How To Donate 80,000 Comic Books—And Get A Marvelous Tax Break

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. It took a team effort.

_{By Kelly Phillips Erb, Forbes Staff}

Gary Prebula blames his mother for his seven-decade-long comic book obsession. He was three when his parents ventured out on New Year’s Eve, leaving him with his grandfather. His mother bought a Superman comic book to keep the precocious toddler, who had just started to read, occupied. When his parents returned home just after 1:00 a.m. they found Prebula still awake, rereading that comic book, while his grandfather slept.

“I was addicted immediately,” he says. It became a constant of his childhood—each week, he’d walk three miles to the corner store in Butler, Pennsylvania, allowance in hand, to buy the latest superhero issues. In 1963, at age 12, he plopped down 12 cents to buy the first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man #1, the character’s solo-debut after Stan Lee introduced the teenage superhero in the Amazing Fantasy series the year before. Marvel’s The X-Men #1, another Lee creation, also cost him 12 cents that year.