More Fun Comics #73

Growing up, I purchased and devoured each year's new Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. I was mildly interested in certain books' monetary value, but for the most part I poured through the books for the amount of historical information contained, and through the Guides I gained a real appreciation of comic books as an art form.

Though, of course, there was one book that always held my interest, and I checked on it every year, usually first thing--More Fun Comics #73, the very first appearance of Aquaman. And this is generally what I found in each and every Guide:

At the time, a comic costing $675.00 (or even $110.00, for that matter), might as well have costed a million dollars, I was so far away from ever owning it. Not to mention the fact that it was classified as "rare", which meant there were something like less than 50 known copies out there. 

A couple weeks ago, Shrine Correspondent Joe Slab and I were taking about this very subject, and he had the idea to see what More Fun #73's current worth is, after the last few years of heightened Aquaman popularity. So we checked the Top 100 most valuable comics according to Nostomania, and...

$74,200?!? Outrageous! Now $675 doesn't seem so far away. Obviously, Aquaman's ramped up notoriety has helped drive this price up, aside from the normal inflation that all old comics have benefited from. If I had known, I would have tried to borrow that $675 from my parents in the mid-1980s...