Ask John: Is Anime Worth Investing In?

Question:
I was wondering if you think the DBZ videos Perfect Cell: Temptation and Perfect Cell: Perfection will be worth anything in the future because the episode numbers on the boxes were printed incorrectly (with different numbers). Will they become collectors’ items?

Answer:
Honestly, I don’t think there’s really a market for misprint anime merchandise in America or Japan. Some of the Trigun volume 2 issues were printed with the wrong episode number as well, but I haven’t heard of anyone making a big deal of it at all. In my experience, most anime merchandise doesn’t significantly appreciate in value at all, unlike things such as American comic books and baseball cards. Generally the only factors that seem to make particular anime merchandise increase in value are age and scarcity conjoined with quality. Generally only high quality anime merchandise increases in value with time. Even very old anime trinkets, monthly magazines and tankouban, for example, items that are considered temporary rather than archival collectible items, generally don’t noticeably appreciate in value. For the most part, since the collector’s market for anime merchandise is relatively small, the only anime items that really increase in value are items that have a significant intrinsic worth to begin with; that is, hand painted cels, nice quality illustration books, garage kits, certain desirable laserdiscs… While oddities, variants and misprints may be very collectable in fields like stamps, coins, cards and action figure toys, anime fans generally seem not to have the same type of completist mentality that values this sort of esoterica.

In simple terms, I think the best advice I can give to you is this: don’t buy anime stuff because you expect it to become valuable. You’ll probably end up disappointed. Buy what you like and you’ll always be happy.