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Terry Hooper-Scharf

Tuesday, 17 June 2025

No, British Golden Age Reprints Do NOT Make Me Money



There seems to be a belief in certain very small circles that I make money out of the British Golden Age reprints.  Let me set the record straight (again). 

There is only a small amount of interest in British Platinum, Golden and Silver ages comics. As two You Tubers in the US pointed out in videos I watched last night: "Old don't mean they are worth a lot of money.; There is limited interest."  There is this online inspire money grab craze going on where a comic dated 1989 is "vintage"/"rare" but I was involved in comics and looked into comic production and the books would only be rare if many thousands of other copies were all suddenly destroyed. The same applies to toys -Ebayers and dealers are literally making a very (VERY) profitable living buying things cheap at car boot sales or charity shops then adding £20-40 on top to sell (Americans £20-40 would $26-53). 

I bought a lot of vintage annuals/albums and comics and have never spent over £10 ($13). That written I can still state that the books I have are worth a few thousand BUT no one wants to buy at a reasonable price but then, I am not intending getting rid of them.  I now see these annuals with price tags of £20-100 (which is ludicrous).

I have the books and then I decide what needs to be scanned and put into the next album or book. Cleaning and resizing scans takes a long time and even the print on Demand uploading and publishing can be a pain and one 48 pages album can take a couple weeks of daily work and then I price as low as I can (the POD company and printers take a big cut and as the POD company is in the US I get hit with US taxes and when the exchange rate is favourable to the POD!).

Basically, the books are "giveaways" as I am lucky to get £4-5 ($5-6 dollars back, usually less.) -you need to sell 50+ books to get some money back and even then it is not compensation for all the time and effort. The Golden age books are a "vanity project"/work of love to save characters, publishers and even creators from obscurity and I have been doing that since 1984.   It sounds weird but I open up an old comic or annual and turn a page and -there is a character I have never heard of or even a chance purchase and I find the origin of TNT Tom which I will tell you now I NEVER ever expected to see! Apparently I was flapping around like a real weirdo all day!

No money making (I am not against that!) but it's a bit of a passion so as long as I keep finding the old strips I will keep making sure they do not fade into obscurity!

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