Ask John: Are There Any Super Valuable Manga?

Question:
The world’s most expensive comic book was Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman. It fetched a record 2.16 million. Several other top comics have fetched several hundred thousand dollars, and the first appearance of Spider-Man has netted over a million.

This price is because of the ongoing cultural popularity of many characters and the rarity of the comic books. (Most people didn’t keep their old comic collections, basic supply and demand.) I’m curious but does the world of Japanese manga have any similar rare collectibles which have collected extraordinary prices? And which one was the most expensive of them all that Japanese otaku dreaming of finding hidden away in their houses or at a garage sale?

Answer:
I first need to explain that my primary field of interest and knowledge if anime rather than manga, so my consciousness of manga valuations and scarcity is itself very limited. Partially based on differences in the philosophy of Japanese collectors compared to Americans, I’m not aware of any existing manga that have collector values that rival the most expensive American comics, like Action Comics issue 1, Detective Comics issue 27, or Superman issue 1. America’s comic collecting community is largely focused around possessing archival copies of landmark books. The Japanese otaku community, on the other hand, is typically far more concerned with reading comics than necessarily possessing historical artifacts. Vintage and rare manga do accrue some significant collector value in Japan, but typically these exuberant prices are based solely on scarcity, not innate historical relevance. For example, the first volume of Seimu Yoshizaki’s contemporary manga series Kingyo Used Books – a manga series about respecting vintage manga – cites that Mitsuhiro Kawashima’s 1954 adventure manga series Billy Puck has been out of print for years, and first edition books are the valuable “envy of all serious manga fans” due to their scarcity and historical significance. Likewise, the first volume of Kingyo Used Books cites mint condition copies of Yukiko Kai’s manga from the early 1980s as especially valuable because they’re no longer widely available. However, again citing Kingyo Used Books, even first editions of Akira Toriyama’s perennially popular Dr. Slump have minimal collector value because the series is still in print and is widely available. So there’s little reason for Japanese collectors to seek out vintage first editions when current reprints are cheap and conveniently available.

Another cause for some degree of Japanese manga valuation can be censorship. While I’m not aware that books like the early printings of Katsura Masakazu’s Video Girl Ai manga volumes 3 & 5 are especially valuable, they are relatively sought after because they’re uncensored while later printings of the books changed the art in select panels to cover up nudity.

The Kingyo Used Books manga series partially revolves around “sedori,” professional speculators/scavengers who spend their days buying rare manga cheaply from bookstores and collectors that don’t realize the books’ values, then reselling the treasures at a profit. The existence of such professionals clearly dictates that Japan does have a large number of valuable, collectible manga. However, possibly due to my own forgetfulness or ignorance, I’m not aware of any Japanese manga that command collector values approaching the million plus recently paid for comics like Detective Comics 27 and Action Comics 1.