By JAMIE STENGLE
Associated Press
DALLAS (AP) - When Michael
Rorrer found 345 comic books neatly stacked in a basement closet as he
cleaned out his great aunt's Virginia home after her death, he thought
they were cool but didn't think much about their value.
He later discovered that
his late great uncle Billy Wright had managed to assemble a remarkable
comic book collection that included some of the most prized issues ever
published, and kept them in good condition. The comics are expected to
fetch more than $2 million when they are auctioned off Wednesday in New
York City.
"This is just one of those
collections that all the guys in the business think don't exist
anymore," said Lon Allen, the managing director of comics for Heritage
Auctions, the Dallas-based auction house overseeing the sale.
The collection includes 44 of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide's list of top 100 issues from comics' golden age.
"The scope of this
collection is, from a historian's perspective, dizzying," said J.C.
Vaughn, associate publisher of Overstreet.
Rorrer, 31, of Oxnard,
Calif., found the comics in his great aunt Ruby Wright's Martinsville,
Va., home a few months after her death last February. His mother, Lisa
Hernandez, 54, of League City, Texas, then divided the comics into two
boxes - one for him and one for his younger brother.
After his box arrived in
California in the fall, Rorrer mentioned the collection to a co-worker,
telling him about seeing a Captain America No. 2, a 1941 issue in which
the hero bursts in on Adolf Hitler. Rorrer, who works at a plant where
oil is separated from water, said the co-worker mused that it would be
something if he had Action Comics No. 1, in which Superman makes his
first appearance.
"I went home and was
looking through some of them, and there it was," said Rorrer, who then
began researching the collection's value in earnest.
He found that his great
uncle had managed as a boy to buy a staggering array of what became the
most valuable comic books ever published.
Once Rorrer realized how
important the comics were, he called his mother, who still had the box
for his brother at her house. He and his mother then went through their
boxes, checking comic after comic off the list.
"I couldn't believe what I had sitting there upstairs at my house," Rorrer said.
Hernandez, who works in a
chemical plant, said it really hit her how valuable the comics were when
she saw the look on Allen's face after he came to her house to look
through the comics she had there.
"It was kind of hard to wrap my head around it," Allen said.
Rorrer said he only
remembers his aunt making a fleeting reference to the comics when she
learned that he and his brother, Jonathan Rorrer, now 29 of Houston,
liked comic books. He said his great uncle, who died in 1994 at age 66,
never mentioned his collection.
The Action Comics No. 1 -
which Wright bought when he was about 11 - is expected to sell for about
$325,000. A Detective Comics No. 27, the 1939 issue that features the
first appearance of Batman, is expected to get about $475,000. And the
Captain America No. 2 with Hitler on the cover that had caught Rorrer's
eye? That's expected to bring in about $100,000.
Allen, who called the
collection "jaw-dropping," noted that Wright "seemed to have a knack"
for picking up the ones that would be the most valuable. The core of his
collection is from 1938 to 1941.
Hernandez said it makes
sense that her uncle - even as a boy - had a discerning eye. The man who
went to The College of William and Mary before having a long career as a
chemical engineer for DuPont was smart, she said. And, she added,
Wright was an only child whose mother kept most everything he had. She
said that they found games from the 1930s that were still in their
original boxes.
___
On the Net:
Heritage Auctions: http://www.ha.com
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