Found out 70% of Silver Age comics are actually reprints and it blew my mind

I was digging through a longbox at a flea market in Cleveland last weekend and saw 3 copies of the same Green Lantern issue from 1963. The seller told me that most of those classic books people think are original are actually later reprints from the 70s and 80s. Apparently publishers like DC would reprint entire runs with just a tiny mark on the spine to tell em apart. I checked a few of my own comics when I got home and yeah, half my collection is fake. Has anyone else accidentally been hoarding reprints thinking they had first prints?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamies451mo ago

Saw a documentary on this last year that talked about how DC shipped mostly reprints to newsstands in rural areas during the 70s. The original 1960s stuff went to big city shops mostly. So if your grandpa grabbed comics off a rack in a small town, he almost certainly got reprints and never knew it. The tell is apparently the cover price - if it says 15 cents when the original was 12 cents, you're holding a later printing. My buddy has a whole box of those Silver Age Flash comics that are all 1972 reprints and he's still salty about it.

richard_wells591mo ago

Wait, did the documentary say if the reprints had different ads or paper quality too?