Thinking about how the comic book collecting boom of the 80s, which our current comic book store infrastructure was built out on and inspired the whole ‘90s endless variant cover issue #1s era, was in part about some golden age fans now being old and wealthy enough to invest in now-rare reminders of their youth, sure, but a lot of it was just the same as the contemporary baseball card boom – which also helped build out later product lines and memorabilia stores – a textbook reaction to early '80s inflation with a flight to nontraditional assets whose appreciation might conceivably outpace inflation, creating a bubble