Like a famous painting, a rare comic is hard to fence.

July 25, 2015 5:23 PM

Comic Con Man: A true crime tale of comic books, corruption, and a $9 million vanishing act
posted by Horace Rumpole (6 comments total)

Man, that's a pretty interesting read. Stealing and attempting to re-sell evidence is a ballsy move, particularly evidence with a known provenance that you have to break technological means to have a shot at re-selling. By ballsy, I of course mean incredibly stupid.
posted by axiom at 6:16 PM on July 25, 2015 [10 favorites]

Interesting - I hadn't realized the CGC boxes were a thing, but it's an obvious development. (short shameless confession: the term "foxing" now reminds me of Phil Coulson talking about his Captain America trading cards in "The Avengers")
posted by rmd1023 at 6:35 PM on July 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I have the mona lisa for sale you can trust me im a museum guard
posted by benzenedream at 12:11 AM on July 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Counterfeit comics are now a thing. The most notorious example involved counterfeit Cerebus Number 1's.
posted by Paul Slade at 3:55 AM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Someone bothered to do a hookey print of Cerebus in 1981? Where one of the major differentiators is that the counterfeit is slightly higher quality?

That is a very odd thing for a number of reasons. One might almost suspect there's a better story there than the bent/broken lawyer does amateur-hour fraud of the original. Certainly weirder... but then, eh, Dave Sim.
posted by Devonian at 5:52 AM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

No conspiracy theory is necessary to explain this, Devonian. Sim's 1977 print run for the real Cerebus Number 1 was just 2,000 issues, so even in 1981 these were rare enough to fetch $150 apiece. That's a pretty healthy profit in prospect, even when the counterfeiters were selling their fakes to shops rather than individual fans. At that time, I doubt there was any other B&W comic with a back issue in anything like that kind of demand. Low print costs + high sale price = temptation.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would kick off the speculative insanity of the whole Black & White Boom in independent comics just a couple of years after the Cerebus incident, at which point people started counterfeiting copies of TMNTs' debut issue too. Just for a few years there, it really was the comics market rather than other collectibles which these forgers gravitated towards, and the Cerebus fakes just happened to be the first example of this phenomenon.
posted by Paul Slade at 10:12 AM on July 26, 2015 [2 favorites]