I've been writing a series of blogs on GoCollect's new Collectible Price Index (CPI). A tool loosely modeled on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a composite index that focuses on blue chip stocks. You can check out my blogs on the Big Spenders Club, Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Copper Age Indexes here. Today, we're going to take a dive into the CPI for the Modern Age.
The Modern Age CPI consists of the 50 most important key issues of the past thirty years.
GoCollect's Modern Age CPI consists of 50 of the most valuable (and historically significant) comic books published during the Modern Age. This index includes all of the usual suspects (this is a non-exhaustive list):
Ultimate Fallout #4 (1st appearance of Miles Morales);
Invincible #1 (1st full appearance of Invincible);
The Walking Dead #1 (premier issue; 1st appearance of Rick Grimes);
NYX #3 (1st appearance of X-23);
Edge of Spider-Verse #2 (1st appearance of Spider-Gwen);
Something is Killing the Children #1 (premiere issue; 1st appearance of Erica Slaughter); and
Star Wars: The Clone Wars #1 (1st appearance of Ahsoka Tano).
Are there any missing books in your opinion? What books would you or wouldn't you include in the Modern Age CPI and why?
The Modern Age Index is up 29% over the past five years.
Although it may not feel this way since we've been in a painful bear market for over two years now, the Modern Age CPI is actually up by about 29% since the beginning of the pandemic in late July 2019. While this growth lags far behind the S&P500's 87% rate of return over the same period of time, profit is still profit.
When you take a closer look at the individual performances of each of the books that make up the Modern Age CPI, you can see that books published by smaller companies such as Something Is Killing The Children #1, Invincible #1, The Boys #1, and TMNT: The Last Ronin #1 have generated really strong ROI:
Marvel and DC books were primarily responsible for much of the declines in the Modern Age CPI.
As it was with the Silver, Bronze and Copper Ages, several Marvel books were primarily responsible for dragging the Modern Age CPI down. For example, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #1, Thor #1, and Invincible Iron Man #7 all lost significant value over the past five years:
The Marvel issue that lost the most value over that same period of time was Avenging Spider-Man #9 which includes the first appearance of Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel. Across five grades, that issue lost well over half of its value:
DC also contributed to declines in the Modern Age CPI with Y: The Last Man #1 and Detective Comics #880 both losing substantial value. Y performed especially poorly over the past five years losing roughly two thirds of its value!
