RCheli

If this is what you want to do, definitely do it. I'd love to open up a shop some day, but I don't think that I could do it financially. My job pays pretty well, and I can't see me matching it as a comic shop owner for many, many years. So I'll have my convention set-up and have fun doing that...

This is out in Oaks -- west of the city -- and is a smaller show than Wizard, which is in the convention center in Center City. I think Philadelphia, along with Chicago and New Orleans, is one of Wizard's best attended shows.

Was it here that I read that someone did this with eBay/Amazon? The would put up hundreds of listings on eBay every day selling common products -- blenders, TVs, DVD players, whatever -- at a prespecified percentage above the Amazon price. As people would buy his stuff and pay on eBay, he would then order the item from Amazon and have it shipped to them. He never had stock. He never had to hold an item. He made a small percentage on each purchase, and made a pretty decent price. Either Amazon or eBay shut them down -- I can't remember which -- but this guy is doing something very similar. The problem, though, is that this guy is trying to do it with collectables and a single dealer and not with appliances and a multinational seller. (There are other problems, of course.)

In the mid-90s, I was living in New Jersey and found a pile of "adult" paperbacks from the 60s (novels of the sexual nature) at a local garage sale. The person selling them was more than happy to sell about 50 of them for $5 just to get them out of their house. I drove up to the Passaic Book Center and traded them for a pile of FFs from the early 20s. Good times...

Evil Squirrel Comics? Looks like they've closed down. https://www.yelp.com/biz/evil-squirrel-comics-chicago That wasn't around in the 80s, though. It opened around... 2005, I guess, and closed in 2013.

The first Hulk Masterworks had the green dust jacket.

Are they held in by the staples? And are they always in the middle of the book? Yes and yes. Just remember, they only ever appear in newsstand copies of the comic. Never direct editions.

This reinforces everyone's understanding that no Marvel or DC comic from the early 90s is difficult to find.

I posted this in Modern (and I apologize for duplicating it here, with some minor edits), but it seems like you guys would be a better audience: I picked up a collection today, including the vast majority of the 90s Turtles books from Mirage. That includes Tales of TMNT #70 -- the last issue. The last copies of eBay all going around $100 or more (and two of them were in the FN/VF range). The copy I have would probably be a 9.4 -- nice, but not spectacular. The thing is, while there are a few copies of this series that have been graded and are currently for sale, none have actually sold. So I wonder if this is just a series that is NOT a gradeable comic, that the buyers just aren't there to pay the premium for the service.

This is quickly becoming a discussion that may go POOF, but there's this video from The Daily Show (from 2011) about what happened to the post office. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/av8twx/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-too-big-to-mail

So here is my theory on these changes: In the 40s, 50s, 60s, and into the 70s, the average comic book reader only collected/bought comics for a few years. Sure, there were always those who were bigger fans (we were the exceptions, not the rule), but for the most part, you started with Superman at 9, went to Spider-Man at 11, and were out of comics by 14. So change wasn't necessary because you constantly had new people coming and going into the hobby. Peter Parker being Spider-Man for 25 years with no real changes wasn't that big of a deal. Now, however, the guy who starts reading comics at 16 (because they sure as hell aren't starting at 9) may read for 10 years or more. So they need new, new, new. New series. New replacement characters. New everything. It's how Marvel and DC think they can retain readers through the rest of their lives.

Man, that Sad Sack is sweet!

i get the feeling that those extra obligations are a lot more than real estate taxes they do not have to pay (although that was a fair point if you are comparing them to UPS/Fedex) Significantly more. The post office is not perfect. They lose things. They deliver things to the wrong address. They also process 40% of the world's mail. They do it rather cheaply. I suppose I'd like them to pay property taxes (though I doubt if it'd be in the billions of dollars yearly); I'd also like churches to pay property (and other) taxes.

The USPS is required to have 75 years worth of retirement benefits funded. So they are funding retirements for a large number of people that are likely neither currently USPS employees or even born yet.

The thing is, the USPS gets no money from tax payers/governement above and beyond the services they pay for. So maybe they need to start getting some cash from us citizens. I'm okay with that.

No we aren't . We are paying to support forward payment of benefits that NO OTHER COMPANY in the history of the world has had to pay. This ruling was made by Congress, and the two leaders of the Congressional committee who pushed this through represent Memphis and Louisville, homes of the shipping hubs of Federal Express and UPS. Such a coincidence. When Congress kills the USPS, and rates to ship things quadruple - and they will - I do hope that everyone who about the USPS remembers what they had. Yes. A thousand times yes. USPS was doing fine until Congress and W started making ridiculous demands. But yeah, blame the Post Office.

The post office fiasco is all due to poor government. The USPS makes a lot of money and is profitable. Congress and W *bleeped* them over in the mid-00s.

That website looks like it's from 1998.

The Michael Golden Spider-Man/Hulk story from around issue #48 is also a great one. There was a Miller Captain America story in there, a terrific Mazzuchelli Angel story, Simonson/Gibbons Dr. Strange, and a whole lot more. The Byrne all-splash Hulk story was great. There were also plenty of duds. And the publishing schedule after the first 30-odd issues was a bit wonky.

where was this one at? Grand Rapids. It was not great for sales. A ton of people over the three days -- more than 15,000, I suspect. They were just not buying comics. They were buying toys and prints and video games and all that stuff. Just not the stuff I was selling. I hustled my off and came home with a little profit after expenses. But a lot of dealers did not do very well at all. It was a good buying convention. The last few hours of Sunday I was walking around buying as much as a I sold, probably, because the prices were so good.

(I priced that one at $8! It sold pretty quickly.)

A few weeks ago I was set up at a convention. It was slow, so I had a chance to dive into dollar bins of my fellow dealers. At one booth, I found a lot of good stuff that I quickly flipped for $5-$15 each, but I what got me really excited was that I found a TON of independent comics that used to be hot. And, because I'm that sort of a guy, I bought nearly all of them. They included (among others): Adventurers #1 Justice Machine Annual #1 Trollords #1 Redfox #1 The Realm #1 I took them back to my booth, bagged and boarded them, put $5 on each, and put them on my display rack (down at the bottom right-hand corner), out of prime real estate. And here's the funny thing: I sold A LOT of them. I didn't make a huge profit or anything, but a lot of people my age who stopped at my tables noticed them, had a good laugh, and then forked over the cash so they could get their copy and remember the mid-to-late 80s. Copper collectors are a strange lot. I'm proud to be one of them.

Wait... there are people outside of the US? When did this happen?

Spillane!?! That's Chandler, pal! The greatest detective fiction writer of all time! Yes, Chandler, Raymond Chandler and I agree with your assesment. I guess I shouldn't post when I've been drinking... If you were drinking whiskey, I think Chandler (and Philip Marlowe) would be okay with it.

Spillane!?! That's Chandler, pal! The greatest detective fiction writer of all time!