What is it that motivates comic book collectors to spend days and nights hunting, gathering, amassing, and organizing multicolored sheaves of stapled paper? There is proven profit in these old, inkstruck leaves that fill the walls of rooms like trophies, but is it only profit that spurs the desires of comic book collectors or is there more to it than that? How are so many captivated by the spell that comic books cast upon the willing susceptibility of certain imaginations?

Allow me to elucidate.

Collecting rare and prized artifacts is a sexual pursuit, in terms of both its predominantly masculine orientation and its mitotic production of brotherly twins: one a voyeur, the other a satyr.

If you attend those auction houses built for gems, cultural mementos, automobiles, wine and, well, just about any item pursued for the sake of preciousness within a limited supply set, you will notice one stark feature: males dominate females by a solid ten to one. The equities market itself is an endless auction, with the trading floor a pool of testosterone in flagrante desidero. The male psychological imperative of predation is in full display within the collector’s pursuit.

Now of the collector himself, not all tend toward the same type. At one extreme of typification is the guy obsessed with commodification, with trade value and the perpetual assessments of peers and authorities and competitors, all of whom relate by compact: to avoid the ravages of age by establishing ageless items as paramount. This voyeur craves the object less as an imperfect, living thing and more as something valued in its proximity to unlived perfection, to original condition, to purity seen and not felt, promised as a visual, regulated concept since his ultimate desired reality is a real impossibility. To his crusade, the grail must remain unattainable, unreal, a hard “10.” He functions under the auspices of a court far removed from him, in some sunny land, granting pretty points like ribbons from a maid who knows he must never remove his unscathed, gilt armor.

At the other extreme we see a man less regulated, at ease with each temporal tease. Far less restrained by fetishizing the rinds, this collector craves the core. Unlike the voyeur who labors to deny time its destructive due, the satyr seeks a separate sense of timelessness, one only full-fledged senses can muster. For him the ravages of age are welcome because he has decided to experience the inevitable for himself, now. Why wait? Why want the impossible? Or better: why avoid the unavoidable? Every object he takes, he takes to embrace, picking whatever is best within reasonable reach, enraptured by decadent decay and refusing to chase anything made worthy by image by fiat. For this man, the memento is consumed, consummated in his moment.

Most collectors exhibit a combination of these two tendencies, as starkly witnessed by the behavior of oenophiles, those caught between their initial compulsion to obtain the finest, rarest wines and the subsequent desire to obtain them further by annihilation, by full communion and joyous insobriety. A self-assurance regards every bottle as no more than a window waiting to open, allowing the harmony of ages passage over their palette. Every case a wine collector possesses begs to be had. Every cellar is haunted by what it keeps: bottled angels seeking, through the collector, release as ghosts, legends, time unstopped.

For the collector of vintage comic books, a similar dual tendency has over the past two decades tipped considerably toward something oenophiles could scarcely fathom: a cellar of sober intent, Bacchus banished, all nectar trapped, sealed, and entombed for good. This strong voyeuristic tendency to bottle against the vagaries of time declares that the label itself is, was, and will always be the object of predation. The rampant encapsulation of vintage comics has made the voyeur triumphant, financially and in terms of what can only be described as his particular pathology: a lust for the lust he can stay in others if not himself. Slabbed comic books, for the most part, boast a remoteness that is truly senseless. Regulated under auspices of perfection, these books are presented best to eyes believing, with religious fervor, that every book is indeed its untouched cover.

So here we are in the years, with thousands upon thousands of juicy, vintage comic books all locked up tight for time travel, for something beyond the living collector, for the abstraction of value: dollars doled point-by-point. Moreover, this tide has turned raw books into increasingly rarer objects, offering readerly pleasures that are becoming more difficult to obtain. Inwardly asking may bear better fruit: is a comic book best possessed as a commodity or a consumable? How do you, as a collector, choose to live out the pages you have left? Does the satyr’s whisper tempt your voyeurism with a wild, irresponsible impulse to get crackin’, case by case?

Yours from the pulp-pit,
The Pontiff @tvc