Going under the hammer later this month will be the first tranche of The Christine Farrell Complete DC Collection, an auction featuring nearly 500 comic books, including 1940’s Double Action Comics No. 2, of which only seven copies have survived.
By the time she died in April this year, Christine Farrell from Burlington, Vermont, had developed a collection running to tens of thousands of books, including nearly every single one DC Comics had ever published, beginning with 1935’s New Fun Comics No. 1. Farrell, began her quest in 1970 and even loaned her books to DC when they couldn’t find copies to make reprints. Farrell granted few interviews and was never identified publicly as the keeper of the collection, even though she owned a comic shop in Burlington called Earth Prime Comics.
Running October 25-26, Heritage Auctions will present books from Farrell’s collection and continue to do so into the summer of 2025.
“Her dedication was simply remarkable,” said Heritage Auctions Vice President Lon Allen. “She did most of this pre-internet. Now, you could put that collection together in several years if you had the money. But back then, tracking down every book took real devotion. And she did not own a single graded or certified book. They were in mylar sleeves, in boxes, sometimes in piles. It was clear that she just wanted to read these books, no matter how many thousands of dollars they were worth.”
Heritage began offering some of Farrell’s books at the end of September, including a copy of 1935’s New Comics No. 1 that realized nearly $8,000.
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Action Comics #182
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All-Flash #6
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All-Star Comics #3
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All-Star Comics #32
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Double Action Comics
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New Fun Comics #1
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Superman 1
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Superman
Highlights include:
restored copies of Action Comics No. 1 and Superman No. 1
a Fine+ 6.5 copy of Detective Comics No. 38 (Robin’s debut)
a restored Very Fine- 7.5 All Star Comics No. 3 (the first appearance of the Justice Society of America)
a Very Good/Fine 5.0 copy of Flash Comics No. 1
rare key pages from Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing No. 1 and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns No 4.
The Double Action Comics No. 2 in the auction is such a rare book there has long been disagreement about whether it was one of a handful of ashcan copies made purely for trademark and copyright registration or a limited-distribution test product to see if customers would buy black-and-white reprints of other comics.
Comics dealer and longstanding friend of Farrell Joe Verenault said: “Chris loved this particular company of comics, DC, and she did it for that reason alone. The fact that it turned out to be such a hard achievement and that they became staggeringly valuable was really secondary to her. But she was very, very pleased at how appreciated it was in the hobby that she had done such a thing.”
