WOULD YOU PAY $129,000 FOR THIS MAGAZINE?

Yesterday, I posted "The Top 100 Most Valuable Magazines" list from the NOSTOMANIA collector's website. Sitting alone at the top is Pete Miller's DRAG CARTOONS #27 from May 1966. With a cover depicting Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin with the George Barris Batmobile, and a newsstand price of just 35 cents, the magazine is now apparently worth more. A lot more. Like almost 130K more. At $129,000, DRAG CARTOONS #27 is currently the "most valuable" magazine on the planet. It's value has increase over 38% in the last year. Granted, this price is for high grade copies in the "slabbed" condition so coveted by high-end collector's, but still . . .

Another consistent top-scorer is FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND #4 with the regional "ghoul's eye" sticker. However, it has recently dropped from the #2 spot to #6 with a reduction in value of almost 50% over the last year. At a price of $13,800, I think I'll wait a little while longer.

HOW MUCH IS THAT MONSTER MAG IN THE WINDOW?

HOWL STREET - With over 60,000 current registered users, NOSTOMANIA is an influential force in the still-strong collector's market. The website is open to both buyers and sellers and is helpful as a research tool, as well. The HOWL STREET JOURNAL reports that their "100 Most Valuable Magazines" reveal an interesting trend in monster magazines -- over 50% of the list are horror film magazines and about half of the hundred are Warren publications.

Pricing seems to be on the high end, but many premium items are being "slabbed" by companies like CGC, who some years ago started their own industry in grading and preserving comic books, magazines, and other paper ephemera.

Here is NOSTOMANIA'S Top 100 list, with a description of the grading structure: 

"With each pricing update we compute and show here the 100 most valuable magazines. We chose NM 9.4 as a "baseline" grade for comparison. Clearly, some of these items may not, and probably do not exist in that grade. Also, the magazines database is still in its relative infancy, so there are certainly many items not yet in the database which will join this list when they are entered."

HOW MUCH IS THAT MONSTER MAGAZINE IN THE WINDOW?

Unlike a number of other objet d' art horded, collected, fawned over and fanatically fondled, monster magazines have generally gone without much guidance as to the actual value of the tomes that are so protectively coveted. This was especially true 30 or so years ago, after the initial monster craze abated and people wanted to find out just what they had in their hairy little hands after their feeding frenzies at the newsstands and occasional fan convention.

One of the best examples of a collector's "industry" is with the monster magazine's cousin . . . comic books. OVERSTREET'S COMIC BOOK PRICE GUIDE is the hallmark and quite likely the epitome of a collector's resource for finding the market value of the items they treasure. There are other guides currently available as well, and there are at least two that I am aware of that are updated monthly.

Now, since monster 'zines could be considered more of a niche market, this might be the most logical reason for not having much in the way of price guides -- there simply is just not enough monster mag collectors as there are say, comic book or toy collectors to make it financially feasible, or even possibly rewarding enough for someone to go to the effort. That is not to say that there haven't been monster magazine price guides out there.

One in particular survived two editions in the 70s. Larry Kenton's THE MONSTERS PRICE GUIDE was a vanguard in the micro publishing field of monster 'zine guides. He used a substantial representation of dealers that sold monster 'zines to evaluate and establish a fair market price. The 2nd, 1975 - 1976 edition has an excellent Bernie Wrightson pen and ink cover depicting THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and a forward by Joe Kane, then editor of THE MONSTER TIMES. Here are a few pages from the second volume. Gaze at the prices and drool, fellow monster lovers!