Mythic Messenger #22 - "We're not intimidated by thugs."
All-Star Comics #8 available for investment on Mythic Markets
Quick superhero P.S.A: if you head over to Mythic Markets right now you can invest in a copy of the first-ever Wonder Woman comic, All-Star Comics #8, at $37 per share.
You can also learn more about Wonder Woman’s astonishing real-life inspiration. Pretty juicy stuff, even by today's standards!
Golden Age records tumble with massive Batman auction
When it comes to big names in comics, who’s the man? It’s Batman, of course.
In an exceedingly rare public sale of a top-specimen Golden Age comic, Heritage Auctions recently auctioned an issue of Batman #1 - already a very exciting day for fans and collectors. But even among the top-end collectibles the auction house normally handles, this was a very particular specimen: a near-mint copy of the 1940 comic, practically unequalled even among the world’s top collections.
The result? A record-shattering closing bid of $2.2 million - the highest known price not just for this issue, but for any Batman comic.
Treasures of this magnitude are jealously guarded and rarely change hands; this issue was on offer after the death of previous owner Billy T. Gates. A pioneer of comics collecting and preservation, Gates spotted this copy of Batman #1 in 1979, acquiring it for the unheard-of sum of $3,000.
There was good reason for his enthusiasm - for a Golden Age comic printed on cheap, flimsy paper, this Batman #1 was in miraculous condition. Even the interior page borders had been kept a pristine white; a true rarity for its age!
Gates made sure to nurse the near-mint grading through the 40 years this issue was in his hands, and now his investment has paid off for his son… 733 times over. The only issue of any comic to command a higher price is of course Action Comics #1, the debut of Superman and genesis of modern superheroes in popular culture.
This issue is not actually Batman’s first comics appearance - that was in Detective Comics #27, which until this sale had been the most expensive Bat-comic at $1.5 million. But besides having the more recognizable title, Batman #1 has its own claim to fame: it features Bruce Wayne’s first encounters with both The Joker and Catwoman! Congratulations to whoever is the proud new owner of this genuine cultural artifact.
HBO greenlights GoT expanded universe with "Dunk & Egg"
Despite now being infamous across the internet for how showrunners fumbled the ending, HBO’s Game of Thrones was an undeniable cultural juggernaut for years. The ambitious adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s critically beloved novels brought epic fantasy to TV the way The Lord of the Rings had brought it to cinemas a decade before. And now the studio behind the franchise has plans to take us back there, announcing a new show based on GRRM’s most popular spin-off stories.
Tales of Dunk and Egg is set to follow the string of novellas written in gaps between the main Song of Ice and Fire books which were adapted for Game of Thrones. While set in the same Seven Kingdoms we know and love, the Dunk & Egg stories take place nearly a century earlier, when Westeros was still in the grip of the dragon-loving Targaryen dynasty.
The title characters are the unlikely duo of “hedge knight” Duncan the Tall (Dunk) and his soft-spoken squire, Egg - who is actually the young prince Aegon Targaryen, traveling incognito to learn about the lands he will rule. “Egg” and his notorious family provide the pair’s sole tangible connection to Game of Thrones: his brother appears in that show, now much older, as Maester Aemon of the Night’s Watch.
Follow-ups to a show as stunningly successful as Game of Thrones are inevitable, and a prequel makes sense for a bunch of reasons. With the final season leaving such a bad taste in the fandom’s mouth, resurrecting the franchise by jumping backwards on the timeline means HBO’s showrunners can completely ignore the mess left by their predecessors and start fresh. It’s such a smart idea, the studio is doing it twice; the other prequel series, House of the Dragon, will air in 2022.
Fast fandom
As always, there is a ton going on in the interconnected world of pop culture and fan media. Here are a few of the stories that caught our eye:
Batman senator to preside over impeachment hearings
Recent reports of events surrounding the outgoing Donald Trump presidency have read like something you’d expect from a comic book, so it should come as little surprise that the man set to hand down justice in his impeachment trial has a special connection to Batman!
Patrick Leahy has been a senator for 46 years, but he’s been a fan of the Caped Crusader his whole life. Sen. Leahy has cameos across at least five Batman films and voice credits in the animated series, first sharing a screen with his hero in Batman Forever.
But his biggest moment came as a Wayne Enterprises board member in The Dark Knight. Leahy’s character is the one who stares down Heath Ledger’s Joker when the Clown Prince of Crime busts into a charity ball, sternly telling him, “We’re not intimidated by thugs.” He’ll need all of that courage as he walks into a raucous senate trial later this month!
Google calls quits on Stadia game dev dreams
Google has pulled the plug on its half-baked dreams of first-party game development, leaving 150 staff from its two “SG&E” studios scrambling for new work. Those studios had been established to develop first-party games for Google’s troubled cloud gaming service, Stadia. Company executives claim that they will instead be pitching their industry-leading technology as a platform to more third party developers to populate the Stadia Pro subscription service.
The premise of Stadia seems sound; instead of needing to own a powerful PC or console, gamers can play games directly off Google’s impressive server hardware, streaming the visuals to their phone, tablet or any other screen. But sloppy marketing and confused development priorities soured audience perceptions long before release, trapping the Stadia team in an uphill battle which has just claimed a bunch more casualties.
Reddit's rebel investors bet big on alternative assets
After publicly humiliating prominent hedge funds by running up the share price of GameStop, r/WallStreetBets has all but abandoned traditional securities, instead fueling daily surges in cryptocurrencies and obscure asset classes. As with their support for AMC, Blackberry and other “meme stocks”, there is a strong vein of internet irony connecting their choice of targets, which include everything from silver bullion to “meme cryptocurrency” DogeCoin.
It’s easy to dismiss this erratic faction as rebels without a cause, but the sheer popularity of their crusade is another sign of the demand for alternative investment options at all levels of the market. While the cryptocurrencies they’ve championed haven’t gotten the same traction as the GameStop gambit, a shift to investments with a stronger identity - such as high-end collectibles - could thrust this populist movement back into the spotlight.