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Christine Farrell's Complete DC Comics Collection Comes To Auction

Heritage Auctions presents Christine Farrell's complete DC Comics collection, featuring rare issues and original art.

Heritage Auctions is to sell a complete DC Comics collection, as collected over the decades by Christine Farrell, once profiled in 1983 by the Associated Press as a "comic-crazed collector" from Burlington, Vermont, who "lives in a land of simple truths, where swashbuckling superheroes match wits with the world's most cunning criminals." Those simple truths are now worth a literal king's ransom.

At the time, the AP reported that Farrell had about 8,000 comics "crammed into cartons stacked to the ceiling in an upstairs bedroom." By the time she died in April of 2024, her collection had grown exponentially. In her basement vault and scattered throughout her house, Farrell left behind tens of thousands of books, among them every single one available DC Comics had ever published, beginning with 1935's New Fun Comics No. 1 and including 1940's Double Action Comics #2, of which there are only seven copies said to have survived.

Farrell began collecting in 1970 and completed it in 2007, when she acquired at least one copy of every available comic DC had ever published. Farrell even loaned her books to DC when they couldn't find copies to make reprints. But unlike some other collectors, she declined to let her name be known to those who used her collection, or be publicised for it. She also owned the comic shop in Burlington called Earth Prime Comics, but kept her own acquisitions private.

That has now changed as, from the 25th and 26th of October, Heritage will present The Christine Farrell Complete DC Collection, an auction featuring nearly 500 comic books, including some of comicdom's rarest, and works of original comic art, including key pages from Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing #1 and Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns #4. Bidding is now open, and Heritage will present further books from Farrell's collection well into the summer of 2025, says Heritage Auctions Vice President Lon Allen.

"Her dedication was simply remarkable," Allen says. "She did most of this pre-internet! Now, you could put that collection together in several years if you had the money. But back then, tracking down every book took real devotion. And she did not own a single graded or certified book. They were in mylar sleeves, in boxes, sometimes in piles. It was clear that she just wanted to read these books, no matter how many thousands of dollars they were worth… This would have to be, by far, the best-assembled collection I've ever gone through."

Allen sent those books from Farrell's collection to Certified Guaranty Company – and many returned with some of the highest grades ever given to some of the Golden Age's rarest and most sought-after books. Heritage began offering some of Farrell's books at the end of September, including a Conserved Fine+ 6.5 copy of 1935's New Comics No. 1 that realized nearly $8,000. "Her collection is already doing really well," Allen says. "I knew it would, because it's rare and fantastic."

There are numerous Golden Age keys in this event, including restored copies of Action Comics #1 and Superman #1, a Fine+ 6.5 copy of Detective Comics #38 (Robin's debut), a restored Very Fine- 7.5 All Star Comics #3 (the first appearance of the Justice Society of America) and a Very Good/Fine 5.0 copy of Flash Comics #1. But what's most notable about Farrell's collection are its numerous and estimable rarities, the books rated 8s, 9s and 10s in Ernst and Mary Gerber's definitive Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books' Scarcity Index – those issues and titles seldom seen at auction or anywhere else.

That Double Action Comics #2 is such a rare book there has long been some disagreement about whether it was one of a handful of ashcan copies made "purely for trademark and copyright registration" (as DC noted in its 75^th-anniversary history The Art of Modern Mythmaking) or a limited-distribution test product made to see whether customers would buy black-and-white reprints of other comics. Farrell didn't care either way: The book, deemed a 10 on the Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books' Scarcity Index, was a DC title, so it had to be in her collection, no matter how long it took to track it down.

Here, too, are copies of Detective Comics #2 (a Very Good+ 4.5) and #3 (Good/Very Good 3.0), both of which The Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books rates as very-rare 9s on its Scarcity Index. The former is one of only five unrestored copies Heritage has seen graded higher than Good- 1.8; the latter is so rare CGC has graded only 17 copies.

And despite Farrell's desire to read rather than merely stash and store these books, many of her comics came back as some of the highest-graded copies on the CGC population reports, among them an All-Star Comics # 32 graded Near Mint+ 9.6; an Action Comics #182 graded Very Fine/Near Mint 9.0; the sole copy of All-Flash #6 to come in at Near Mint- 9.2; and a Superman #49 graded Near Mint- 9.2.

Farrell's friend of nearly four decades, comics dealer Joe Verenault, says Farrell seldom spoke of her collection simply because "she was a very private person by her nature… Chris loved this particular company of comics, DC, and she did it for that reason alone. The fact that it turned out to be such a hard achievement and that they became staggeringly valuable was really secondary to her. But she was very, very pleased at how appreciated it was in the hobby that she had done such a thing."

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