The main reason to get money is to buy comic books.

Many people hold this insight as children until mocking adults beat it out of them. Somehow, they never beat it out of Vincent Zurzolo, who goes to sleep at night with a box of comic books at his bedside at age 42.

Be forewarned: Zurzolo touts comic books the way a broker might tout a penny stock. Want to double or triple your investment? He wants to show you how.

“I used to say that comic books were in their infancy,” he said, “but now I say they are in their adolescence and have a long way to go.”

Zurzolo is one of the owners at Metropolis Collectibles Inc. and ComicConnect.com on Broadway near Manhattan’s Union Square. His companies have brokered the top three-grossing comic book sales of all time, beginning with a nearly mint copy of Action Comics No. 1 of June 1938, which features the first Superman appearance and fetched more than $2.1 million at an auction in December 2011.

Zurzolo is convinced comic books are about the best investment out there.

Here’s why:

With great power, comes great responsibility. The book that introduced Spider-Man to the world remains one of the best investments, says Vincent Zurzolo. Marvel

• What else could anyone buy for a dime in 1938 that would be worth $2.1 million today? The copy that sold in 2011 reportedly belonged to actor Nicholas Cage. He bought it in 1997 for about $150,000. It was stolen from his house in 2000 but was returned after Los Angeles police uncovered it from an abandoned storage locker. Its condition was graded a 9 on a 10-point scale and remains the most expensive comic book ever sold.

• A comic book could pay off your house. In June, Zurzolo auctioned another copy of Action Comics No. 1 for a Minnesota man who found it in the wall of a house he was remodeling. It had been stuffed in the wall as insulation and was in bad shape, attaining a grade of only 1.5. “The guy bought the house for $10,100, found a comic book that sold for $175,000,” and I collected a 10% commission on it,” Zurzolo said.

• A comic book could save your home from foreclosure. An anonymous couple living in the South were cleaning out the basement of a home they had owned since the 1950s because they were about to lose it to the bank. They found a copy of Action Comics No. 1 in an old box and brought it to Zurzolo. “The headline was ‘Superman saves the day’ and it was absolutely true,” Zurzolo said. They sold it for $436,000.

• Comic books are recession-proof. The only time business growth slowed for Zurzolo was right after the dot.com bust, but it soon rose from its plateau. “When the economy is doing poorly, people are looking for alternative forms of investment,” Zurzolo said. “When the economy is doing great they have more discretionary income and they buy comic books.”

Corporate cybercrimes expected to soar

• The widening gap between the rich and poor has only priced the masses of investors out of some issues, like the old Action Comics No. 1. “There’s a comic book for every budget and a budget for every comic book,” Zurzolo said.

• Comic-book valuations have yet to decline. (Yes, I know, they used to say this about real estate.) “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve dealt with who are ecstatic about their comic-book investments,” Zurzolo said. In the bleak aftermath of the financial crisis, Zurzolo sold an Action Comics No. 1 for $317,200 — which was then the record. “There were a lot of people with money who did not want to buy real estate and were terrified of the stock market,” Zurzolo recalls.

• Comic-book investments are often more liquid than real estate. Comic-book conventions around the world consistently draw crowds of 30,000 to 150,000. “People with very big bank accounts are showing up in costumes,” Zurzolo said “Nowadays it’s cool to be a nerd.”

• Comic-book investments are more predictable than stocks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.46% could go to 20,000 or 5,000, but Zurzolo predicts comic books will continue to captivate new buyers. “At the conventions, people see my comics in the case and they say how much is that? And I say $100,000 or $500,000 or $700,000 or $1 million. And they can’t believe I have a comic book worth more than their house.”

• They’re printing more money; they’re not printing more vintage comic books. OK, sometimes someone finds an unknown copy in a box and raises the circulation count, but it’s nothing like the Federal Reserve printing $85 billion a month. Zurzolo says comic books won’t be prone to bubbles, like, say, Beanie Babies, which were a manufactured product, because they’re not making any more and there’s still a long line of buyers.

• It’s more fun to research a comic book than a bond or a company. Instead of keeping track of CEOs with bad hair, you keep tabs on what comic-book characters are emerging in the movies and the hot starlets playing beside them. “I could tell you more about what’s going on with Spider-Man than I could about a Fortune 500 company with 10,000 employees, where if one of them does one stupid thing, the stock price drops $5 in a day.” Zurzolo said. “There’s nothing you’re going to tell me that’s going to make me not love Superman, Spider-Man and Batman.”

In closing I asked Zuzolo for a hot comic-book tip for anyone with $5,000 or $20,000 to invest. He gave me a pretty specific answer:

“I would just buy the first appearance of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy No. 15,” he said. “That’s almost always a guarantee. You might have to hold it for a year to three years, but you will see growth in that comic book like no other comic book on the market.”

A nearly mint copy sold for $1.1 million in 2011 but there are plenty of lower-grade copies on the market that are valued in the thousands of dollars, Zurzolo said.

“Spider-Man is the most highly collected superhero in the world of comic books. … Five years ago, Amazing Fantasy 15 sold for about $2,500 to $3,000. The same comic book today is about $7,000. It is the best book to invest in. If you’re asking me what I would put money into, I would put my money into that book.”