Planet Money - We Buy a Superhero 7: Collectibles (Live Show!)

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

What transforms a regular object into a collectible? At our live show earlier this month, we went on a journey through collectibles history. And we had a goal: to turn our Micro-Face comic book into the most collectible item of all time. | Bid on our collectible Micro-Face comic book here!Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Christmas tree here! Make a t-shirt and then file that shirt around the world as it gets made. We were Toxie's last owners. She was our pet toxic acid. A hundred barrels of crude oil. Three, two, one, we have ignition. Oh, whoa, oh my gosh. This is Planet Money Studios from NPR. Hey, everybody. Wow. Wow. We're so excited to have you here. I'm Robert Smith. And I'm Kenny Malone. How many of you are familiar with Microface? Just to get a gauge.

It's not everybody. A few weeks ago, we recorded a live Planet Money episode at the Roulette Theater in Brooklyn. This was the culmination of our superhero series, in which we discovered a forgotten 1940s superhero with audio superpowers named Microface. We found a way to own a version of that intellectual property. We resurrected Microface by writing and publishing a brand new comic book. Eventually, it took us a while, Robert,

but we did get there. We got there. But now that we had that comic book in hand, we knew there was one more crucial corner of the superhero business we needed to explore. And just to set the scene for you, Robert and I are standing on a stage at a couple of music stands. There's a giant movie theater screen behind us showing pictures of things that we referenced throughout the show. One more thing you should know. On stage, Kenny and I are each holding copies of our Microface comic book, Hot Off the Presses.

And at the very front of the stage, there is a mysterious black briefcase. It's inlaid with the words Microface Origins Edition. Ooh. Could that case contain the most collectible item ever made by mankind? Here's the show. All right.

We good? So the podcast, we generally begin with a three, two, one. There you go. You're in the podcast now. That was a good move. Respect. Yeah. All right. In're in the podcast now. That was a good move. Respect. Yeah. All right. In three, two, one.

Over the last year, we here at Planet Money have been creating a physical product, which I hold in my hands now, the Microface comic book. Yeah. And for us, this is a kind of work of art, for sure. It's the story of a lost character. It's a teaching lesson about intellectual property.

But at the end of the day, it is also a mass-produced product that we made in a printing factory. And we've printed 15,000 identical copies. We're selling each of them for the identical price of $6.99. It stops to feel like art at some point. Yeah, that's fine. Mass market is fine. We're an economics podcast. We understand this. You sell your marginal comic book for more than your marginal cost, and that's profit. But as any entertainment company can tell you, if you just sell an average product to an average fan, you're leaving money on the table. You're forgetting about the super fan.

You're leaving money on the table. You're forgetting about the superfan. Leaving money on the table feels a little cynical, Robert. But yes, okay. Because I am one of these superfan types, and when I am into something, I'm all the way in, Robert, as you know. I want the specific shirt from my favorite Nicktoon character.

I want the version of Mad Max Fury Road that comes in a steel case. I want the actual film used to project Madame Leota onto a crystal ball at Disney World, all of which I have and own. From a business perspective, if you spot a super fan like Kenny desperate to hand over his money for the love of something special? Well, I mean, you would be remiss not to meet that need. If there are collectors, you have to give them objects to collect. You have to somehow create collectibles. Here's where music would go.

Tickety-tickety-tickety-tickety-tickety-tickety-tickety. I know, it's exciting. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Robert Smith, and we're recording live. We're recording live from the Roulette Theater in Brooklyn, New York. Tonight we have gathered 300 or so Planet Money superfans in the audience. They are for the final test of our little microface comic. Can we take this mass-produced, stapled collection of papers and transform it into rare collectible versions of our microface

comic. In order to pull this off, we need to study the greatest, the most ruthless, the most hilarious moments in collectible history. And we'll use these secrets that we uncover to make what we believe is the most collectible item of all time.

Good. We didn't even tell them to do that. Not hypothetical. In this case is the ultimate never before seen one of a kind knock your socks off edition of the Microface

comic book. The greatest collectible ever made in human history. After the break. Okay, our mission was simple. Create the most collectible item in human history. No big deal. We figured there's got to be an art to this, right? And in order to pull it off, we need to go through the history of comic book collectibles, a journey with just five stops. So we figured, let us begin with what many say is the most collectible comic book of all time from 1938, many of you will know, Action Comics number one, aka the one where Superman shows up for the first time. Who knows Action Comics number one? Who owns Action Comics number one?

All right. Now, obviously at first no one thought of this comic book as a collectible. No more than a daily newspaper was collectible. It's cheap paper, you read it once, you throw it away. And apparently 99.95% of all people did exactly that. There were an estimated 200,000 copies of Action Comics number one

printed. There are now maybe 100 left. It cost 10 cents in 1938. A nice copy will run you about 3.2 million dollars today. So the number one lesson that we've learned for creating a collectible is that we should make most people throw away the comic book

and then wait 80 years and profit. Yes, time and scarcity. It's sort of hard to recreate, I suppose. Not that comic book manufacturers didn't try. And for our next lesson, we jump to the 1970s, when at least one comic book maker started to wonder, what could we do to make comic books special without having to wait 80 years? Collectible item number two, the 1977 Kiss comic book. In 1977, the band Kiss announced that they were partnering with Marvel to make a Kiss comic book in which, I'm going to flip through a little bit, I guess Kiss goes to space and gets punched a bunch by Doctor Doom?

Fine. But what's important for our collectible quest here is the actual production of the comic. the actual production of the comic. You see, Kiss had found a printer in Buffalo, New York, willing to help them do something very special inside this comic. Yes, and I think we need to just let the 1977 local Buffalo reporter explain this, because I swear to you, I've never heard a reporter obviously hate something so much in my entire life. Kiss, I'm told, is a big rock group on some level of music,

appealing to that portion of the population that finds its collective voice changing and reads comic books. Speaking of which, Kiss is going to have its own comic book soon. To that end, Kiss flew into Buffalo today, yes, with a plane, a Brinks truck bringing a little white box in which were four vials of real Kiss blood, which were summarily dumped into some

printing ink for the old comic book. Isn't that wonderful? You know what? It is freaking wonderful. It's great. Blood in the red ink of the Kiss comic book, because Kiss had figured out a way to make a mass-produced commodity, but still imbue it with something special.

And Kiss was right. The blood story was valuable. It imbued this physical object with a real story, which is our second lesson. You can create a collectible by making it part of a myth. Yes, yes. Okay, time, scarcity, mythology. Yep. All right. Now, maybe you can manufacture a collectible by making it part of a myth. Yes, yes. Okay, time scarcity mythology. Yep. All right. Now, maybe you can manufacture a little specialness, which brings us to our third collectible, or rather collectible moment. It is the 90s comic book bubble.

In the 1990s, lots of people started to realize that really old comic books were worth a lot. And so a lot of people started to buy up new comic books thinking, geniuses, well, I'm just going to put them in this plastic sleeve, put them in a box, put them in the back of my closet, and then someday I'm going to be rich. Now the comic book companies of course are like, oh, oh, you guys want to invest?

Sure, let's do it. Well, lucky for you, we now offer lots of collectible editions. You've got the foil one, you've got the embossed collectible editions. You got the foil one. You got the embossed bumpy one. You got the foil and the embossed one. You got the glow in the dark. You got the hologram.

You got the 3D magic eye. Now, you can imagine the comic book companies just seeing this and being like, more. We need to make more, more, more. Run the printers. Charge more per comic. Feed the demand. But then came what some people say was the peak of the collectible bubble,

the death of Superman. Oh, that's very good. In 1992, DC Comics announced that they were going to kill Superman in a comic book. And I suspect a number of you remember this because this was front page news. This was on the evening news. Everyone was like, oh, oh, this is the end of an era.

And so many of us had the exact same misinformed thought, which is, well, I missed out on the first Superman comic. I'm sure as hell not going to miss out on the last Superman comic. Yeah. It was not the last Superman comic. It wasn't the last one. People were confused. DC sold so many of these, and are all the people who bought them rich today, Kenny?

Well, at least somebody on eBay is $10 richer. Because this here is a pristine, still-in-the-plastic copy of The Death of Superman. Adjusted for inflation, I guess that guy made like five bucks. See, the problem with tens of thousands of people all buying comics as investments is the comics aren't actually scarce. And that's the irony of Superman number one. It's collectible because no one collected it. I mean, it's Superman, but sure.

Yeah. And so the comic book bubble popped, sales plummeted, it was very bad for a lot of people. Now, it would be reasonable to look at the 90s nonsense and say no collectible lessons to be learned here, just companies wringing more money out of everybody, but I was a kid in the 90s. This is my comic book era, and I had no idea

that shiny covers and bumpy covers and 3D covers were just a gimmick i loved them and i still do i saved all of them i collected them they're collectible to me even if those gimmicky covers came from a cynical period of collectible comic mayhem coming up after the break things got more cynical and weirdly more worthy of love. You guys like that one? We can do a different one to the break. We can come up with another one.

I like the mayhem. I thought about playing on the mayhem one. Coming up after the break? I don't know. I got nothing. I got nothing. There's a famous story in the collectible world. Around the year 1990, a business executive with a kid was forced to watch his kid's favorite movie over and over again, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And reportedly, one scene in particular really started to get into his brain.

This scene. I want you to be the first to find a golden ticket, Daddy! I know, Angel. We're doing the best we can. I've got every girl on the bleeding staff hunting for you. I want it now. This is, of course, the scene where a factory of people are ripping open chocolate bars and throwing away the chocolate bars

because all anyone cares about anymore is finding a golden ticket. I've got a golden ticket. So our business executive is watching this. An executive who happens to run the Upper Deck Trading Card Company. And he's thinking, I've got a golden ticket. I've got a golden ticket. Wait a minute. We should have a golden ticket somewhere in our pack of baseball cards.

Which brings us to collectible number four, find the Reggie. What this upper deck executive does is he gets an enormously famous baseball player named Reggie Jackson, has Reggie sign and hand number 2,500 cards, and then randomly inserts those into packets. And friends, here tonight,

an unopened pack of 1990 Find the Reggie upper deck cards. When I got this on eBay, I opened it, and the smell of, like, childhood gambling just, like, flooded my nostrils. And I was like, oh, this is, like, my thing.

Oh, my God. Anyway, okay. He's a super fan. It's true. And friends, I have purchased an unopened pack. We have it right now. But if we never open it, there always might be a Reggie in here. We could resell this pack. It has some value still.

But if we open it, it's probably worth nothing. 99% of the time, it's zero. Or maybe worth hundreds of dollars. Sort of Schrodinger's Reggie. So, we're going to put this to a vote. Do we open this and destroy its value? Oh!

Okay, okay, here we go. That's good. All right, here we go. All right, here we go. Nope. Nope. Kent. Rebecca. That was a tough one. There were three consonants in a row on that guy's name.

Nope. Andy Allenson. Nope, nope, nope. Matt Young. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Nope. No golden ticket. This is sad.

But it is still thrilling. And we were thinking about why is this thrilling? It's because I actually do believe that finding a Reggie would be special. Because Reggie Jackson isn't going to sit there and sign cards for eternity. So it really would have been special for me. So this promotion does very, very well, which brings us to our final,

our fifth collectible ploy we can learn from. Baseball card companies, they're like, you guys like autographs on cards in your packs? Well, hold on to your butts. We put Sammy Sosa's sweaty game-used jersey onto a card. We put Ken Griffey Jr.'s bat, we cut it up into pieces and put it on a card. Which reminds me of like a medieval relic, right? It's like a sliver of wood from the true cross or St. Clair's fingernail clippings or Babe Ruth's shirt. Babe Ruth's shirt? We put that on a card. Oh no! People were mad. There's one quote from the time that's like, what's next? George put that on a card. Oh, no! People were mad. There's one quote from the time that's like,

what's next? George Washington's Revolutionary War uniform. People loved it, though. Because it feels, I don't know, it's proximity. It's like, I'm close to this childhood icon of mine, and I really like being able to have this. I don't even really care if I can resell this. But this feeling is exactly what we want to create with the microface collectibles

it's not about the thing it's not about the investment it's not about the experience it's about this kind of love that Kenny has for an object so what have we learned what have we learned so far let's do the recap okay. A collectible must be truly scarce. Do not accidentally flood the market, like in the 1990s. Yes, but if you do want to push your luck, like a collectible can be variations on a theme, maybe some fun covers, like it's not the end of the world. Yeah, lesson three, a collectible must contain human blood.

No. No, that was not the lesson. No, I didn't. The lesson was must contain a good story yeah good story part of mythology yes yes yes and and finally a good collectible must bring you proximity maybe even incorporating real physical items that have some sort of connection to a human being which brings us to our final collectible it is here in this case the one of a kind microface origins edition now as part of this live show we listed this very special edition for sale for 1943 dollars

any of you could have bought this admittedly we only told you that it is very, very, very special. And yet you did not believe us. None of you bought this. But you're going to be kicking yourself because it is worth way more than that $1,943. Kenny, show them what they get. All right. For the first time ever, we will reveal...

And from the briefcase beamed a brilliant light. For Planet Money had created a microface collectible comic so perfect, so singular, so complicated, that Robert and Kenny are going to have to cut in here and explain everything. And here we are. Yes. Okay. Because what we had created and what we revealed to the audience that evening was a single microface comic book to which we had attempted to apply

every single lesson from collectibles history this folks is the whole magilla if that's what you say that's it has lesson one like in the 1990s we wanted an alternative collectible cover so we secretly made a completely different version of our same comic book with a totally different cover that is also embossed, a little fancy and bumpy. And this edition comes with a real piece of the hand-drawn original comic book art by our illustrator, Jamal Igle. But that's not all, as they say. The next lesson, incorporate real cut-up pieces of stuff, you know, like jerseys and bats, to create this sense of proximity. Yes, but what is the podcast version of a jersey or bat, we wondered?

Cut up a microphone? Staple the shirt Robert was wearing to a comic book? No? No, no. No? I love that shirt. But then we remembered, the way we introduced our microface character to the world was with a little radio drama in which our hero received a mysterious

super suit from his grandfather. Here's a little clip from that drama. It says it's from my grandpa. He's been dead for 10 years. I don't know what to tell you, kid. I don't know what to tell you, kid. It's some kind of... Mask? Yes, okay. Now, that mask sound effect, the one that sounds like this. We improvised this sound effect using a random vinyl bag that I stole from my parents' attic. And we were like, great, that's memorabilia. That'll work.

Yeah. So, okay. I enlisted my quilter mother to cut that vinyl bag into little squares. Very professional. Yes, indeed. And then we very artfully attached a little square to our special edition book. And then like find the Reggie, we hand-numbered, signed, and authenticated the little square. Boom. Certified pod used material. But we had to make sure this was truly scarce. Like, how do we prove we won't just flood the market with lots of comic books covered in special little fabric squares? We did have lots of leftover fabric, so we figured there was only one way to create real scarcity here. I think this,

I hope this doesn't go up too fast. We lit a fire in the backyard and then we burned the leftover podcast used material. Whoa. Step back, step back. Real scarcity. That's how you get it. Oh, and then inspired by the band Kiss, I did take the fiery ashes from our burned prop micro mask. Ow, it's still hot. And then poured those ashes into red ink, which I then painted onto a small section of the comic book. Ugh, ash paint. Look, it looks better than you would think, Robert. There was one more thing we wanted to do, or specifically a person that we needed to call.

Okay, I put you on speaker. That's better. I think that's okay, yeah. a person that we needed to call. Okay, I put you on speaker. That's better. I think that's okay, yeah. Peggy Lauks, daughter of the original Microface creator, Alan Ulmer.

Her dad created Microface back in the 1940s. One of his favorite characters, according to Peggy. And Peggy told us she didn't have any copies of that original Microface book from 1943.

They're pretty hard to find at this point. They're kind of like the Babe Ruth jersey of Microface. Oh, oh, oh, oh. What is this? We were able to find a real original 1943 Microface comic book,

like the very first Microface. And it was a little bit in shambles, so it was kind of coming apart. But that is a real 1943 Microface page. So it was kind of coming apart, but that is a real 1943 microface page. I just have, well, I'm sure I will think of more things to say right now. I'm really like, it's not me to be almost speechless. That is my experience. Yes, that's right.

Thank you. Thank you. Now, Peggy gets to keep that page, but there is one other pristine comic book page. That is part of our collectible Microface comic book, a real page from the real with original artist pencils with signed, numbered, and certified MicroMask podcast used material, the excess of which was burned to ensure scarcity, the ashes of which were poured into red ink to create a weird mythology, plus an original 1943 Microface premiere page, all carefully packed inside foam, inside a custom briefcase. This is the result of weeks and weeks of work, mostly Kenny's work. It was maybe not the best use of time. That might be true. And yet there was still one more thing Kenny added. You know those greeting cards where you open them up and they sing happy birthday to you. Well, Kenny found a place that sells cards that says whatever you want,

and then he somehow rigged that card into this special comic book. And you know what? We're just going to go back to the live show and let you hear how this played out on stage. If you open this book up to the magical right page, don't fail me now, Microface.

Prime can claim home by itself with most credit menace. Microface. But you, collector, can thank yourself for obtaining this one-of-a-kind comic book. You own one of one. Microface Origins Edition. So obviously the greatest collectible of all time,

but what is it worth? What is it worth? At this point, it's worth zero because nobody paid for it, right? But what will it be worth? Will it be worth millions? It will. I will say there is this weird beauty to this project

and all of the work that you've put into it. Thank you. I just want to hold it while we do this ending. So if you think about it, like a year ago, we set out on this huge artistic project, right? You know, making a comic book. And we brought together some of the best comic book artists and storytellers, some pretty good radio folks. And it always felt like an artistic endeavor. But then all that work went into making a commodity, right? A mass-produced book that we will almost certainly keep printing until it is worth nothing.

But with this collector's edition, we've now spent all of this work and time, well, mostly Kenny, wrestling back just a little bit of the artistic originality. So this is truly one of one. It's a work of art. Yeah, Robert. Maybe it doesn't matter if we ever sell this book.

No, we're totally going to sell it. We've got to sell it. It's the mission. Starting today, not today, but when the podcast airs. Starting today, this collector's edition of Microface is officially available for auction. Let the market decide.

You can head over to npr.org slash superhero for details. That's right. Music would probably start here, too. Let me put this back because I don't want to sit on it again. This has been our live episode of Planet Money and we're serious. Our one of a kind Origins edition of our Microface comic book is now up for auction.

All of that stuff and the briefcase, the details are at npr.org slash superhero. The auction will be live for exactly one week. So do not dilly dally if you're interested. And also, I know the list of things we did to make that comic book is huge, but we didn't even mention all of them. If you want to see the full rundown, again, you can head over to This live episode was produced by Willa Rubin,

edited by Molly Messick and Jess Jang. It was engineered by Gilly Moon and Isaac Rodriguez. Planet Money's executive producer is Alex Goldmark. Special thanks to Devin Meller and to our friends over at NPR's live events team, Devin Williams and Gianna Cappadona, and to Jessica Goldstein and Joanna Polowska, who also helped edit this show. We truly, truly could not have done this without you all. And of course, a very, very, very special thanks to our Brooklyn Roulette audience. Thank you all so much. I'm Kenny Malone.

And I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. and a special thanks to our funder the alfred p sloan foundation for helping to support this podcast