Welcome to the first look at the Fantastic Four CPI!
We here at GoCollect are thrilled to introduce this brand-new feature in our Collectible Price Indexes. And this is just the start! We have some exciting plans to help you dive in deep and discover and learn about comics and their values in a way you’ve never done before and that you can’t find any place else. So, let’s get started!
Why the Fantastic Four CPI?
Before I answer that question, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the Fantastic Four CPI so you can see for yourself everything that will be discussed here. Now, to answer that question, the simple reason we made a Fantastic Four Index is because we could. And that’s thanks to the incredible work of our behind-the-scenes tech folks – they are amazing people who do (no pun intended) fantastic things!
But as for a more complex answer, well, I’ve been a Fantastic Four fan pretty much my entire life. In fact, it’s literally hard for me to remember a time when I wasn’t a Fantastic Four aficionado as I was only four years old when I read my first FF story in Marvel Collectors’ Item Classics #7. I’m going to date myself here by telling you that I read that issue back in 1972. It was a beat up copy that a neighbor gave me and even back then I loved the smell of the newsprint and the feel of the paper. In short, I was hooked, and I’ve been collecting Fantastic Four comics ever since.
Why These Issues?
The issues I chose for the Fantastic Four CPI are all from the first series (plus annuals) and run from the Silver Age through the Copper Age. You’ll notice quite quickly that the issues I chose are all what would be considered key issues. While I have my own favorites that wouldn’t necessarily be considered keys by collectors, I didn’t include them in the index. I wanted to put together a list that would be applicable to both Fantastic Four collectors and general comic collectors. I also wanted to see how issues from the same series, but different eras were affected by market changes over time and how those ups and downs were reflected in, or ran counter to, the overall indexes for each era.
First Thoughts
Looking at the overall Fantastic Four CPI, the first thing you’ll notice is that it’s been a rough year for Marvel’s first family. From September 3, 2023 to August 25, 2024, the index lost 4.4% of its value. The steepest drop occurred during a one-week period from June 16 to June 23 when the index lost 1.2% of its value.
You can really see what a momentous drop it was by taking a look at the index for the past three months. Since June 23, it’s been fairly uneventful, with the index only losing 0.3% since June 23.
Zooming out a bit, let’s take a look at how the Fantastic Four fared over the past five years:
Things look much better from this perspective. The index has gained 71.1% in value since September 8, 2019. Looking over on the right, we can see that sharp drop from June of this year, sharp enough to be visible in the five-year trend line. However, the most notable point of interest is the present value of the index at 4,214. The last time the index was this low was on June 12, 2022 when it reached 4,191 during a two-week spike.
Takeaways
As with any investment, there’s the long game and the short game. The short game in comics is chasing potential spec books, looking for those issues that might temporarily have a spike in value that can be capitalized upon. While that happens with the occasional Fantastic Four issue, for the most part it’s a long game with a series like this. Even if you purchased the entire index in the midst of the comic book boom in 2020 and 2021, you would still be ahead. If you purchased between June 12, 2022 and November 20, 2022 – when the index peaked at 4,559 just before the decline we’ve been seeing since – your FF collection has lost value. That’s a relatively short span of time – just five months – during which the index was valued more than it is currently.
If you’ve been collecting FF books for a while and you’re playing the long game, an extended view will help you keep the doom and gloom of the past year in perspective. While the index definitely bears watching, the decline – for the most part – has been slow and relatively steady.
What’s Next?
I’m going to continue to blog regularly about the Fantastic Four CPI. It’s an interesting way to look at a small subset of the comic collecting universe, using a series that has long been regarded as one of the top ones to target from an overall perspective, and see what the trends show us.
In forthcoming blogs, I’ll be comparing the Fantastic Four CPI to the indexes for different eras, diving in deep to the individual issues in the FF CPI for explanations as to why they were chosen. Surprises, winners, and losers – both long term and short term – and look at how value trends are affecting sales volume, plus any other tidbits I can glean or anything else that looks new and noteworthy.
Hope you enjoy the ride!
