Jujitsu Gerbils, and Pre-Teen Dirty Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos. This period also saw a corresponding expansion in price guide publications, most notably Wizard Magazine, which helped fuel the speculator boom with monthly columns such as the "Wizard Top 10" (highlighting the "hottest" back-issues of the month), "Market Watch" (which not only reported back-issue market trends, but also predicted future price trends), and "Comic Watch" (highlighting key "undervalued" back-issues). The speculators who made a profit or at least broke even on their comic book "investments" did so only by selling to other speculators. In truth, very few of the comics produced in the early 1990s have retained their value in the current market; with hundreds of thousands (or, in several prominent cases, over ten million) copies produced of certain issues, the value of these comics has all but disappeared. "Hot" comics like X-Men #1 and Youngblood #1 can today be found selling for under a dollar apiece. Veteran comic book fans pointed out an important fact about the collectors market that was largely overlooked by speculators: popular Golden Age comic books were valuable because they were genuinely rare. Since comic books were originally marketed to children and not viewed as collectible until much later, most Golden Age comics didn't survive to the present era. And before the 1990s, comic books were typically printed on cheap paper stock that aged very poorly. As a result, popular comic books published from the 1940s through the 1960s are extremely difficult to find and thus highly prized by collectors. By contrast, the speculator boom of the 1990s saw large print runs of comics on high-grade paper that were carefully stored by multitudes of collectors, creating a glut of product in the collectors market. Bust of the speculator market The comic book speculator market reached a saturation point in the early 1990s, and finally collapsed between 1993 through 1997. Two-thirds of all comic book specialty stores closed in this period, and numerous publishers were driven out of business. Even industry giant Marvel Comics was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1997, although they were able to continue publishing. It is surmised that one of the main factors in Marvel's downfall was the decision to switch to self-distribution (via their purchase of Heroes World Distribution). Until then, many publishers went through secondary distributors (such as the current and only mass distributor, Diamond Comic Distributors), and Marvel felt it could