Daniel Kandra peruses the stacks at Earth Prime Comics in Burlington on Friday, October 11. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDiggerBURLINGTON — In a modest Church Street shop with walls splashed red and yellow, three customers quietly flipped through stacks of comic books. What many visitors to Earth Prime Comics, one of Vermont’s first comic book stores, may not realize is that the shop’s late co-founder, Christine Farrell, wasn’t just another comic book fan. Farrell built one of the largest collections of DC Comics — the home of “the world’s greatest superheroes,” such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern — in existence, becoming a quiet legend in the world of comic art.Farrell died in April, leaving behind a trove of treasures and memories for those in the comics industry, as reported by Seven Days.In her Burlington home, comic books filled every corner, packed in boxes, wrapped in mylar sleeves or stacked high in piles. Farrell had tens of thousands of books, among them every DC Comics ever published, starting with 1935’s “New Fun Comics” No. 1. While some of her collection has already hit the market, the full DC Comics collection is set to be auctioned off later this month, with sales continuing in the months to come.“It’s definitely unique. Only one other person in history had a complete collection,” said Lon Allen, vice president and comic art expert of Heritage Auctions based in Texas, the auction house handling the sale of Farrell’s comics. Another auction house has been selling the other full collection for the past few years, but those copies were of much lower quality, according to Allen.“She went out of her way to buy higher grade copies,” Allen said, explaining that books are inspected for factors such as the condition of the cover, spine, pages and corners. The book is then given a grade, usually on a scale of 0.5 to 10, with 10 representing a perfect condition.Allen said he believes Farrell’s full collection will be sold for more than $5 million. “I think that would be the bare minimum. It will probably go for a lot more,” he said. Heritage Auction took Farrell’s 20,000 oldest comic books; the more modern ones are for sale at Earth Prime Comics.“They have already been going up in our last two weekly internet sales and we’ve already sold about a quarter-million dollars worth in weekly sales,” Allen said. There will be more weekly sales over the next six months during which the majority of the comics will be sold, according to Allen.Jordan Van Dyke, the store manager of Earth Prime Comics and Quarterstaff Games — both formerly owned by Farrell — has worked there for over 15 years. He got to know Farrell well in the final years of her life and was at her house when auction staff arrived to sift through her vast comic collection.“They were discussing what era some of the comics were from. ‘Is this 80s Marvel? Is this DC from the 60s?” Van Dyke said. “So it was very cool to have them be like, ‘Hey, check this out!’”Although some Vermont comic artists are disappointed that Farrell’s collection will be dispersed instead of preserved in a museum for people to read, Van Dyke said everything is happening in accordance with her will.“This is the course of action that she set up, that the estate was essentially gonna be liquidated,” Van Dyke said. Roughly 15 years ago, Farrell started to distance herself from her stores, Van Dyke said, but when he told her he was going to be the new manager, their friendship started to flourish. “The cool days were the days where she wanted to show me things. And when we were talking about that stuff, nothing else gave her that pop,” Van Dyke said. Farrell was big into genealogy so she would apply that to collectables, according to Van Dyke. “She would go into her stories of how and where she got it from, so she liked the path and the history.” Farrell loved showing people her collectables but to a limited extent. Van Dyke was one of the lucky few invited to see her private comics collection.“It was very cool just to see. She had original artwork up on the walls, she had like one of the original Green Lantern panels before they (went) to print,” Van Dyke said. “It’s oversized and you’ve got the speech bubbles taped down because that’s the copy that’s going to the printer.”Impossible finds Stephen Bissette, one of Vermont’s most influential comic artists, recalls going to Earth Prime Comics for the first time around 1984 when he was working for DC Comics.Farrell, he recalled, was eager to hear about his experience. “She asked some pretty pointy questions which I was happy to answer because at that time few people wanted to talk about the business of comics,” Bissette said. “Most comic fans are in love with the fantasy of comics (but) Chris had visited the DC offices.” Her passion for collecting did not end when she obtained the full DC Comics collection. “Her original plan was just collecting the superhero comics, but once she completed that, she decided to collect everything else, so the western, the humor comics, and the romance comics,” Allen, the auctioneer, said, adding that obtaining those comics was more of a challenge than the DC Comics because at the time, they were only worth $5. “The dealer at the time might not even bother to take them to a show with them, so she had to have a want list and let the dealers know what she was looking for,” Allen said. “I believe the very last comic she got was a mid-1950s romance comic, which probably cost her $8 but is just impossible to find.”Some of the comics in Farrell’s collection even predate Superman, the first superhero comic, which debuted in June 1938. Earth Prime Comics in Burlington on Friday, October 11, 2024. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDiggerFarrell did not own a single graded or certified book, Allen said, suggesting she read the comics she collected. When a book is certified or “slabbed,” it refers to the process of encasing it in a hard, tamper-proof plastic case to protect it from further wear or damage.The formal certification and slabbing of comic books started in 2000 with the creation of the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), which is also grading Farrell’s comics collection for Heritage Auctions. It is an expensive process that comes out of the pocket of the person selling the comic. “It makes me happy to hear that Chris’ collection is not in that state of existence,” Bissette said. “But it will also diminish the market value, in that people will bid on those comics and they will bid on them hoping on getting a copy of a given comic in good enough condition so they can slab and resell it at a higher price, so this is gonna be a highly speculative-driven auction process.”Greg Gordiano, a Burlington comic artist and illustrator, describes the certification of comic books as a profit-driven scheme that has cast a cynical shadow over the entire collecting industry. “Slabbing is so non-empathetic towards enjoying the books because once it’s in that plastic case, you can’t enjoy it,” said Gordiano. “You can’t even look at it. Zero pleasure.”For Rick Veitch, a comics artist and writer mostly known for his work for DC’s “Swamp Thing,” the collectables industry has become a collectors’ market rather than a readers’ market.“As an author of comics, I want readers, not orders,” he said.But there’s hope. At the Center for Cartoon Studies in Hartford, an institution focusing on comics and graphic novels, young cartoonists are setting up small marketplaces where they are outside of the collectors’ market. “They’re highly creative and following their individual visions and creating these sometimes handcrafted comics,” Veitch said. “You go to one of the marketplaces and the customers coming in aren’t comic nerds, they’re just regular civilians off the street who’re looking for something interesting and beautiful to read.”‘A place where I could shine’ Comic book shops didn’t exist when Bissette was growing up. Instead, comics were sold at newsstands and pharmacies. He recalled once driving over 200 miles in a single day just to get to a place that carried them.“Whatever money I had in my pocket stayed in that store and I went home with issues I had never laid eyes on,” he said. Similar to Bissette, Gordiano was a fan of comic books searching for places that sold them. He found John Young, who was selling comics out of his house on Buell Street. “There was no store for comics in the state. The only stuff you would see once in a while was the stuff you find at a flea market, so this would be 1979 or 1981. The year before the store.”Gordiano and Farrell met because she was a customer at Young’s, sitting on the floor reading through back issues. Young and Farrell hit it off and opened their own comics store on the bottom of Bank Street for a year before they moved up the street.In 1990, Young and Farrell ended their business partnership, with Young opening a store called Comic City, while Farrell continued with Earth Prime Comics. She later purchased the building on Church Street, where it has been ever since.For Gordiano, who describes his younger self as an overweight, lonely, critically shy kid, the store was unbelievably important. “I was this kid who sat in the back room of the old Earth Prime, and I had a table where I would draw,” said Gordiano. “What they gave me was like an adopted family, but they also gave me a place where I could shine.” Customers would come in, look at his work and ask him if he drew comics, which gave him a huge boost. For Gordiano and Bissette, everything changed when Farrell and others began to open direct-sale comic shops.“It gave an avid comic reader or an avid comic collector, who were often the same person, access to work that they hadn’t been able to read before,” Bissette said. Read the story on VTDigger here: With a massive comic book collection up for sale, fans remember the woman behind it.