10 Comic Book Crazes You Totally Forgot Were A Thing

As any true comic book collector knows, it's incredibly important to bag and board your books, or they will suffer the ravages of time, rendering them bent, folded, or faded. This isn't helpful if you want to preserve your books, but that doesn't mean it's a great idea for the publisher to do it for you.

Back in the 1980s and well into the '90s, publishers began polybagging any books they felt they could sell more of, which was often limited to #1 issues, key centennial issues, or something overhyped beyond belief, like the "Death of Superman" story featured in Superman #75.

DC opted to release that book in several different polybag versions, and the readers bought all of them, but it was hardly the only book of its kind. The issue with polybagging a comic is that you had to tear the thing open if you wanted to read your book instead of just collecting them.

Doing this killed the book's value, so most readers had to purchase a separate copy, so they would have one to read, and one to box up and never touch again. Fortunately, polybagged issues have mostly disappeared from the industry, and with any luck, they won't ever return.