I Blame It on the Wives and Mothers Out There

I blame it on all the wives and mothers out there.  You know how it goes, guys.  Sooner or later your wife gets tired of dealing with all your "stuff," and she starts to pressure you into getting rid of some of it.  So you dump a little of your lesser stuff, not the good stuff, but it still hurts.  And then it happens again.  And then again.  One day you realize your good stuff is gone - all those comic books and  baseball cards you accumulated as a kid are history.  If you were lucky, you picked up a few bucks in the process; if not, you gave everything to nephews and neighborhood kids that are going to destroy it all in a few months time.

Of course, none of that happened if your mother convinced you to give your stuff to your young cousins before you even had a wife to make those kind of decisions for you.  How many guys have come home from college or, as in my case, the military, to find their collectibles gone?

The Sacramento Bee has the story of one man who did manage to hang onto a comic book he paid 10 cents for in 1939.  But this was not just any comic book; it is an almost perfect copy of "Detective Comics #27," the very first comic book in which Batman appeared, and it sold at a November 18 Dallas auction for an astounding $492,937.

Irwin, who traveled to Dallas with his wife and son to attend the live auction, will make roughly $400,000, once the auction house subtracts its commission fee.


Irwin said he planned to celebrate with dinner in Dallas before returning home today.


He intends to use the bulk of the money from the auction to pay off the mortgage on his Granite Bay home.


"At my age, I'd rather be free and clear so that I don't have to owe anyone anything," said Irwin.

Seriously, folks. Think about the odds against something like this happening.  In 1939, a 13-year-old boy hands a dime to a Sacramento newsstand and takes a comic book featuring a new superhero home with him.  Some 71 years later, that same boy, now an 84-year-old man, sells that very same Batman comic book for almost half a million dollars.   His mother and wife/wives must have been slackers.  (Just kidding, ladies.)