, I diaper with more vim and vigor, like I lucked out and got the good one and that until he has to be changed again, Henry will be in an extra special mood.

This past weekend, when opening up a new package of diapers, I checked to see if my hunch was right, if the Cookie Monster was more rare. I pulled them all out of the plastic bag and stacked them all up. And what I found was that my own perception, my X-Force-itis, had proven me wrong, that there was the same number of each of the characters.

Not all was lost, however, because I’ve decided that I’m going to save one each of the diapers and put them away for prosperity. And in 18 years, they’ll be worth enough to send Henry to college!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Barnabas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.