I'm a fan of this book (and have been since I was 12 and thought it was crazy because it was a "new" $100 book) so this isn't a "get off my lawn" post from a guy that (recently at least) is spending most of his comic money on Golden Age DCs. I think this is great. Crazy! But great.
That said, when a Copper Age book tickles up against joining the $100,000 club, that's something to write about. So, aside from the eye-popping baseline number it's important to note that this copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 CGC NM/MT 9.8 sold for more than twice the previous GPA record of $38,240 set at Heritage in May of last year. It's a big, crazy, headline grabbing price increase.
So, what happened? Pent up demand meets two (or more) whales? The last GPA sale was that one in May, so that's actually a decent amount of time to build up demand for a book like this.
The other possibility is two "I'm gonna win this one" bids firing against each other. I don't know that I've seen too many of those at this level. Doing a ballpark calculation, the winning bid (before buyer's premium) was around 2x the average of the two 2018 sales (the winning bid was around $73-74k and the 2018 average was $37,045) so the winner could have bid $500,000 or whatever and the under-bidder could have put in a bid of double GPA thinking "no one will be so crazy, I have to win this," assuming they'd win at like $50,000. It will be really, really, really interesting to see what the next one goes for.
By Most Valuable Comic Books of the 1980s - Personal Finance Advice November 5, 2019 - 12:37 am
[…] is a pop culture mainstay, so its not hard to understand why someone spent $90,000 for a first-print copy of TMNT #1 in August 2019. This comic has a CGC grade of […]