What Tolstoy wrote about families is true of economics: Boom times are all alike, but every crash is disastrous in its own way. That’s why stories about bursting bubbles are always instructive. There are lessons in the smallest of them, even the bubble that led to the comic book crash of 1993.

Once upon a time comic books were ubiquitous and worthless. Sold in drugstores for a dime during the 1930s and ’40s, they were fun, pulpy reading for kids and youths. Issues were printed by the hundreds of thousands—even a million for the top titles—and then read, passed around in classrooms, locker rooms, and barracks, and eventually thrown away. A few odd ducks collected the things for pleasure, but this barely amounted to so much as a hobby.