Panelology #1 - December 2009 |
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Welcome to panelology.info. It's all about serious comic book studies with all the fun still left intact. To kick off this new website, I had originally planned to elaborate on the term panelology and why exactly I feel it covers the field of comic book studies so well, but as happens so often, I changed my plans upon contact with the enemy. No, with enemy, I don't mean any comicbook unfriendly parental or educational organisation. Matter of fact, they're not always entirely wrong. No, I'm thinking more in terms of the global economic downturn and the guys who started the whole mess, got saved by Super Paxtayer, and are now seemingly back to their super duper money game as if nothing had happened. |
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No connection to comic books, right? Wrong. If experts and laymen alike are attributing the economic crisis to speculation and greed as driving factors, then comic books are a part of the game. The all-out search for financial profits has long been a part of the collectible's markets, including comics. And so, as Jerry Bails was thinking foremost of the hobby of collecting comics when he coined the term panelology in the 1960s, I changed my plans and decided to kick off this website by revisiting material which I had compiled in 2007 on how the comic book market is, like many others, a constructed environment, I was quite curious to see if and how the financial crisis had affected the comic book. If I had hoped to see a return to common sense, then I was utterly disappointed as I updated my write-up. So roll up your favourite easy chair in front of your monitor, sit back and read about old and new comic books, why and how people collect them, how prices for comics began to rise in the late 1960s, what the Overstreet Price Guide and CGC have to do with this, how and why the comic speculators bubble popped in the mid-1990s, and why people are seriously hoping that Amazing Spider-Man #583 (2009) will one day sell for a substantial profit, almost as if it were Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962). |
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