that there is no price guide that focuses on foreigns, values can
be all over the map with one exception that I know of. That exception dealing directly with foreign issues is the Comic Book
Price Guide of Great Britain, and for the most part values of UK
foreign “pence” variants are about half of their American counterparts. Interestingly enough many foreign variant collectors
prefer this price discrepancy for the end goal isn’t monetary
value but intrinsic value to their collections. The task of finding
these rare variants is hard enough, what is not needed on top of
everything else is sky high pricing factored into the hunts of key
books.
Condition
For American comic book collectors condition has long been
a very important issue. Obsessive would probably be a good
adjective to describe American’s views on condition. In
some countires it seems the
exact opposite of obsesive is
true in many cases dealing
with foreign countries’ collectors. The “bag and board mentality” is not something that
caught on until recently in
many foreign countries. The result is that huge amounts of
foreign material were left to the Fantastici Quattro 56, Italian edition that collects 3 issues. A Fanelements and exist in a poor
tastic Four, Secret Wars 2, and
state. Finding high-grade forthe Classic Hulk #340, Vicious cireign comics can be practically cle! Notice the Italians curious editorial decision to flip the iconic
impossible because of this
McFarlane cover so it is reversed
issue! In many of these counhorizontally?
tries, structural condition only
matters in extreme cases, like detached covers, massive tearing
or writing on a book. This being the case, many American foreign collectors have had to adjust their collecting preferences
having to do with condition.
Some would say many of the collectors in foreign countries
have a more traditional philosophy when collecting comics. The
stories and the visceral excitement of the content matter more
than the structural condition of the book. This traditional mindset, while great for what it is, makes finding foreign variants in
the highest quality condition extremely difficult and time consuming.
The other factor in condition of these books is environment.
North America sits in latitude where the environment could generally be called temperate. Many countries closer to the equator
have more tropical environs that damage books much faster because of the duel comic killing factors of high temperatures and
high humidity. The Latin American foreign variants are one
group that was highly affected by this climate issue.
The Batman Novaro 227 variant
condition problem
This variant is extremely rare and even more rare in grades above
fine. Print quality and storage issues seemed to plague this very important Mexican variant. Many comic books printed for countries in
lower latitudes not only suffered from a lack of a “bag and board
mentality”, but also a humid and tropical environment. Just finding
one 227 Novaro variant is tough, but finding three while residing outside their countries of origin is a gargantua n task.
The ironic indigenous bias by foreign
collectors
Another very important aspect to consider in foreign variant
collecting is that for many but not necessarily all, some foreign
collectors seemed to have a preference for the American editions instead of their own indigenous language versions. This
bias can be seen in the UK Comic Book Price Guide of Great
Britain where the books created for the local market are worth
considerably less than the American books. This flies in the face
of the generally accepted variant value phenomenon of
rarity=value. Normally with American variants the more rare a
book the more its generally accepted value. Not so with foreign
variants, even though the UK “pence” copies had print runs of
about a tenth of their American counterparts, they are not nearly
as valued in the UK guide.
Unfortunately, I have found that this bias for American books
seems to appear all over the world. While hunting for a particular Portuguese variant I spoke with a Portuguese collector about
why it was so difficult finding a particular book. He explained
that for the most part the Portuguese collectors at the time were
not pursuing the local Portuguese book. They wanted the American version and he found it amazing he was able to find the
Portuguese version for me at all. I believe this bias for American
books only intensified with the creation of the Internet and the
explosion of other venues for foreign collectors to pick up original American comics. It must be noted however that this view is
a just a generalization from some of my research and this bias
doesn’t necessarily exist for all foreign collectors, countries, or
types.
The other issue I believe contributed in this bias for American
versions is language. The educational systems in place in Europe and elsewhere around the world usually start children on a
path to being multilingual from very early on. Language limitations which could have caused a foreign collector to be pigeon
holed into only his countries version didn’t seem to
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