They can be worth thousands of dollars, and their ever-increasing value makes them an important commodity for investors as well as fans.

The market for comic books, as entertainment, as collectibles, and as investments, is already enormous, and is only showing further signs of growth.

Vincent Zurzolo, Vice President of Metropolis Collectibles, knows this first hand.

"There´s a tremendous potential for our product because comics have touched every person in some way or another. The most popular fictional character in the world next to Santa Claus is Superman."

And their business doesn´t end with comic books—Metropolis is also known for their vast collection of rare and collectible movie posters as well.

While many people only think of comics as a childhood hobby, the fact is that comic book collecting is serious business.

In fact, so many people are turning to comics as an alternative to traditional investments that Metropolis plans on offering small group seminars to teach the fundamentals of comic book investment in 2003.

"Our clients are serious collectors, for the most part. Around the holidays, we get a lot of people who are buying presents for their husbands or boyfriends. 95% of our business is male. Maybe even 99%. And they´re very serious about recapturing a part of their childhood. Comics represent nostalgia-- they represent a better time."

"This is how I feel about comic books: You may be selling a comic book, a collectible, an investment, but most of all, you´re selling a story. It may be the story inside the comic book, or the story that comic represents in some person´s life. You´re selling something that has meaning to a person. And that´s something that a lot of people miss."

"And, of course, there are a lot of people who invest in comic books strictly for profit. Comic books are a fantastic investment when you´re talking about using it as a long-term tool. It´s not a tool to be used for six months or a year.

They appreciate slowly, but they do appreciate. I can pull out a price guide from 1972 and one from 1990 and you´ll see a tremendous amount of difference in the prices. Many times, the increases are easily the same as what you´d get from other types of investments."

Vincent began buying and selling comic books at 17. He continued through college to support himself, but it wasn´t until he graduated that the business really took off.

He was proud of his degree in marketing, but he knew he wouldn´t be happy in the corporate world. So he decided to keep doing what he loved—selling comic books—and his bedroom became his first office.

"Back in the early 1990´s, stores like Wal-Mart and Price Club were selling 3 comics in a bag for a dollar. The market was absolutely booming at the time, and there was a tremendous amount of extra comic books out in the marketplace.

I was able to buy warehouses with a quarter of a million or half a million or a million comic books and move them from the seller to the buyer. I was basically a middleman at that point. I didn´t have a lot of capital reserve, so I´d just make buy-and-sell deals."

He sold comic books on the street in Manhattan, on Broadway between John Street and Maiden Lane—the heart of the Wall Street financial district.

"I´d go out their and sell comics all day, I´d hustle the Wall Street crowd, and buy and sell warehouses of books and do comic conventions, and all the while I was building my business up from there."

The comic book conventions were crucial to the growth of his business. When he started out, he attended as many as he could, sometimes more than 30 per year. In more recent years, he has become more selective, attending 15 or fewer shows per year, all of them larger shows guaranteed to attract a key audience.

"I had set a goal when I graduated from college: I wanted to be the biggest comic book dealer in the world. I wanted to be the number one dealer in the country and the biggest in the world. That was setting the bar pretty high. I broke up my business, and I struggled…really, really worked my butt off… to get where I am."

Vincent´s original company had been called `Vincent´s Collectibles,´ and in addition to selling on the streets of New York, he already had an Internet presence and was a popular vendor at conventions.

His friend (and now partner) Stephen Fishler dealt in vintage movie posters and collectibles, and had a showroom in Manhattan. In 1999, Vincent and Stephen decided to merge their companies and take their business to the next level.

The Manhattan showroom now does double duty as their office and a gallery to showcase one of the finest collections of vintage movie posters and comic book art in the country. But the gallery displays only a small portion of what they have to offer: "The stockroom is filled with over 100,000 vintage comic books."

After the merger, Vincent reviewed the Metropolis Collectibles website and decided that it wasn´t quite up to par with the volume and caliber of the items they were selling.

He sought solutions that would make it easier to track their inventory, and make it easier for his customers to find exactly what they wanted. The site had an initial makeover and re-launch in late 1999, and another in October 2001.

In order to promote and market the site, and expand their customer base, they joined forces with TIAS.Com, "The Internet Antique Store."

"TIAS host stores in an online antique shopping mall. We met them at an Ebay convention in Ohio. They were based all over the country, but the president of the company worked out of Long Island, New York. We liked what they had to offer, and we got on board."

TIAS provides templates to their members to help them easily build online stores. All the back-end technology and programming is handled by TIAS, so members don´t need to hire an Internet consultant or have a computer guru on their staff to make a successful, working shop. Members create the look-and-feel of their site and add information about their inventory, and for a monthly fee, TIAS handles all aspects of maintenance.

"We had always thought of ourselves as the Amazon.com of vintage comics books, and we realized our site needed a look that would reflect that.

"It was clear that our customers wanted to shop quickly and easily, so we have multiple search options. You can search by title, by issue number, by genre, by publication. You can search for CGC comic books, which are encapsulated, third party graded comic books, so people who are novices when it comes to knowing how to grade a comic book can buy comics that have been graded by a professional, impartial company."

"We´ve taken our search features to the next level. I believe our website, for comics, is the finest of its kind on the Internet. I don´t think any of our competition has everything we have, and that has shown: in the last year, our sales have gone up 93% on the Internet, and that´s a tremendous jump."

When it came to creating a website design that really appealed to his customers, the old adage `Nothing succeeds like success´ came to mind:

"We created a new look for our site based on the top 10 most visited sites on the Internet. I´ve always worked that way; I´ve looked at the people I admired the most and I´ve emulated them, whether that was my father or friends or teachers. I tried to find out what made them tick, what made them successful, and then tried to incorporate those things into my own regimen.

"Model yourself after someone you admire. It doesn´t have to be someone in the same business… it doesn´t even have to be someone in business! It could be someone in politics or sports, an actor, anything. Find out how they´ve done what they´ve done, what their formula was, and incorporate that into your strategy for your business.

"When it came to business, it´s a natural direction to take: when you want to be the best, you look at who´s the best, and you try to copy or incorporate what you can from them. Absorb what is useful and discard what is not. Take what you can use and make it your own. And that´s what we´ve done with both our business and our site.

"Since we´re the premiere company in our niche, we´re trying to constantly maintain that position, and we´re constantly looking at what our competitors are doing, and if we really like what they´re doing, we´ll incorporate it into our business. Observation has been a really important tool for us."

And that is one of the benefits of the Internet: businesses don´t have to go in the red or spend months of development time to initiate changes: they can happen very cheaply and, literally, over night.

"We have so many new strategies we´ll be incorporating over the next few months. We´ll be adding a discounted section, we´re working with various search engines to improve our placement, and we´re looking at expanding our market into the far East."

But that 93% Internet sales increase hasn´t made Vincent complacent. There´s still plenty of competition—most of it in the form of auctions, both live and online. The key to matching, and ultimately surpassing, the competition lies in finding your business´ key strengths and expanding on them. While auctions can be inviting, they aren´t always in the customers´ best interest, and Vincent knows that people are catching on.

"There´s been a shift on the Internet toward auction businesses in the last few years, and since we´re not an auction business, we have to figure out how to compete against companies that are doing something very different from what we´re doing. I think the way to do it is to get out there and really highlight the strengths of our company.

"Auctions are a great vehicle for selling items, but they might not always be the best option. Sometimes you wait for months to get paid; there are a tremendous amount of fees involved. With our company, when you sell your items to us, you get a check the next day. It´s a simple process."

Because auctions do represent competition for Metropolis, they´ve decided to keep pace with their competitors by making some of their inventory available on Ebay. A link to their Ebay listings is even featured on the Metropoliscomics.com homepage.

"We do sell some stuff very cheaply on Ebay, and it´s a way for people who don´t necessarily want to spend large amounts of money on comic books to get some deals they can be happy with."

While they´ve seen a giant leap in the use of their web site, it still only accounts for 10% of their overall business. Customers frequently refer to the site to check on the price or availability of a particular title, but many still call in their orders or visit the store.

Vincent still relies on face-to-face interaction with his customers through comic book conventions and trade shows, since most of his customers want to look closely at their treasures before purchase. As important as the Internet has become, new innovations can´t always replace older conventions:

"We haven´t had a print catalog in over five years, but many of our customers aren´t online yet, and right now I feel that a paper catalog would increase sales, and would help us compete against some of the auction houses, and really showcase the strengths of our company."

The market for his comics continues to expand as movies like Spiderman and X-Men familiarize a new generation with comics, and audiences begin to seek out the comics that inspired these blockbuster hits.

"More of these different characters are being turned into movies, and more people have become aware of the comics behind the films, so we´ve seen a growth in the number of possible collectors and investors in our hobby. It´s going to be very good for us in the next five years."

And in that same period of time, Vincent hopes—and expects—that more and more of his business will be done online.

"The thing I like about doing business online is that it´s clean and easy. You don´t have to spend a lot of time on the phone with people, people can get in, see what they want, buy it, and that´s that.

They can be exposed to a much larger portion of product from my company, in less time. And it frees me up to spend my time managing the company and trying to move us forward."

The Internet, Vincent feels, can be a powerful tool for business growth, as long as it is wielded wisely:

"You have to set very specific goals for yourself. If you don´t know where you want to go, it´s hard for you to get there. That might sound pretty obvious, but a lot of people drift along aimlessly, without knowing exactly what they want to accomplish for their business.

I think it´s valuable to sit down and write out your goals. From there, you can create a game plan, a strategy for how to achieve these goals.

"It´s important to stay focused. It´s important not to sabotage yourself by becoming satisfied and feeling like you don´t have to work at it anymore. People get stuck in the day-to-day of their business, and sometimes it´s hard to pull back and see the big picture."