8 ms·

Those Comics in Your Basement? Probably Worthless

68 points by rubikscube 13y ago

devNoise 13y ago
As the article states the newer stuff does not have the scarecity that the Golden Age and thus and not worth as much.
- ZanderEarth32 13y ago
  Interestingly enough, there are a few books that are new but can command a decent price for such a new book. For example, a first edition printing of Saga #1 which is just a couple of years old can fetch $75 or so, with a $4 cover price. It really has a lot to do with the creators of the book, and the number of issues printed during that first run. The 90's killed much of the comic book collecting market. Marvel and DC fed speculators hunger for variant covers, limited editions and multiple lines of books with the same characters. I can remember going to a comic book store in the early 90s when the Death of Superman issue came out, hoping to snag one of the coveted issues sporting an all black bag with a bloody S on the front. My 8 year old self was basically laughed out the door, saying they'd all be bought up or were selling for multiples of the cover price. That really killed a lot of my spirit for collecting. I just recently got back into comics, but purely for the enjoyment of reading them, so I buy digitally nearly 100% of the time. Digital comics are interesting, they remove the speculating, collecting and coveting of comics for some perceived monetary value and put the content front and center, which is where it should be.
- vidarh 13y ago
  A large part of the issue with this in the US is that you have a market where the number of issues sold is higher than the number of readers, because reading comics is a really niche thing in the US, while "everyone" has heard the stories of titles selling at ridiculous prices. Meanwhile, for comparison, a market like Norway, with 5 million people, have at various times had multiple series selling more than 100k copies a month. Donald Duck & Co. for a many years sold 150k copies a week. More importantly, readership here is usually estimated at 3-5 readers per copy, as opposed to more than one copy per reader in the US, as copies would pass around the family and get lent out to friends. In France, some new issues of the top selling album titles, like Tintin, Asterix and Spirou et Fantasio, have sold in millions in France alone.
mathattack 13y ago
When the wife threatened to pitch them, I shipped them all to my nephews. I hope they got more psychic value than the couple of dollars I could have gotten locally. I expect my kids to get them back when they're a little older. I think a couple things kill the prices: - A lot were produced. - It's much easier to find and sell them. (Thank you eBay) - Softcopy as a medium doesn't appeal to today's buyers. I wonder if Comixology will go after older properties.
- vidarh 13y ago
  > I wonder if Comixology will go after older properties. They already are. They do have some issues going back to the 30's. It's just spotty, and generally seems to be driven by "special events", e.g. they seem to have filled in bits and pieces related to Guardians of the Galaxy with the newest series in the run-up to the movie. Also, I expect they're also affected by poor archiving in early years - I know some publishers outside the US used to just dump excess stock and sell off or give away originals without ensuring they had proper archive copies. Many of them have had to buy individual issues from collectors when wanting to do reprints etc.
DanBC 13y ago
What happens if someone aggressively buys the sort of rare (but not ultra rare, significant) collections, and burns them? Is that enough to drive up the price?
- AJ007 13y ago
  There is no need to burn them, you just put them in a box and they are effectively off the market. If you examine the behavior of certain other thin markets, like art, this happens. The action of paying a record high price for something is because you own more of that item. It may happen with financial markets as well, but it requires a whole lot more money. My suggestion for any collectibles is first see if you can even find the item available on ebay, amazon, abebooks, etc. If its not, then that is a good sign. If there are a lot available and they aren't selling (watch the listing a week), then its worth a lot less than the asking prices.
bane 13y ago
I had a conversation a few years ago with the brother of a guy who owns a small chain of comic book stores in my area. I told him I might look at selling off my small collection of a few hundred comics. He waived me off of it. "My brother has a sizable warehouse full of old comics. It's just yet more inventory he needs to move. You'll be lucky to get $1 a book." It sounds like things are even more dire these days. The collectible market comes and goes, I'll just wait till it comes back around in 20 or 30 years I guess.
MrZongle2 13y ago
I can't say I'm terribly surprised. I bought into the hype back in the '90s and have about five boxes worth of comics in my basement that I feared parting with for years since they would "eventually be worth something". Now I let my kids read them. Granted, I still say "ok, wash your hands before you read them and put them back in the sleeves when you're done". I'd like to think that even if they're almost worthless 20 years from now in a less-than-pristine state, somebody besides myself has enjoyed them.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  Bravo. Whenever I think about all of those comics, many of them great reading material, stored away to be forever unread based on some notion of "value" makes me sad. I taught my kids how to read the same way that I learned, reading Spidey Super Stories comics from the 1970s. They were just a few bucks at my local comic book shop, and worth every penny.
AsymetricCom 13y ago
That 7-figure stock portfolio? worthless.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  Actually, it's worth 7 figures.
  - AsymetricCom 13y ago
    and those figures are worthless
    - notdrunkatall 13y ago
      Actually, they're worth about 7 figures.
      - AsymetricCom 13y ago
        Circular logic is what keeps this economy going (in circles, around the drain)
        notdrunkatall 13y ago
        Whatever you say, bub.
durkie 13y ago
clearly their tween selves should have invested in baseball cards
Asparagirl 13y ago
See also: buying a house to live in with your family versus buying a house as an "investment". My pay-off on my comics, collected during that crazy mid-1990's boom, is that my kids are getting three long boxes of 1980's-1990's Chris Claremont and Peter David awesomeness and fun.
- jimhart3000 13y ago
  This. I have a 7k-ish collection in a storage unit near my family's homes. I worked in comics retail in the late 90s and had no expectation these would ever net me anything more than enjoyment. When my kids are a few years older I'll actually shell out the money to transport them to where I live now and hopefully the stories can be as magical for them as they were for me.
  - MartinCron 13y ago
    I knew a kid growing up who had one of those spinning comic book racks like you find in a corner store in his bedroom that was fully packed with great comics. That totally made him the coolest kid ever. Pay it forward.
mililani 13y ago
Yeah, I've suspected this for a long time. I'm 40 years old now, and my cousins and I used to collect comics when we were in elementary school all the way to high school. We sometimes would buy collector's items off the top walls in comic book stores (comic fans know what this is about) that were higher priced and more valuable. But, mostly, we would find a comic series we really like, follow it, and then when we knew a good story or "episode" was coming out, we would buy several of those comics. Some that I can remember from memory are: 1) Super Spiderman vs Hulk penned by Mcfarlane 2) Punisher vs Wolvering series 3) Xmen mutant massacre cross over series These comics of my youth are still tucked away at my parent's house with acid free backing and plastic for the past 20+ years. Anyways, sometimes I will go into comic book stores to peruse, and I'm often happy to discover that many of the comics my cousins and I thought would make the big time wall are now there. However, the big shock is, the prices they command are far below what we thought they would be. Some are $5-10. A few maybe $15. I mean, for the price we paid, I think it was $1.25 or 1.50, that may sound pretty decent. But, that's only half the story. Most comic book shops will only pay 50% of the market value of any collectables. So, that $10 comic will only probably net $5. After 20 years, it's not really worth it. But, there is one happy outcome of all this. My love of finding good stories that I think one day will become worth something has led me to stocks and investing. I think my comic book collector mentality translated well to stock picking and investing. I love finding a good business story and investing in it. That's how I found Netflix, Google, and Tesla. These companies made me FAR more money than any comic book has or probably ever will.
- mistermann 13y ago
  Any "unknown" stocks out there you like now?
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago
    MXWL.
  - mililani 13y ago
    Not nearly as much as before. I think for the most part, most equities are fairly valued and even over priced. Although, I still do like some BAC warrants. Some of the insurers and reinsurers look undervalued (most are trading at 75% of book value), but the insurance markets have been in a soft market (pricing power) for a while now, and there is no idea when markets will start to "harden". It will take a major catastrophe for that to happen. Some of the better managed ones, like Fairfax Financial, are fairly priced. So, to answer, no, not really. I'm actually mostly in cash now.
segmondy 13y ago
well, most collectibles are worthless, that's just the way it is. collecting things is not a way to get rich.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Particularly anything that people already see as collectible and carefully preserve; leads to a large supply of good-condition items. Pocket watches are one interesting example. The majority of nice old pieces from the late 19th century are worth only $50-$80. It's something that seemed obviously valuable to people so nobody threw them away, even once they went out of fashion in actual use. So there are literally millions of pocket watches out there still, since everyone has their grandfather's old watch. And they regularly appear on eBay, keeping the market supplied. Even if a large proportion are cannibalized for parts or lost, it's still enough supply that collectors' demand doesn't push prices very high.
3pt14159 13y ago
People pay for things they loved from thier childhood. Not things they collected during thier childhood. Right now? Nintendos and stuff like that. Not comicbooks. In the future? I don't know. Digital goods lack scarcity, but if I would have to guess I would say a nice assembly of all the stuff they may have thought they lost (like the blog I deleted after I entered university).
fishercs 13y ago
my dad was a comic nut, collected everything... he sold literally a pool table full of paper grocery bags stacked with comics for I believe 25-30k... so the market collapsed i take it?
infocollector 13y ago
Perhaps you want to keep it forever ?: http://bookscanner.us http://bookscanner.us
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
loudmax 13y ago
I have a couple of boxes of Magic: The Gathering cards going back to Antiquities and Arabian Nights. I'm counting on them being worth their weight in gold when I retire. Or maybe I should invest in tulips...
- mathattack 13y ago
  I recall hearing someone mention "Those Dragon magazines will be worth a lot some day..." If only...
- fredoliveira 13y ago
  Go through the trouble of separating the rares and uncommons from the rest. I'm pretty sure you know they're already worth a ton of money.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Those could actually be worth something, although most cards' value is a function of metagame more than age, so "older" does not always mean "worth more". If you actually want to try to monetize them, watch prices and sell some cards when you think those cards are particularly valuable.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  Those might actually be worth something some day. Not many people collected those, so the present supply is low, and will only decline further as time goes on. Magic was a game widely played by geeks, and I'm sure quite a few have fond memories of sitting around playing the game with friends, thus the game has sentimental value for them. Finally, geeks and former geeks will probably continue to gain more wealth over the next few decades, at least, which means that there will be a decreasing supply of something that an increasing number of people with money want. I'd definitely hang on to them.
  - Slackwise 13y ago
    Sorry, but this comment is hilarious because it is written from a perspective that Magic "was" popular. Truth? It's more popular than ever [1], and the Power 9 cards are still worth hundreds, if not thousands. [1]: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/253c http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/dai...
swang 13y ago
I just want to post this from the baseball card collecting perspective. Comic books and baseball cards share a pretty similar correlation between their values and their declines in the 80s to 2000s. The glut actually started in the mid 80s and not the 90s. And due to waning interest from kids due to both video games and the Internet their markets have slowly declined. The only difference is baseball cards have escalated to being essentially a lottery/gambling game while comics actually still have some value as entertainment itself. Basically card collecting now is a big gamble. You can buy $100 packs and they either have some common value cards worth maybe $5 or you might pull a great card that you can probably sell for $5K. Only a small percentage of people come out of it as a "winner" but because of the rush people get from pulling these special cards they continue to be bought. And even though $100 seems out of reach for kids, I have seen tons of videos on YouTube of kids who buy these packs. And since there is only one company now that can produce baseball cards (out of maybe 3-4 total card producing companies), they need to make their money back from buying the license from MLBPA/MLB so they essentially glut the market with tons and tons of different sets. Allen Ginter, Gypsy Queen, Bowman (there was ~3 different sets of Bowman released the last time I collected, and Bowman generally is for rookie/minor leaguers and since most of them will probably not make it to the majors, the set is going to contain a lot of useless cards/inserts), Topps, and some other sets they sell at like >$500 per pack. And the people on Craigslists who think their sealed 1992 Topps sets are worth any more than ~$5 or people who are selling those huge boxes of 80s/90s cards for $200 is laughable. You could literally burn half the world's supply of 80s/90s baseball cards and those cards would still probably be just as worthless. Just a huge, huge, worthless glut of cardboard. Edit: Took out roulette comment, made no sense.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  Once some category of goods whose value depends solely on rarity are widely perceived as collectibles, people rush out to buy them, and prices initially increase. After a while, demand drops to near zero, supply is huge, and their value goes in the toilet. Once people think something is a collectible, it's no longer wise to collect it.
  - wmf 13y ago
drpgq 13y ago
Huh. I live in Hamilton and knew Big B was a decent comic book store, but didn't know it was that big.
ilamont 13y ago
This made me think about LPs. I bought my last in 1999 (Pavement's Wowee Zowee and a used copy of ZZ Top's Tres Hombres). It was an impulse buy and they were cheap. At the time, I thought that LPs would go the way of 8-track and reel-to-reel audio, another old format eclipsed by the new (CDs and mp3s, which were just starting to become popular in the late 90s). I was wrong. People still buy LPs, and even more interesting to me is they are not just folks over 40. That said, I noticed that most used LPs are still dirt cheap -- while there is demand, it seems that it's just not large enough to put a dent in the supply. It also seems very difficult to sell old collections unless you truly have some rarities or good music that never made the digital transition).
- teddyh 13y ago
  > People still buy LPs Effectively, they don’t. It just looks like they do, because compared to CDs, LPs do sell. But, nobody buys CDs or any physical media with music anymore.
  - diydsp 13y ago
    I'm not sure if your post is sarcasm or uncritical listening to the internet telling you people only buy music on the internet, but a quick glance at wikipedia [1] shows the ratio of physical to digital sales varies greatly by country. Even in the United states, the ratio is about 1:2. In Japan, it's 4:1. In Germany it's almost 5:1. Physical media are still a $1.5 Billion/year business in the U.S. alone. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry go about halfway down the page.
    - teddyh 13y ago
      Personally, I am just observing the complete vanishing of brick-and-mortar stores for physical media of music, and extrapolating. I could certainly be mistaken.
      - vidarh 13y ago
        I don't actually know where to find one any more. I live in Londons most populous borough. I know there must be some in Central London still, probably in one of the locations I used to go to a decade ago, but the largest chains I used to go to have all gone bankrupt.
taude 13y ago
I really think a lot of this has to do with the abundance of digital availability. When I was a kid, we were forced to buy the rare commodity to enjoy the story. We'd even pool our money to do so. (I have a friend that had every IronMan up until about 1998, for example). Now, you can find out about backstory by reading Wikipedia. And you can either buy legitimate digital copies, or download illegal versions...
brk 13y ago
On a similar note, my friend's toddler is currently enjoying her "retirement account", a large tupperware container of Beanie Babies, several with the tags still attached.
tzs 13y ago
I wonder if anyone has ever tried collection college textbooks as an investment? Apostol's two volume "Calculus" was $20 per volume when I bought them at Caltech in 1977. Each was in its second edition then (and had been for about 10 years). The second edition is still the current edition, and still in use at Caltech and a few other top schools...and is around $220 for volume I and around $170 for volume II. (Apparently, Apostol never got the word that calculus books need to be revised every year to keep up with the rapid pace of research in freshman mathematics...) That's 6.8% growth per year for volume I, which is not bad.
ideonexus 13y ago
I was volunteering in a comic shop when the bubble burst. At the time we blamed it completely on the sudden availability of reprints. Marvel realized they were sitting on a wealth of intellectual property and started pumping out graphic novels compiling the most valuable story arcs (this plus the movies made their stock prices shoot to the Moon). Then they started producing DVDs with entire collections of comics in PDF format. I bought a DVD from Marvel with the entire history of Uncanny X-men comics for $40 (DVD's now worth $200). A week later, I donated my entire X-men print collection to the shop owner. http://www.amazon.com/40-Years-X-Men-Complete-Collection/dp/B000E28UT2/ http://www.amazon.com/40-Years-X-Men-Complete-Collection/dp/... There are a lot of hard feelings about this in the comic-collector community. I did lose years of what I expected to be an investment. At the same time, I get to read the entire history of Hulk comics at a fraction of the cost.
withad 13y ago
The article only touches on it briefly but I think the difference between most issues and the few "gold-plated issues with megawatt cultural significance" is key. People saw Actions Comics #1 and Amazing Fantasy #15 selling for huge amounts and got the idea that #1 issues and first appearances were somehow inherently worth a lot of money, when in fact it's the cultural importance of Superman and Spider-Man that gave them their value. Even if there weren't a million bagged-and-boarded copies of Rob Liefeld's Bludd Gunn McShootDeath and the X-Murder Y-Bunch #0.5 sitting in people's basements, it still wouldn't be worth anything because hardly anybody cares about those characters. Even classic runs from the 80s and 90s (Walt Simonson's Thor, Morrison's JLA, Sandman, etc.) haven't had anything like the cultural impact and recognition that major Golden and Silver Age titles did outside of comic circles.
tzs 13y ago
Let's let our inner villain run free for a bit, and see if we can find a way to cheat. Suppose we were to buy a good sized supply of paper of the same kind and from the same manufacturer that Marvel prints its books on. And suppose we were also do the same thing with the ink Marvel uses, and the staples Marvel uses. Then we wait 40 or 50 years, and look back to identify the books that turned out to be very valuable in hind site, but did not appear so when they were new. For instance, books like Journey into Mystery #83. Journey into Mystery was an anthology series. It had started out, I believe, as horror, and slowly changed to science fiction. In #83, one of the stories was of a Norse god, Thor, in our world. Nothing about that stood out to alert people that this was the start of something big, and so maybe they would want to buy extra copies to preserve. Just another new character in a book with new characters all th time. But this one WAS different...more Thor stories appeared, and he became a feature in every issue, and gradually they stopped having non-Thor stories and the book became The Mighty Thor. Anyway, we look back and identify a book that we now see was another Journey into Mystery #83 (which, BTW, is worth something like $50k now). Then we reprint it, on our 50 year old paper, using our 50 year old ink, and stapled with our 50 year old staples. Then we age it for a few years (I'm guessing that ink diffuses some through the paper and so experts could easily tell if a page has been freshly printed). Is this a viable evil plan?
- valleyer 13y ago
  So you've just described counterfeiting. What am I missing?
  - tzs 13y ago
    Yes, I've described counterfeiting. The question is whether or not it would work. Generally, physical items undergo somewhat predictable physical changes as they age, allowing experts to determine the approximate age of an item. To counterfeit with an acceptable level of risk, we need our counterfeit to appear to be the right age. I'm asking if using authentic period paper, ink, and staples would be sufficient, or are there aging effects that depend on how long the ink has actually been applied to the paper?
loso 13y ago
If you want to see this same event happen in real time in the next few years then look at the sneaker market. The same thing that happened with Comics and Baseball Cards is going to happen in the sneaker market. Nike and other sneaker companies are pumping out so called "collectable" sneaker to sneaker heads. These people, tempted to say kids but I know too many adults who do this as well, buy the sneakers at $200 and never wear them. Or there are some like the kid in this story http://abcnews.go.com/Business/teenage-sneakerheads-bet-thousands-high-stakes-sneakers-trade/story?id=19393834 http://abcnews.go.com/Business/teenage-sneakerheads-bet-thou... who camp out and buy them only to resell them on eBay right away for double to triple the price. There is definitely a bubble going on here and someone like me who is very interested in economics and have many friends who are into the sneaker scene, but not as hardcore as a lot of these people, it is going to be interesting to watch it go pop.
- redsparrow 13y ago
  That reminds me of this story of a family who "invested" $100,000 in Beanie Babies: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/how-one-family-went-bankrupt-spending-100000-beanie-babies http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/how-one-family-went-b...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
ericcholis 13y ago
Probably is the key word here, but there might be some gems in that stash. It's worth it to do your due diligence and check these things out for yourself. I work in both the Sports Card and Comic Book industry, and I can say that I've seen $100,000 worth of cards/comic being purchased moments after turning down a collection that wouldn't be worth $5.
ashleycutler 13y ago
These articles are always written from the same perspective: collectors who invested in a particular item when the market for that item was at its peak and now they are shocked that it didn’t retain its value. It isn’t all that different from buying Dell Stocks in 2000. You don’t realize it is a bubble until it is over. From running Zistle.com I can say that in sports cards at least, these 'bubbles' in price are often correlated to current events. I can guarantee there is a spike in the prices for Ortiz cards right now and in 6-12 months they will go back to normal. These articles totally miss the fact that the savvy collectors in the market are always the ones selling the cards during the peak and not buying. During Linsanity, there were Jeremy Lin basketball cards selling for several thousand dollars and now you can pick them up for a couple of bucks. Savvy collectors knew that this was their moment to make money and they took advantage of it. That was the peak of the market. If you want to know who is profiting in the collectibles market, it is the people who pay close enough attention to what is hot right now and not people who wrap items up in their closet for 20 years.
zxlk21e 13y ago
As a guy with a comic book marketplace startup (http://comicswap.com http://comicswap.com) - I'd have to disagree. Some of the recent prices fetched for key golden age issues are absolutely insane and many of the currently running series are fetching ridiculous prices (Image comics in particular, like The Walking Dead). However, the bronze age - yep. Very little there worth much.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

68 points by rubikscube 13y ago

devNoise 13y ago

As the article states the newer stuff does not have the scarecity that the Golden Age and thus and not worth as much.

ZanderEarth32 13y ago
Interestingly enough, there are a few books that are new but can command a decent price for such a new book. For example, a first edition printing of Saga #1 which is just a couple of years old can fetch $75 or so, with a $4 cover price. It really has a lot to do with the creators of the book, and the number of issues printed during that first run. The 90's killed much of the comic book collecting market. Marvel and DC fed speculators hunger for variant covers, limited editions and multiple lines of books with the same characters. I can remember going to a comic book store in the early 90s when the Death of Superman issue came out, hoping to snag one of the coveted issues sporting an all black bag with a bloody S on the front. My 8 year old self was basically laughed out the door, saying they'd all be bought up or were selling for multiples of the cover price. That really killed a lot of my spirit for collecting. I just recently got back into comics, but purely for the enjoyment of reading them, so I buy digitally nearly 100% of the time. Digital comics are interesting, they remove the speculating, collecting and coveting of comics for some perceived monetary value and put the content front and center, which is where it should be.
vidarh 13y ago
A large part of the issue with this in the US is that you have a market where the number of issues sold is higher than the number of readers, because reading comics is a really niche thing in the US, while "everyone" has heard the stories of titles selling at ridiculous prices. Meanwhile, for comparison, a market like Norway, with 5 million people, have at various times had multiple series selling more than 100k copies a month. Donald Duck & Co. for a many years sold 150k copies a week. More importantly, readership here is usually estimated at 3-5 readers per copy, as opposed to more than one copy per reader in the US, as copies would pass around the family and get lent out to friends. In France, some new issues of the top selling album titles, like Tintin, Asterix and Spirou et Fantasio, have sold in millions in France alone.

mathattack 13y ago

When the wife threatened to pitch them, I shipped them all to my nephews. I hope they got more psychic value than the couple of dollars I could have gotten locally. I expect my kids to get them back when they're a little older. I think a couple things kill the prices: - A lot were produced. - It's much easier to find and sell them. (Thank you eBay) - Softcopy as a medium doesn't appeal to today's buyers. I wonder if Comixology will go after older properties.

vidarh 13y ago
> I wonder if Comixology will go after older properties. They already are. They do have some issues going back to the 30's. It's just spotty, and generally seems to be driven by "special events", e.g. they seem to have filled in bits and pieces related to Guardians of the Galaxy with the newest series in the run-up to the movie. Also, I expect they're also affected by poor archiving in early years - I know some publishers outside the US used to just dump excess stock and sell off or give away originals without ensuring they had proper archive copies. Many of them have had to buy individual issues from collectors when wanting to do reprints etc.

DanBC 13y ago

What happens if someone aggressively buys the sort of rare (but not ultra rare, significant) collections, and burns them? Is that enough to drive up the price?

AJ007 13y ago
There is no need to burn them, you just put them in a box and they are effectively off the market. If you examine the behavior of certain other thin markets, like art, this happens. The action of paying a record high price for something is because you own more of that item. It may happen with financial markets as well, but it requires a whole lot more money. My suggestion for any collectibles is first see if you can even find the item available on ebay, amazon, abebooks, etc. If its not, then that is a good sign. If there are a lot available and they aren't selling (watch the listing a week), then its worth a lot less than the asking prices.

bane 13y ago

I had a conversation a few years ago with the brother of a guy who owns a small chain of comic book stores in my area. I told him I might look at selling off my small collection of a few hundred comics. He waived me off of it. "My brother has a sizable warehouse full of old comics. It's just yet more inventory he needs to move. You'll be lucky to get $1 a book." It sounds like things are even more dire these days. The collectible market comes and goes, I'll just wait till it comes back around in 20 or 30 years I guess.

MrZongle2 13y ago

I can't say I'm terribly surprised. I bought into the hype back in the '90s and have about five boxes worth of comics in my basement that I feared parting with for years since they would "eventually be worth something". Now I let my kids read them. Granted, I still say "ok, wash your hands before you read them and put them back in the sleeves when you're done". I'd like to think that even if they're almost worthless 20 years from now in a less-than-pristine state, somebody besides myself has enjoyed them.

MartinCron 13y ago
Bravo. Whenever I think about all of those comics, many of them great reading material, stored away to be forever unread based on some notion of "value" makes me sad. I taught my kids how to read the same way that I learned, reading Spidey Super Stories comics from the 1970s. They were just a few bucks at my local comic book shop, and worth every penny.

AsymetricCom 13y ago

That 7-figure stock portfolio? worthless.

notdrunkatall 13y ago
Actually, it's worth 7 figures.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  and those figures are worthless
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago
    Actually, they're worth about 7 figures.
    - AsymetricCom 13y ago
      Circular logic is what keeps this economy going (in circles, around the drain)
      - notdrunkatall 13y ago
        Whatever you say, bub.

durkie 13y ago

clearly their tween selves should have invested in baseball cards

Asparagirl 13y ago

See also: buying a house to live in with your family versus buying a house as an "investment". My pay-off on my comics, collected during that crazy mid-1990's boom, is that my kids are getting three long boxes of 1980's-1990's Chris Claremont and Peter David awesomeness and fun.

jimhart3000 13y ago
This. I have a 7k-ish collection in a storage unit near my family's homes. I worked in comics retail in the late 90s and had no expectation these would ever net me anything more than enjoyment. When my kids are a few years older I'll actually shell out the money to transport them to where I live now and hopefully the stories can be as magical for them as they were for me.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  I knew a kid growing up who had one of those spinning comic book racks like you find in a corner store in his bedroom that was fully packed with great comics. That totally made him the coolest kid ever. Pay it forward.

mililani 13y ago

Yeah, I've suspected this for a long time. I'm 40 years old now, and my cousins and I used to collect comics when we were in elementary school all the way to high school. We sometimes would buy collector's items off the top walls in comic book stores (comic fans know what this is about) that were higher priced and more valuable. But, mostly, we would find a comic series we really like, follow it, and then when we knew a good story or "episode" was coming out, we would buy several of those comics. Some that I can remember from memory are: 1) Super Spiderman vs Hulk penned by Mcfarlane 2) Punisher vs Wolvering series 3) Xmen mutant massacre cross over series These comics of my youth are still tucked away at my parent's house with acid free backing and plastic for the past 20+ years. Anyways, sometimes I will go into comic book stores to peruse, and I'm often happy to discover that many of the comics my cousins and I thought would make the big time wall are now there. However, the big shock is, the prices they command are far below what we thought they would be. Some are $5-10. A few maybe $15. I mean, for the price we paid, I think it was $1.25 or 1.50, that may sound pretty decent. But, that's only half the story. Most comic book shops will only pay 50% of the market value of any collectables. So, that $10 comic will only probably net $5. After 20 years, it's not really worth it. But, there is one happy outcome of all this. My love of finding good stories that I think one day will become worth something has led me to stocks and investing. I think my comic book collector mentality translated well to stock picking and investing. I love finding a good business story and investing in it. That's how I found Netflix, Google, and Tesla. These companies made me FAR more money than any comic book has or probably ever will.

mistermann 13y ago
Any "unknown" stocks out there you like now?
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  MXWL.
- mililani 13y ago
  Not nearly as much as before. I think for the most part, most equities are fairly valued and even over priced. Although, I still do like some BAC warrants. Some of the insurers and reinsurers look undervalued (most are trading at 75% of book value), but the insurance markets have been in a soft market (pricing power) for a while now, and there is no idea when markets will start to "harden". It will take a major catastrophe for that to happen. Some of the better managed ones, like Fairfax Financial, are fairly priced. So, to answer, no, not really. I'm actually mostly in cash now.

segmondy 13y ago

well, most collectibles are worthless, that's just the way it is. collecting things is not a way to get rich.

_delirium 13y ago
Particularly anything that people already see as collectible and carefully preserve; leads to a large supply of good-condition items. Pocket watches are one interesting example. The majority of nice old pieces from the late 19th century are worth only $50-$80. It's something that seemed obviously valuable to people so nobody threw them away, even once they went out of fashion in actual use. So there are literally millions of pocket watches out there still, since everyone has their grandfather's old watch. And they regularly appear on eBay, keeping the market supplied. Even if a large proportion are cannibalized for parts or lost, it's still enough supply that collectors' demand doesn't push prices very high.

3pt14159 13y ago

People pay for things they loved from thier childhood. Not things they collected during thier childhood. Right now? Nintendos and stuff like that. Not comicbooks. In the future? I don't know. Digital goods lack scarcity, but if I would have to guess I would say a nice assembly of all the stuff they may have thought they lost (like the blog I deleted after I entered university).

fishercs 13y ago

my dad was a comic nut, collected everything... he sold literally a pool table full of paper grocery bags stacked with comics for I believe 25-30k... so the market collapsed i take it?

infocollector 13y ago

Perhaps you want to keep it forever ?: http://bookscanner.us http://bookscanner.us

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loudmax 13y ago

I have a couple of boxes of Magic: The Gathering cards going back to Antiquities and Arabian Nights. I'm counting on them being worth their weight in gold when I retire. Or maybe I should invest in tulips...

mathattack 13y ago
I recall hearing someone mention "Those Dragon magazines will be worth a lot some day..." If only...
fredoliveira 13y ago
Go through the trouble of separating the rares and uncommons from the rest. I'm pretty sure you know they're already worth a ton of money.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Those could actually be worth something, although most cards' value is a function of metagame more than age, so "older" does not always mean "worth more". If you actually want to try to monetize them, watch prices and sell some cards when you think those cards are particularly valuable.
notdrunkatall 13y ago
Those might actually be worth something some day. Not many people collected those, so the present supply is low, and will only decline further as time goes on. Magic was a game widely played by geeks, and I'm sure quite a few have fond memories of sitting around playing the game with friends, thus the game has sentimental value for them. Finally, geeks and former geeks will probably continue to gain more wealth over the next few decades, at least, which means that there will be a decreasing supply of something that an increasing number of people with money want. I'd definitely hang on to them.
- Slackwise 13y ago
  Sorry, but this comment is hilarious because it is written from a perspective that Magic "was" popular. Truth? It's more popular than ever [1], and the Power 9 cards are still worth hundreds, if not thousands. [1]: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/253c http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/dai...

swang 13y ago

I just want to post this from the baseball card collecting perspective. Comic books and baseball cards share a pretty similar correlation between their values and their declines in the 80s to 2000s. The glut actually started in the mid 80s and not the 90s. And due to waning interest from kids due to both video games and the Internet their markets have slowly declined. The only difference is baseball cards have escalated to being essentially a lottery/gambling game while comics actually still have some value as entertainment itself. Basically card collecting now is a big gamble. You can buy $100 packs and they either have some common value cards worth maybe $5 or you might pull a great card that you can probably sell for $5K. Only a small percentage of people come out of it as a "winner" but because of the rush people get from pulling these special cards they continue to be bought. And even though $100 seems out of reach for kids, I have seen tons of videos on YouTube of kids who buy these packs. And since there is only one company now that can produce baseball cards (out of maybe 3-4 total card producing companies), they need to make their money back from buying the license from MLBPA/MLB so they essentially glut the market with tons and tons of different sets. Allen Ginter, Gypsy Queen, Bowman (there was ~3 different sets of Bowman released the last time I collected, and Bowman generally is for rookie/minor leaguers and since most of them will probably not make it to the majors, the set is going to contain a lot of useless cards/inserts), Topps, and some other sets they sell at like >$500 per pack. And the people on Craigslists who think their sealed 1992 Topps sets are worth any more than ~$5 or people who are selling those huge boxes of 80s/90s cards for $200 is laughable. You could literally burn half the world's supply of 80s/90s baseball cards and those cards would still probably be just as worthless. Just a huge, huge, worthless glut of cardboard. Edit: Took out roulette comment, made no sense.

notdrunkatall 13y ago
Once some category of goods whose value depends solely on rarity are widely perceived as collectibles, people rush out to buy them, and prices initially increase. After a while, demand drops to near zero, supply is huge, and their value goes in the toilet. Once people think something is a collectible, it's no longer wise to collect it.
- wmf 13y ago

drpgq 13y ago

Huh. I live in Hamilton and knew Big B was a decent comic book store, but didn't know it was that big.

ilamont 13y ago

This made me think about LPs. I bought my last in 1999 (Pavement's Wowee Zowee and a used copy of ZZ Top's Tres Hombres). It was an impulse buy and they were cheap. At the time, I thought that LPs would go the way of 8-track and reel-to-reel audio, another old format eclipsed by the new (CDs and mp3s, which were just starting to become popular in the late 90s). I was wrong. People still buy LPs, and even more interesting to me is they are not just folks over 40. That said, I noticed that most used LPs are still dirt cheap -- while there is demand, it seems that it's just not large enough to put a dent in the supply. It also seems very difficult to sell old collections unless you truly have some rarities or good music that never made the digital transition).

teddyh 13y ago
> People still buy LPs Effectively, they don’t. It just looks like they do, because compared to CDs, LPs do sell. But, nobody buys CDs or any physical media with music anymore.
- diydsp 13y ago
  I'm not sure if your post is sarcasm or uncritical listening to the internet telling you people only buy music on the internet, but a quick glance at wikipedia [1] shows the ratio of physical to digital sales varies greatly by country. Even in the United states, the ratio is about 1:2. In Japan, it's 4:1. In Germany it's almost 5:1. Physical media are still a $1.5 Billion/year business in the U.S. alone. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry go about halfway down the page.
  - teddyh 13y ago
    Personally, I am just observing the complete vanishing of brick-and-mortar stores for physical media of music, and extrapolating. I could certainly be mistaken.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      I don't actually know where to find one any more. I live in Londons most populous borough. I know there must be some in Central London still, probably in one of the locations I used to go to a decade ago, but the largest chains I used to go to have all gone bankrupt.

taude 13y ago

I really think a lot of this has to do with the abundance of digital availability. When I was a kid, we were forced to buy the rare commodity to enjoy the story. We'd even pool our money to do so. (I have a friend that had every IronMan up until about 1998, for example). Now, you can find out about backstory by reading Wikipedia. And you can either buy legitimate digital copies, or download illegal versions...

brk 13y ago

On a similar note, my friend's toddler is currently enjoying her "retirement account", a large tupperware container of Beanie Babies, several with the tags still attached.

tzs 13y ago

I wonder if anyone has ever tried collection college textbooks as an investment? Apostol's two volume "Calculus" was $20 per volume when I bought them at Caltech in 1977. Each was in its second edition then (and had been for about 10 years). The second edition is still the current edition, and still in use at Caltech and a few other top schools...and is around $220 for volume I and around $170 for volume II. (Apparently, Apostol never got the word that calculus books need to be revised every year to keep up with the rapid pace of research in freshman mathematics...) That's 6.8% growth per year for volume I, which is not bad.

ideonexus 13y ago

I was volunteering in a comic shop when the bubble burst. At the time we blamed it completely on the sudden availability of reprints. Marvel realized they were sitting on a wealth of intellectual property and started pumping out graphic novels compiling the most valuable story arcs (this plus the movies made their stock prices shoot to the Moon). Then they started producing DVDs with entire collections of comics in PDF format. I bought a DVD from Marvel with the entire history of Uncanny X-men comics for $40 (DVD's now worth $200). A week later, I donated my entire X-men print collection to the shop owner. http://www.amazon.com/40-Years-X-Men-Complete-Collection/dp/B000E28UT2/ http://www.amazon.com/40-Years-X-Men-Complete-Collection/dp/... There are a lot of hard feelings about this in the comic-collector community. I did lose years of what I expected to be an investment. At the same time, I get to read the entire history of Hulk comics at a fraction of the cost.

withad 13y ago

The article only touches on it briefly but I think the difference between most issues and the few "gold-plated issues with megawatt cultural significance" is key. People saw Actions Comics #1 and Amazing Fantasy #15 selling for huge amounts and got the idea that #1 issues and first appearances were somehow inherently worth a lot of money, when in fact it's the cultural importance of Superman and Spider-Man that gave them their value. Even if there weren't a million bagged-and-boarded copies of Rob Liefeld's Bludd Gunn McShootDeath and the X-Murder Y-Bunch #0.5 sitting in people's basements, it still wouldn't be worth anything because hardly anybody cares about those characters. Even classic runs from the 80s and 90s (Walt Simonson's Thor, Morrison's JLA, Sandman, etc.) haven't had anything like the cultural impact and recognition that major Golden and Silver Age titles did outside of comic circles.

tzs 13y ago

Let's let our inner villain run free for a bit, and see if we can find a way to cheat. Suppose we were to buy a good sized supply of paper of the same kind and from the same manufacturer that Marvel prints its books on. And suppose we were also do the same thing with the ink Marvel uses, and the staples Marvel uses. Then we wait 40 or 50 years, and look back to identify the books that turned out to be very valuable in hind site, but did not appear so when they were new. For instance, books like Journey into Mystery #83. Journey into Mystery was an anthology series. It had started out, I believe, as horror, and slowly changed to science fiction. In #83, one of the stories was of a Norse god, Thor, in our world. Nothing about that stood out to alert people that this was the start of something big, and so maybe they would want to buy extra copies to preserve. Just another new character in a book with new characters all th time. But this one WAS different...more Thor stories appeared, and he became a feature in every issue, and gradually they stopped having non-Thor stories and the book became The Mighty Thor. Anyway, we look back and identify a book that we now see was another Journey into Mystery #83 (which, BTW, is worth something like $50k now). Then we reprint it, on our 50 year old paper, using our 50 year old ink, and stapled with our 50 year old staples. Then we age it for a few years (I'm guessing that ink diffuses some through the paper and so experts could easily tell if a page has been freshly printed). Is this a viable evil plan?

valleyer 13y ago
So you've just described counterfeiting. What am I missing?
- tzs 13y ago
  Yes, I've described counterfeiting. The question is whether or not it would work. Generally, physical items undergo somewhat predictable physical changes as they age, allowing experts to determine the approximate age of an item. To counterfeit with an acceptable level of risk, we need our counterfeit to appear to be the right age. I'm asking if using authentic period paper, ink, and staples would be sufficient, or are there aging effects that depend on how long the ink has actually been applied to the paper?

loso 13y ago

If you want to see this same event happen in real time in the next few years then look at the sneaker market. The same thing that happened with Comics and Baseball Cards is going to happen in the sneaker market. Nike and other sneaker companies are pumping out so called "collectable" sneaker to sneaker heads. These people, tempted to say kids but I know too many adults who do this as well, buy the sneakers at $200 and never wear them. Or there are some like the kid in this story http://abcnews.go.com/Business/teenage-sneakerheads-bet-thousands-high-stakes-sneakers-trade/story?id=19393834 http://abcnews.go.com/Business/teenage-sneakerheads-bet-thou... who camp out and buy them only to resell them on eBay right away for double to triple the price. There is definitely a bubble going on here and someone like me who is very interested in economics and have many friends who are into the sneaker scene, but not as hardcore as a lot of these people, it is going to be interesting to watch it go pop.

redsparrow 13y ago
That reminds me of this story of a family who "invested" $100,000 in Beanie Babies: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/how-one-family-went-bankrupt-spending-100000-beanie-babies http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/how-one-family-went-b...
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ericcholis 13y ago

Probably is the key word here, but there might be some gems in that stash. It's worth it to do your due diligence and check these things out for yourself. I work in both the Sports Card and Comic Book industry, and I can say that I've seen $100,000 worth of cards/comic being purchased moments after turning down a collection that wouldn't be worth $5.

ashleycutler 13y ago

These articles are always written from the same perspective: collectors who invested in a particular item when the market for that item was at its peak and now they are shocked that it didn’t retain its value. It isn’t all that different from buying Dell Stocks in 2000. You don’t realize it is a bubble until it is over. From running Zistle.com I can say that in sports cards at least, these 'bubbles' in price are often correlated to current events. I can guarantee there is a spike in the prices for Ortiz cards right now and in 6-12 months they will go back to normal. These articles totally miss the fact that the savvy collectors in the market are always the ones selling the cards during the peak and not buying. During Linsanity, there were Jeremy Lin basketball cards selling for several thousand dollars and now you can pick them up for a couple of bucks. Savvy collectors knew that this was their moment to make money and they took advantage of it. That was the peak of the market. If you want to know who is profiting in the collectibles market, it is the people who pay close enough attention to what is hot right now and not people who wrap items up in their closet for 20 years.

zxlk21e 13y ago

As a guy with a comic book marketplace startup (http://comicswap.com http://comicswap.com) - I'd have to disagree. Some of the recent prices fetched for key golden age issues are absolutely insane and many of the currently running series are fetching ridiculous prices (Image comics in particular, like The Walking Dead). However, the bronze age - yep. Very little there worth much.

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