Getting the Last Laugh : Collecting: Comic books have come into their own as big business, and Gary Carter of Coronado can tell you why.

Gary Carter was floating on a comic book collector’s cloud nine.

There he was at the famous Sotheby’s auction house headquarters in New York City, living out a boyhood dream, elbow-deep in thousands of colorful action-packed renditions of his beloved super-hero tales.

All around him, comic books to kill for. Like Detective Comics No. 27, the May, 1939, copy that featured Batman’s burst onto the comic book scene--and into the hearts and minds of small boys everywhere.

There were scores of mint-condition Superman comics from the mid-1950s. And premiere editions of such sensational crime-fighters as The Atom and The Human Torch.

Wearing surgical gloves, the 42-year-old Coronado resident and eight other comic book aficionados gently and breathlessly handled each book, considering the whiteness of the paper, the brightness of the ink, the stroke of the artist’s renderings and the strength of the story line.

They looked. They touched. They smelled. They checked for rust on the staples. And they listened for the paper-puckering noise that comes with perhaps the rarest find of all--the first opening of an unread vintage comic.

As chairman and organizer of the authenticity certification grading committee, Carter was to help evaluate the level of preservation of about 4,000 comics to be sold Dec. 18 at Sotheby’s first-ever comic book auction--an event organizers say could be Sotheby’s most popular occasion ever.

“All their lives, comics have been treated like second-class citizens,” Carter said. “And suddenly, there we were at Sotheby’s under the shadow of Rembrandt paintings on the wall, grading the condition of a Batman No. 1 comic book. It’s the most historic event in the history of comic book fandom, a sure sign that comic collecting has come of age.”

These are indeed heady days for the once lowbrow world of comic books. And the reason, Carter said, is as simple as a cartoon story line.

Thanks to their steady rise in resale value, comics are now big business. Along with baseball cards, they’ve become the hottest collectibles around, surpassing stamps and even coins.

As Robin might say to his crime-battling buddy, “Holy resale value, Batman!”

Indeed, a mint-copy 1938 Action Comic No. 1, worth $300 only 20 years ago, brings more than $100,000 today. People are snatching up old comics on the chance that their increased value will someday provide retirement income.

Some Wall Street portfolios even include comic book investments. Foreign collectors are lining up to get in on the action. As a result, Carter said, the day of the first million-dollar comic isn’t too far away.

The high-roller New York auction--as well as the display of many of the soon-to-be auctioned comics at Sotheby’s Beverly Hills location on Dec. 6 and 7--are just a few of the well-deserved encores for the new comic book-collecting legitimacy, he said.

After decades of operating in relative obscurity, avid adult collectors like Carter are coming out of the closet--showing off the fruits of a boyhood obsession that have evolved into collections of staggering breadth and value. At last, it’s cool to be crazy about comics.

The slow-talking Carter, dressed in his blue jeans and pointy cowboy boots, is fast becoming a main character in the Cinderella comic book story.

This year, he and his wife, Lisa, began publishing “The Comic Book Marketplace,” a fan magazine produced out of their renovated garage--a monthly labor of love that has already captured 14,000 avid subscribers from as far away as Europe, Japan and Australia.

A part-time English instructor at Southwestern College, he also free-lances articles on historical aspects of comic book stories and characters. And he’s helping to compile a new comic book grading guide--one that will feature 100 grading levels to replace the eight now used by collectors.

Wary of price-gouging in the booming comic industry, Carter has also started an association that he hopes will be able to set ethics guidelines among dealers for the resale of vintage books.

Over the years, he’s developed a reputation as a comic historian and self-made comic book scholar. But Carter said he’s first an avid gee-whiz collector, at heart still the 7-year-old who once traded his new bike for a stack of his neighbor’s comics.

He collects Golden Age comics from the World War II era, comics featuring the cast of “underwear heroes” such as Superman, Batman and the rest--who in cartoon form illustrated the good-versus-evil themes of the war.

He collects Westerns, war comics, shock comics, science fiction stories, mysteries and romance. And he’s after the Silver Age comics of the 1950s and 1960s, when the super-heroes made their comeback.

He’s even got an eye for the new generation of comics. If it tells a story in colorful picture frames and shapely word balloons, chances are Carter has read it. Or wants to.

“I just have this overwhelming love for comic books. I really love them with all my heart,” he said. “I have a deep, abiding respect for them as an art form and as an entertainment and historical mirror. No matter what its subject or condition, I’ll pick up a comic book before anything else.”

For Carter, it’s not enough to just read comics. He has to own them.

In all, he has collected more than 15,000 comics--worth anywhere from a few dollars to, in a few cases, more than $50,000. He owns numerous examples of comic book art--works straight off the artist’s easel--and has the most-complete collection of DC Comics in the world.

Some of his most valuable treasures are stored in safe deposit boxes. Others are in the home office he calls the Comic Book Room.

Most of the comics are kept under layers of plastic to protect them from their worst enemies--light, moisture, temperature fluctuations and air pollution. Some are so valued that even Carter won’t chance opening them.

For a collector like Carter, comics are the ultimate contentment.

“I just want to have them in my collection so I can have access to them at my will, to pick them up and thumb through them--even if it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. Because, for me, comic books are the greatest escape device--better than television, movies and radio rolled into one.

“For kids, they were the one thing that you could control. They were private and personal. You could get under the covers with a flashlight and go back and reread them and get a charge out of them all over again--just like the first time.

“God, I love that idea so much, I still go back and reread my favorites. Only now I don’t have to get under the covers with my flashlight.”

Heck, Carter could talk about comic books forever. Well, almost.

“I know I could sit around talking for a whole month just about the comics published between 1950 and 1955,” he said. “And the ones that came out during the Second World War--that would take a year to cover.”

The dramatic comeback of comics has given Carter even more to talk about. Because, like Rodney Dangerfield, comics for years got no respect, he said.

They were considered the Sunday funnies in book form, not a legitimate reading effort. And, unlike the lofty stamps or coins that are minted to last a lifetime and more, comic books were made with the cheapest possible pulp paper.

Folded up in some kid’s back pocket, their high-acid content turned them into time bombs that would begin their inevitable yellowing, crumble and decay the moment they left the dealer’s shop.

Nobody cared about the condition of the comic, the telltale wrinkles or tears. Not the printer, the binder, the wholesaler or even some of the youthful buyers who rushed home with the newest edition each month. Only the solitary collector, whose day has finally come.

Now, perhaps because of such shoddy initial treatment, mint-condition copies of pre-1965 comics are nearly impossible to find--driving up prices, attracting more interested investors into the game.

Because of the loyalty of collectors, however, most comics stay put once they are purchased, making available copies that much more desirable--further setting the stage for a comic book market gone amok.

Some collectors go after particular artists, others are into characters. Still others go after comics published by a particular company. Or the baroque and renaissance periods of comics--known as the Golden and Silver ages. The point is, Carter said, they’re collecting like never before.

“So many comics,” he said. “So little time.”

In the still-small world of serious comic collecting, Carter’s enthusiasm and integrity have begun to pay dividends.

“The comic book industry has gone from a grass-roots hobby to big money, and I’ve seen too many people affected adversely by that money,” said Jerry Weist, a consultant to the Sotheby’s auction.

“There’s just too few people around who have kept that original boyhood love for comics and incorporated that into their adult lives, people who are still the way they were the first day they picked up a comic book. Well, Gary is one of them. You can trust him.”

Robert Overstreet, perhaps the country’s most accomplished comic collector with whom Carter is compiling the grading guide, added: “Gary’s a real intelligent person with a lot of other interests besides comics.

“But he’s got the bug. He’s someone you can stay up all night with and talk about comics. We’ve been doing that for years.”

Carter recalls seeing the first comic book he simply had to own. It was 1956. He was a 7-year-old Coronado school kid who had walked into Corrin’s Drug Store to see, there on the far shelf, a copy of Showcase No. 4, the first Flash comic.

“The cover hit me like a bolt of lightning, like a 2-by-4 that whacked me over the head,” he said. “It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”

Carter bought the first comic in his collection for a dime. And then he couldn’t stop. “Comics weren’t just a pastime for me, they were a passion. They were living, breathing things I thought about every day of my life. They were a crush, a romance, a childhood obsession.”

Once, as a fifth-grader, after his parents had given his comic collection away to a neighbor because of their son’s bad grades, Carter traded his bikes to get the books back.

Soon, he and younger brother Kent began prowling comic book shows in San Diego and Los Angeles to fill holes in their growing collections. They even got their parents interested in the hunt for the rare book.

In 1961, a 12-year-old Carter talked his mother into paying $65 for a 1939 edition Superman No. 1 comic, which in near-mint condition today would be worth $47,000 or more. “They were just little boys, so persistent and such avid collectors,” Dorothy Carter recalled of her sons.

“Mothers, they give in after prodding if their sons are constant and persuasive. They say, ‘I’ve really got no better place to put this money than in something like a comic book collection.’ You’re just sucked in by their enthusiasm.”

Years later as college students, the Carter brothers used the last $75 in their bank accounts to buy a carload of comic books. As a result, for the next six weeks they were so poor they lived off Bisquick and cherry pie filling. Carter said he hasn’t touched a biscuit since.

Kent eventually went out and got a real job. But Gary kept at comics.

Today, joking that he’s known on his block as “that comic book weirdo,” Carter said he’s well aware of the negatives to such obsessive behavior.

He has seen the marriages of at least a dozen fellow collectors fall apart. His magazine has featured stories aimed at comic book widows--the spouses of fanatics--discussing the difficulties of living with the collector mentality.

But late at night, secure in his Comic Book Room, Carter climbs back atop his Cloud Nine.

He handles his comics cautiously, like newborn babies, careful not to open them too fast or too far--for fear of ripping a cover or stretching a binding.

He thinks of the low point of comics--the days of “Commies and comic books”--to the 1950s McCarthy-era Senate subcommittee hearings that looked into the connection between comics and juvenile delinquency.

Carter considers the brilliant moments--such as the two 16-year-olds who in the 1930s dreamed up and illustrated the story of an infant with superhuman powers sent to Earth from the doomed planet Krypton, a name they derived from the periodic table of the elements.

The Superman story, he said, is as important to the literary world as a Shakespearean play, “as important to the 20th Century as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne were to the 19th Century.”

Comics, he said, are as American as eating Popsicles and skipping rocks on a lake. And he knows that there are other unexplored worlds out there in Comic Book Land--millions of issues to be categorized, catalogued, talked about. And, most important of all, read.

And, although Carter concedes that, in his comic book career, he’s sniffed and smelled thousands of books, looking for the pickle-like musty smell that lowers their value, he’s yet to go off the deep end as a comic book fanatic.

At least he’s never drooled on a comic book.

“I’d never do that,” he said. “That would ruin its condition.”