Christine Farrell started reading comic books when she was a kid, and started collecting them in her teenage years. A 1995 interview with Mountain Lake PBS shows Farrell’s collection piled in boxes around her house. In the video, she pulls a comic from a box labeled "Wonder Woman issues 121 to 145."
“This one, I paid a whopping 12 cents for — it was 1963 at the time,” she told host Derek Muirden. “And my mother insisted my name be on the books if I was going to lend them to friends … so she wrote my name on the cover.”
Farrell told the TV station that at first she favored comics with female leads, like Lois Lane and Supergirl. But soon she was buying them all.
In the early 1980s, Farrell opened the shop Earth Prime Comics in Burlington. But as she told Mountain Lake PBS, her collection was just for her.
“I buy them because I want to read them — although my reading is about 10 years behind,” Farrell said. “But not for resale, not at all. I do not intend to sell the collection. That's not what I'm in it for.”
Farrell died in April at the age of 72. And now, many of the tens of thousands of comics in her collection will be sold. Dallas-based Heritage Auctions will sell about 500 of the rarest ones this weekend.
In the early 2000s, Farrell assembled a collection of everything published by DC Comics. She is believed to be the first person to ever achieve this feat. Her collection starts in 1935 and features the first appearances of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, plus obscure comics in genres like romance and science fiction.
“She was able to track down every single DC comic book, tens of thousands of them, going back to 1935 — plus she did all of this pre-internet,” said Lon Allen, vice president of Heritage Auctions.
“It's really quite a feat,” he added.
Allen estimates Farrell’s entire collection could be worth up to $7 million. He expects this weekend’s auction could bring in $4 million, with Superman’s 1938 debut likely to fetch the highest price. Poor quality copies of that can still go for a quarter million dollars, Allen said, and Farrell’s is in good shape.
The collection contains other rarities too, like one called Double Action Comics. Only seven copies are believed to exist, according to Heritage.
“It's so steeped in mystery, nobody really understands what it is or where it came from,” Allen said. “So it's something that's just impossible to value.”
It’s comics like Double Action that make Farrell’s collection so special to Stephen Bissette, a Vermonter and comic book artist, whose work includes illustrating Saga of the Swamp Thing in the 1980s during part of writer Alan Moore’s run on the series.
For Bissette, it’s not the monetary value that matters — it’s the artistic and creative history that’s contained in the thousands of comics Farrell collected, which included all the science fiction comics DC published.
“Strange Adventures, House of Secrets, Challengers of the Unknown — I mean, these are titles that don't register with the public at large, but they had amazing stories,” Bissette said. “And that's where, to me, the creative juices are.”
It’s heartbreaking to see Farrell’s collection broken into pieces and auctioned off, Bissette said.
“It would have been an amazing collection to preserve,” he said. “Either in the state of Vermont, where it would have been a gravitational force for researchers, collectors, archivists, to come to Vermont, or if it had been preserved at a university library or a museum.”
Heritage Auctions is handling the sale of the high-end comics in Farrell’s collection. The rest will likely be sold through Earth Prime Comics. The shop’s manager says details about that are still being worked out.
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