The problem is the difference between a collector's market and a speculators market. A collector assigns value because you can read it or because of legitimate

The problem is the difference between a collector's market and a speculators market. A collector assigns value because you can read it or because of legitimate rarity at the time or other personal issues. A speculator just hitches on to "first appearance of!" issues of popular characters and slabs them up to resell. Like for example, something like First Comics's Warp is incredibly valuable to me, because it's a comics adaptation/spin-off of an old science fiction stage play that doesn't seem to even exist any more. (By Stuart Gordon of Re-animator fame, no less.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp! It's not the popular first appearance of a Marvel character we've seen for 50 years, but it's much more of a historical rarity imo. There's a lot of things which are of value to collectors less than speculators; something like trying to collect a lot of Carl Banks's Disney books simply because of the sheer quality of them for example. Or loving independent comics of the 90s and trying to track down the beginnings of the furry movement; Albedo, Hepcats, Omaha the Cat Dancer, etc. There are whole teams that are just ignored by the speculators; Wally Wood's DNagents for example. It's just the speculators market is just actually trying to flip really common comics that are evergreen. Those really have little value to them; stuff like Spiderman's first symbiote costume appearance wasn't really that earth shattering a story. Secret Wars was kind of a lame crossover for its time and i doubt would even be considered one of the great crossovers. That's why its main interests are mostly forgotten, like the Beyonder or Molecule Man. So yes, some of the value is in reading the comic itself. It's just the market is weird and never reflects it. Did you know the first video game tie in comic dates back to the Atari age, with DC's release of Atari Force? And it actually was a serious, decent SF comic? Yet you could probably find it in a store's dollar bins, while a spiderman or punisher apperance that was really common at the time is considered valuable even if all the story does is introduce something kind of commonplace or unspectacular. Sorry this is one of my passion things, I'll get back to my usual growly self soon.