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Superman Comic Saves Family Home From Foreclosure 217

Posted by samzenpus from the more-powerful-than-an-angry-banker dept.
A couple's home was saved from foreclosure after they found a copy of Action Comics #1 in a box in the basement. From the article: "In a statement released through ComicConnect, the owner of the prized comic book said the family was still 'a little shell shocked' after the unexpected find. 'I was so nervous when I realized what it was worth,' the owner said. 'I know I am very fortunate but I will be greatly relieved when this book finds a new home.'"

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Superman Comic Saves Family Home From Foreclosure More

Superman Comic Saves Family Home From Foreclosure

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  • Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)

    by Pojut ( 1027544 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @11:54AM (#33138652) Homepage

    "I don't think it's for usin'...I think it's just for lookin' through." -Cartman

  • Worth (Score:5, Informative)

    by gatzby3jr ( 809590 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @11:55AM (#33138660) Homepage

    From the article:

    It could fetch upwards of $250,000

    • Re:Worth (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @12:16PM (#33138962)

      Finally! Thank you! I _never_ read TFA's, so here I sat, furiously reloading this page & quickly skimming it whilst screaming "what's it worth?! what's it fscking worth?! ARRRRRRRRG!" But everything is ok now

  • Faster than a speeding (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jarkov ( 1867240 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @11:57AM (#33138674)
    Now where was Superman when all my stocks nosedived?

  • Superman saves a home... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Drakkenmensch ( 1255800 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @11:57AM (#33138684)
    ... FOR REAL!

  • Superman saves family ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @11:59AM (#33138702)
    I'm surprised the article has the more accurate title:

    "Superman Comic Saves Family Home From Foreclosure"

    rather than the more sensationalist:

    "Superman Saves Family"

    ;-)

  • they have owned the home since the 50's (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @12:02PM (#33138750)

    article says they have owned the home since the 1950's. means they probably refinanced a few years ago to "liberate the equity" or "put the equity to work". i bet they will lose the home some day.

    • Re:they have owned the home since the 50's (Score:5, Informative)

      by ptbarnett ( 159784 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @12:06PM (#33138802)

      means they probably refinanced a few years ago to "liberate the equity" or "put the equity to work".

      An article I read yesterday said that they took out a home equity loan to finance a small business startup -- which subsequently failed.

      I don't know any of the details about the failed business, but even in the best of economic climates, the odds are against you.

    • yes, because no one has any legitimate need to do that, like sending someone to college, or stating a business.

      Twit.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by netsavior ( 627338 )
        sending someone to college?? Student loans are one of the cheapest forms of debt, although if you plan on bankruptcy or default, then it is best to avoid student loans because they are protected from bankruptcy, but that is a pretty unethical, but mostly legal way to go about stealing money if your plan is to default.

        Starting a business, on the other hand, nobody has a "need" to do. And it is not for the faint of heart or wallet. If you can't afford to lose it, then you should not risk it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mcvos ( 645701 )

        Sending someone to college or starting a business is perfectly fine, but it is really a good idea to gamble away your home for that?

        If you've got a house in the family for 50 years, it should be completely paid by now. Why risk something like that by getting a mortgage you can't afford?

    • The article says the home had been "in the family" since the 1950's. In other words, the equity they took out wasn't anything they put in the first place.

      Their parents probably bought the home for a few $K, leaving a windfall for their kids due to housing inflation and inheritance, which they lost - but fortunately they received another windfall from not having thrown away a 5 cent comic book that now happens to be worth a quarter million.

      We talk about people "earning" money, but really, they system i

  • They still have a mortgage? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 1000101 ( 584896 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @12:03PM (#33138756)
    FTFA: "painful task of packing up a home that had been in the family since at least the 1950s"

    What kind of mortgage do these people have where they are still paying it off after ~60 years?

    • Second mortgage? Fifth? Tenth?

    • You can take out a mortgage on your home... for some quick cash.

      Doesn't make sense to me though since it's still a loan you need to pay back. You don't even get anything from the loan like a new car or house.

      • If you are going to borrow to buy a car, using home equity may be the best way to do it. In the US, mortgage interest is often tax deductible.

        • Afaict provided they aren't for too high a percentage of the houses value mortgages are generally regarded by the banks as low risk so even in places where they don't have tax relief for mortgage interest they are still generally the cheapest way for an individiaul to borrow.

    • Re:They still have a mortgage? (Score:5, Informative)

      by makomk ( 752139 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @12:07PM (#33138834) Journal

      Read the first page of TFA. "The couple had recently taken out a second mortgage on their home to start a new business, which failed in the uncertain economy."

    • What kind of mortgage do these people have where they are still paying it off after ~60 years?

      I replied below, but it's worth restating: they reportedly used a home equity loan to finance a small business startup, which subsequently failed.

    • They may have needed to remortgage for any number reasons, failed family company to medical bills.

    • FTFA, on the same page as your quote no less: "The couple had recently taken out a second mortgage on their home to start a new business, which failed in the uncertain economy."

    • The home has been in the family since the 50's. It doesn't mean that the current owners have owned it since the 50's.

      My wife and I bought her family home from her parents three years ago. It's been in the family since the 80's. We still have a mortgage that will take decades to pay off, as we started from scratch.

  • As the number of people foreclosed on increases, the probability of find just about anything increases as well. If there's an Action Comics #1 out there, that makes me suspect (1) we've foreclosed on a hell of alot of people, and (2) I can only imagine what other improbable forgotten items are being found. We could very easily be approaching Hoffa odds.

  • they didn't try to sell it to Thadeus Venture.
  • My first thought was that it was a comic featuring superman melting a bankster with his heat vision....

  • Wait, so there might be something profitable down here with me in Mom's basement? *rummage*

  • ...on wealth and the disparity between classes in our society. I'm glad this family will be "saved" from foreclosure, but it never ceases to amaze me that someone could drop a quarter of a million dollars on something that doesn't carry much *real* value--like a comic book.

    • Nothing intrinsically holds any value. That something carries any value is purely in the eye of the beholder.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Aboroth ( 1841308 )
        I think of intrinsic value as equivalent to how much human effort would go into making it, with of course the condition that people actually want it for something. For a comic book that is easily reproducible since it is only made of paper, that has a very low intrinsic value. For a big gold bar, that takes a lot of human effort to mine the ore and refine it, so that has a lot higher intrinsic value.
        That's just the way I look at it, anyway.
    • WTF? Is there another measure of "value" besides "what someone is willing to pay for it"?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Surt ( 22457 )

        Yes, there is real value in things that directly affect your survival: food, clothing, shelter, health care. Pretty much everything else is operating on a more imaginary level.

        • Re:This is a commentary... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by onkelonkel ( 560274 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @01:31PM (#33140070)
          I see. So this comic book clearly has "real value" since the family was able to trade it for shelter.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Surt ( 22457 )

            Seems pretty clearly to be operating on the imaginary level. Yes, you can often trade things with imagined value for things with real value. But imagine it like a game of musical chairs. When the music stops (no further trades are possible), would you rather have a house, or a superman comic?

            • Hypothetically, I'd rather have a house, unless of course I already have a house. In that case what value would a second house have? I can only sleep under one roof at a time. Then I'd take the comic.

              Are you saying things have "real value" only if that value still exists when you can no longer trade that thing for some other thing? In that case the idea of "value" is almost meaningless, since you have now replaced it with "utility". If I have no need or use for something it has no value.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by shutdown -p now ( 807394 )

        WTF? Is there another measure of "value" besides "what someone is willing to pay for it"?

        Yes, there are quite a few [wikipedia.org], in fact.

  • Superman lives in a basement? (Score:4, Funny)

    by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @12:14PM (#33138932)

    I thought only nerds did that . . . ?

  • let me see.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @12:28PM (#33139080) Homepage

    I have a copy of the "Death of Superman" comic from 1992 around here somewhere. I'm gonna buy a house with it!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by misexistentialist ( 1537887 )
      You can probably get two in Detroit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      Lol, my little brother used to say stuff like that seriously. I tried to explain to him that the value in old comics was that everyone WASN'T collecting them at the time, to no avail. He was convinced that his 80's comic books were going to be worth a fortune in 50 years.

  • ... you probably won't either. That's okay, I'm used to it.

    When I was a lot younger... I think I was around 7, I had come to acquire an absolutely huge pile of old comic books that a friend of my dad's gave to me. One of these comics turned out to be an Action #1 comic. It was dog-eared, definitely a very used comic book, but still intact and very readable. The only character in the comic that I recognized was Superman... the others were completely unknown to me (I can't even remember who they were). Owing to the fact that the superman story in it ended in a cliffhanger (superman apparently couldn't yet fly in the story, and was falling from a great height while carrying some guy), and the fact that I didn't know any of the other characters in the comic, I had thought relatively little of this comic, other than to notice that it was #1 issue, which with my limited knowledge of comics at the time I knew could be worth a bit more than the cover price (10c, if I remember correctly).

    Being the young entrepreneur that I was, I held a miniature yard sale at the back of my parents' place, unloading the comics that I did not want. As I said, I saw that this comic was a #1, so I priced it higher than the cover price - at 50 cents, five times the cover price.

    It sold, along with quite a few of the other comics that I had, and I never thought of it again until I was in my teens, when I saw a reprint of a portion of the comic (just the superman story) and an article that explained how rare the original actually was. Seeing this triggered my memory of the comic that I had let go for only half a dollar in the early 1970's, and I've had to live with knowing what an imbecile I was ever since. I can easily say I didn't know better at the time, but in actuality, I always think that I _should_ have. I wasn't a stupid kid... well, maybe I was, but I was bright enough to know that I probably should have talked to an adult before selling those comics.

    Anyways... that's my anecdote about this comic... and one of those "if I had only known then what I know now" type of regrets.

    • You shouldn't feel too bad. Your friend's Dad was an adult and still didn't know any better. And from a child's point of view it would make sense to assume that an adult wouldn't give up something of significant value.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcvos ( 645701 )

      I don't blame you for failing to imagine the ridiculous prices collectors pay for it nowadays.

      I recently found an original Transformer toy from the '80s. I thought it might sell for as much as EUR 50, which is quite a bit more than it cost at the time. Turns out people were fighting each other to be allowed to pay me EUR 300 for it. Not a house, but certainly a nice weekend out in exchange for some childhood nostalgia. But I bet I'll regret it in a couple of decades.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CaseM ( 746707 )

      There's a silver lining in all this: that $.50 in 1970 is worth $2.73 [westegg.com] now!

    • Talking to an adult probably wouldn't have helped. Wasn't this about the same time a lot of moms were throwing out boxes full of baseball cards?

    • On the topic of stupid kid things, I inherited a bunch of indian head pennies from my father. I was probably no more than 12. You'd see ads on tv all the time advertising these shiny coin collections for easy payments of $19.95. My indian heads didn't look shiny at all, so I cleaned them all so that they were. Thought this was a good thing.

      Now that I'm older, and wiser about coin collecting, I really hate how stupid I was to do that. It's a collection I wasn't going to sell anyways (pass it on, keep it

  • I mean, someone finding the original download of some book in a forgotten corner of the hard disk of some e-book reader and selling it for hundreds of thousands of dollars?

    • I mean, someone finding the original download of some book in a forgotten corner of the hard disk of some e-book reader and selling it for hundreds of thousands of dollars?

      No, but the superman #1 comic will be worth ten times as much.

    • Because we don't have real books or comics in the space year 2010?

    • Personally I'd rather see pristine copies available online for anyone who's interested than someone dropping a quarter mill on a bunch of pages stapled together because they're old and scarce.

    • 1 April, 2040:

      Three-digit Slashdot ID sells at auction for $240,000!

  • This should help Supes with all of that bad press [superdickery.com] he's been getting.

  • Well then. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Spewns ( 1599743 ) on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @12:35PM (#33139156)
    I figured someone should point out how messed up the world is that a family's house not being foreclosed rests on some extremely bored rich guy with way too much money flushing $250,000+ down the toilet on trite, stupid shit like a comic book. I think this whole capitalism thing is being filmed. It's like The Truman Show. Except it's a very black comedy.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gad_zuki! ( 70830 )

      Except the alternatives to capitalism have been horribly oppressive, dehumanizing, and found not to really work at all.

      I can handle that rich guys buy rare comics. No biggie. I also get to eat, sleep in my own bed, and buy trite shit myself.

      Please go start your super society on some island somewhere. I'll give you 6 months before it becomes a new Jonestown or at best a new Cuba.

    • To me, The Truman show WAS a black comedy. Look at how everyone is trying to get their 2 minutes of fame on the latest vapid reality show. The video of thousands of models creating a stampede (in NYC I think?) trying to get on a model reality show and all thinking this was their only chance at decent job and stardom?

      We ARE on The Truman Show, and we are all being filmed, if we let the asses do it. The only reason why The Truman show came out so nice is because Truman picked the best out come... and yet t

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AutoReg ( 1140805 )
      I agree. We should have the Government take that bored rich guy's $250,000 and give it to the poor guy. After all, it wasn't that poor guy's fault that he mortgaged his home to start a business and failed. It would only be fair, that rich guy obviously has way too much.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      Hey, Nicholas Cage is NOT bored!

    • Spewns -
      Unless you live in a schoolbus on a hippie commune I'm guessing you do something to earn cash.

      Please suggest a way that this family could grow their money in a way that does not offend your delicate sensibilities. Whether it's buying gold, the stock market, real estate, baseball cards... the one thing every form of investment has in common is one party feels the item in question is more valuable than the money in their pocket, and thus goods are sold and money changes hands.

      I'm happy for the family

  • Did anyone else read the title and think that the latest Superman comic involves Superman battling a bank executive who is trying to foreclose on someone's home? I was sitting here thinking, great, now comic books have to pander to the economic crisis, and what a boring story. Preventing foreclosure does not require super human abilities. I'm picturing Superman in a library studying mortgage law. Think of the suspense! Then I read the summary and feel like an idiot. I still think my version is more am

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