Spider-Man #1 on Pawn Stars

I am a fan of Pawn Stars on the History Channel and I watched with interest a rerun episode the other day that featured a guy bringing in a copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #1. The proprietors often call in an expert to help them gauge value of an item, but I was a little startled that they called in their toy expert to appraise this landmark comic book.

The toy expert paged through the book, noting that the story was by Stan Lee and the cover by Jack Kirby (but no mention was made of Steve Ditko). The interior pages looked very nice to me but there was spine stress, especially at the staples. If I were selling that copy on ebay I would have assessed the book as VERY GOOD+/ALMOST FINE- (a grade of my own creation, thank you very much); the toy expert graded it between FINE- and FINE+ and valued it at between $6000 and $7000. The Pawn Stars haggled and wound up buying from the man for $4000. You can read an article about the transaction over here.

My mind wandered and I started wondering if maybe this episode was what inspired Kevin Smith to create his horrible Comic Book Men show. Proabably not, since this P.S. originally aired in January of 2012 and C.B.M. debuted just one month later.