Marvel comics from the 1960s are the foundation of the world’s biggest pop culture brand, the MCU. But very few original copies of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original comic books still turn up in the wild, so to speak. But now and then, a valuable early Marvel title resurfaces in the unlikeliest of places. And makes the owner of said comic a nice chunk of change in the process. This 2015 clip from the Antiques Road Show features such a happy discovery. It happens when one man finds out he owns copies of the first two comic issues of Avengers from 1963. And he has his mom to thank for finding this treasure.
You can watch the clip, which resurfaced via Geeks Are Sexy, below:
The owner’s mom, who bought the comics mixed in with a box of others for just $24.00 at a storage unit auction, hit pay dirt. It was good fortune for her that whoever wound up with that box in the storage unit didn’t know what they had. And these comics only increased in value since the release of the first Avengers movie in 2012. It was that film that transformed the team into global icons. We imagine with the success of Infinity War and Endgame, and the introduction of Avengers Campus at Disneyland, these issues are worth significantly more now.
Here’s a fun fact about Avengers #1. Despite being cover-dated September 1963, Marvel Comics released it to newsstands on July 2. And also hitting the stands on that very same day was X-Men #1, also by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Imagine you’re a kid who saw these two new comics on the spinner rack, and you bought them both. If you kept them, that would have been a wise investment indeed. Especially those two titles in particular, as they would shape the cinematic superhero movie landscape four decades later. We can’t help but wonder what else was in that box of old comics.
