Seven decades after he became addicted to Superman, Gary Prebula’s collection of graphic novels and comics has a permanent home at the University of Pennsylvania library. The collection is now going through more processing, by both librarians and by an appraiser hired by the Prebulas. (While the collection is worth north of $500,000, it’s up to the appraiser to determine its final value for tax deduction purposes.)
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2024/06/08/how-to-donate-80000-comic-books-and-get-a-marvelous-tax-break/
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0:00 Introduction
1:57 About Golden Apple Comic Books
5:34 Prebula's Career And Collecting: How Valuable Is The Collection?
8:11 The Process Of Donating To The University Of Pennsylvania library And Gems In The Collection
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Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2024/06/08/how-to-donate-80000-comic-books-and-get-a-marvelous-tax-break/
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
0:00 Introduction
1:57 About Golden Apple Comic Books
5:34 Prebula's Career And Collecting: How Valuable Is The Collection?
8:11 The Process Of Donating To The University Of Pennsylvania library And Gems In The Collection
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
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More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00My comic book collection is a true cultural artifact reflecting the times that we lived through and it will explain to people in the future what it was like to be in America in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s and understand all the problems we had, our happiness, our sadness, everything about us.
00:30I'm Gary Perbola and I'm Dawn Perbola and we're at Golden Apple Comics.
00:42When Golden Apple Comics opened in 1979, the store was a 400 square foot hole in the wall, a fitting supplier for Gary Prebula's comic book habit, which had developed at a young age.
00:54I got my first comic book when I was three years old. My mother and father were going out for the New Year's Eve party and they bribed me with a comic book and I read the comic book over and over and over because the story was so incredible and I just wanted more comics.
01:11The first comic book I read was a Superman comic book. Superman still excites me and it's a comic book that I still collect to this very day.
01:20When I was a kid, I didn't have a particular affinity for comic books, but I've always been an avid reader.
01:28When I got together with Gary, I wasn't quite sure that he was a comic book collector, but as our relationship grew, I started to realize how important it was to him.
01:41We funded the hobby actually by buying real estate, funny enough. I mean, we both had jobs, we both worked, but I think the real key was amassing the real estate in Los Angeles, which was a great investment.
01:57Every weekend, I would go from store to store to store to find the comic books that I missed because there was no comic shop like Golden Apple where you can go and one-stop shopping.
02:07So after a while, I started to question, why am I doing this? Why am I spending all this time and all this energy and all this money to collect all these comic books?
02:19And I came to the conclusion it very simply was to preserve them for future generations.
02:25The hardest challenge collecting comic books with my spouse was the allowance that I had.
02:31I always wanted to increase the allowance and I had to explain to her why and what was going to happen and then pray to God that she would allow my allowance to increase.
02:42You never asked me.
02:44I did.
02:48After graduate school, I got a job with a company called HBO, and I was the 27th employee of the company.
02:56I really didn't enjoy working in television as an executive.
03:00I wanted to write, direct, and produce, and I went into television as a writer, producer, and director.
03:07And that basically funded a lot of the comic books that I bought.
03:12At the height of Prebula's collection, he had amassed 80,000 comic books, worth at least half a million dollars.
03:19The most memorable comic that I acquired was the first Marvel comic, Spider-Man number one, that I really, really went crazy over.
03:30The character Peter Parker was my age, and it was unusual to find a comic book hero character who was young and a teenager, basically, and you could easily relate to everything that the character was going through.
03:45If you juxtaposition it to other Marvel characters, say Thor, who was an older man who turns into a Norse god with a hammer and flies around, that's really hard to relate to.
03:59But when you're Spider-Man, you're having problems at lunch and at school and girlfriends, and then you have to go out and save people's lives, and that was easy to relate to.
04:10X-Men was the most exciting and expensive comic book that I found.
04:14The reason was that I found the comic book twice, once in Butler, Pennsylvania, where I lived, and then I found it again in Cleveland, Ohio, and the color schemes on the magazines were different, and it was exciting to know that I had an unusual comic book here.
04:34Later in life, when I happened to work with Stan Lee, I asked him about the two different color schemes, and he said, oh yeah, those were in Cleveland, and so it verified that I had a comic book that was really very rare.
04:50And when our comic book collection was appraised, the appraiser person had never seen that cover before.
04:58Nobody's even heard about that mistake.
05:01Yeah, I'm sure that there were probably 20,000 copies of that X-Men made, and probably four or five have survived.
05:13Prebula had always been more of an enthusiast than a profit-driven collector, and he had never sold his comic books for a profit.
05:20So, in his sixth decade of collecting, something began to gnaw at Prebula.
05:25He had amassed nearly 80,000 comic books, and now wanted to make good on his lifelong ambition to share his collection and passion with future generations.
05:34When I started to realize how many comics he had and the value, it took him a long time to convince me that they were not going to get sold, because I had always expected that collection to be our retirement.
05:50In hindsight, I know it was the right thing to do.
05:54Well, we decided to give the comic book collection in a donation to the University of Pennsylvania.
06:00And the reason was very simple. Everything that I have in life is because of Penn.
06:06The University of Pennsylvania introduced me to my business partner.
06:10It introduced me to understanding how to succeed in life.
06:15It taught me everything I need to know about business at Wharton.
06:20It really gave me a framework to go on and succeed in life.
06:24The biggest problem that a collector is going to confront giving their collection away is the remorse that you have before you give it away.
06:33You start to feel like, oh my God, why am I doing this?
06:37Am I crazy?
06:39This is something that is important to you, and you're giving it away to someone.
06:44He was a mess the night before they came to pick up the books.
06:49And he had the worst night, the worst sleep, tossing and turning.
06:53He was like going to lose his child or something.
06:57And then the books were gone, and I felt relief, an amazing sense of relief and happiness.
07:06They're now going to where they should go.
07:09They're going to be protected.
07:10They're going to be saved.
07:11And they're no longer my problem.
07:13I don't have to worry about that.
07:15Prebula wasn't the only one thinking about the future of his collection.
07:19Ryan and Kendra Lebowitz, who have run Golden Apple since 2004, were instrumental in getting the collection donation ready and shipped to Penn through Golden Apple Comic and Art Foundation,
07:29a tiny charity with support from A-list celebrities, including Keanu Reeves, Kevin Eastman, and Kevin Smith.
07:36The foundation aims to act as a middleman, finding library homes for additional private collections and getting them ready for donation.
07:44Anyone that wants to donate their comic books or comic art to a foundation can do it through the Golden Apple Foundation.
07:53And they take your comics, they take your art, they put them in order, they list them, they catalog them,
08:00and they'll know exactly what you have and the institution that your comics or your comic art is going to will know exactly what they have and they won't have to do it.
08:11It turns out that donating comic books, let alone 80,000 of them, isn't as easy as writing a check to your favorite charity,
08:18particularly if you want to maximize your tax benefits and assure your collection is available for study.
08:25The collection is currently going through more processing by both librarians and an appraiser hired by the Prebulas.
08:31While the collection is worth north of $500,000, it's up to the appraiser to determine its final value for tax deduction purposes.
08:38Penn is going to be very protective of this collection, and we feel very good about where it is, and he can still visit.
08:48Gary and I have been married for 55 years. We've been together for 57 years.
08:57And ever since then, I knew he was a little boy trapped in a man's body.
09:04He has enjoyed his books. I would never take that away from him.
09:09He really, truly looks forward to his books, and he takes just about every Saturday afternoon, watches television, and reads his comics.
09:21And that's been the way it's been for 55 years.
09:26So I know how important it is to him, and the fact that it's been preserved is extra special.
09:35I kept no comics for myself. I thought about, you know, keeping Spider-Man No. 1, and I had it on the wall for about a week.
09:43And I realized that was vanity, and I took it down, and I gave everything away.
09:49And I'm still collecting comics, and those will be given to Penn in due time.
09:54People that aren't into comics are missing really incredible stories that are just fascinating and truly something that will spark your imagination and make you happy.
10:07And the writing, and the good writing.
10:09Well, that's what I mean. The writing is what gives you a sense of a great story.
10:17Buy a comic book and read it, and enjoy what it's like to read a comic book, and enjoy the stories and the characters.
10:25And who knows? You might become a comic book collector yourself.