When looking at a comic book, most people see… a comic book. It’s made of paper; it’s worth a few bucks… Others, yet, may see a treasure, sometimes even a nearly priceless jewel, depending on the superhero featured and the year it was issued.

In February 2010, Heritage Auction Galleries announced that a rare copy of “Detective Comics #27” had been sold for 1.075 million dollars. The price of this comic book issued in 1939 went that high for the reason that it featured Batman’s first appearance ever and therefore unleashed the incredible appetite of collectors, comic books fans and other bat-maniacs who usually feed on more recent and more common issues and who are willing to spend their family-savings in order to become the owner of such a rare copy.

This made me wonder: how is this possible? And what is “Batman” worth today?

The first question being more directed to sociologists and comic books fans, I decided to focus on the second one.

In his book Strategic Brand Management, Kevin Lane Keller explains that the concept of “brand valuation” is very controversial. Indeed, there is no active market for brands like there are markets for stocks, commodities, real estate, etc. Very specialized knowledge of marketing , accounting and trademark law is required to assess the actual role of the brand on a balance sheet and it is fairly obvious that brand valuation is based on art as much as on science.

However, the company Interbrand uses a formula that provides you with an idea of how much your brand is worth, give or take, which is actually a useful tool, keeping in mind it is impossible to reduce the richness of a brand to a single, meaningful number.

This formula calculates the brand value as the Net Present Value of the forecast brand earnings, discounted by the brand discount rate.

Unfortunately enough, no information of this kind is made available to the public regarding Batman.

Nevertheless, one can safely assume Batman is worth more and more as each movie brings more income, derived products and media attention than the one before. In 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman movie reached 100 million dollars of profit in only ten days – a studio record – and went on to become the biggest hit and the most successful franchise in Warner’s history to that point. Less than 20 years after, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight reached 314.2 million dollars in 10 days, new studio record again. This latest adaptation had also the title of biggest opening weekend at the box-office, until the last Harry Potter movie came out in 2011.

If we cannot determine how much Batman is worth, we can at least recognize its brand equity kept increasing with time and now has a stronger than ever symbolic meaning and value to customers, either old-school’s fans or new comers. The values of the brand are well-known by the general public, and because those values are embodied by the character himself they are easier to convey in all Batman products: comics, movies, cartoons, video games, and even clothing.

At last, for those of you readers who are disappointed not to have an actual number that estimates Batman’s net worth, I would like to point out that very serious Forbes Magazine releases every year its list of the wealthiest fictional characters. Net worth estimates are based on an analysis of the fictional character’s source material, and where possible, valued against known real-world commodity and share price movements. Bruce Wayne is ranked at the 8th position this year with over 7 billion dollars of net worth.