When did comic book collecting become popular?

When did comic book collecting become popular?

Mark Zaid (Owner of Esquire Comics) gives expert video advice on: When did comic book collecting become popular?; How do you become a comic book collector?; Should I insure my comic books? and more...

Comic book collecting has had it's ups and downs as far as popularity is concerned. Certainly when comic books became extremely popular in the late 1930s with the creation of Superman and Batman, they were bought and they were primarily discarded, though there were collectors and kids who collected them. But I would say that comic book collecting really took root more in the 1960s when kids were starting to really buy them and hold on to them and the back-issue market started to develop. By the 1980s, everybody was collecting, we were collecting everything, nobody throws out anything. You always hear the stories of those from the generation, of the World War 2 generation or the baby boomers, their parents threw out comics. You don't do that now, nothing gets thrown out with our hobbies today. So comic book collecting pretty much took root, say in the 1960s, especially into the 1980s.