Hamlet

On 12/30/2022 at 10:00 PM, Hamlet said:

I want to actually sell a meaningful number of books this year, to fund the purchase side of things.  I got the funding part correct last year, but only because an effortless sale of an expensive non-core book in my collection basically came up and bit me on the butt.  I need to actually ship a few boxes off to MCS this year.

I want to attend some conventions and buy some very cool books at reasonable prices, and some kinda cool books at dirt cheap prices.  Since my definition of cool is extremely broad, I’m sure I’ll find a few things to buy.

I failed on the selling side.

I did buy some books though

On 12/3/2023 at 7:04 AM, path4play said:

Sweet!  What a beauty.  But why not simply auction it and let the market decide?  Else I'd use GPAnalysis and try to establish a value, then offer it here!  My guess is your probably taking several offers now via your messages that probably are providing a nice legitimate range, if not then I'll make an offer.  As someone mentioned, I also roughly estimate full covers at 50% of Good price.  Seems to me it would do better those ways than in an antique shop.  Just an opinion. 

It’s my neighbor’s not mine.  I really don’t want to get involved in the actual transaction in any way, TBH.

On 12/2/2023 at 2:48 PM, Lazyboy said:

The actual problem with origin issues, as I've mentioned before, is that origin stories of older characters have been endlessly reprinted, retold, and altered over the years. The first origin issue is nothing special anymore.

You could say the same thing about 1st appearances, but the market has gone in the opposite direction for those.

On 12/1/2023 at 6:43 PM, Prince Namor said:

It's been a slow erosion ever since.

The biggest reasons are the most obvious:

PRICE - VALUE - MARKET - SERVICE - AGE

PRICE has gotten exorbitant. The #1 reason most former readers bring up.

VALUE - Video games, the quality of movies, smart phones, the Internet... comic books can't keep up, especially vs the cost. 

MARKET - Digital sales in particular is eating away at stores sales, much of it coming directly from Marvel and DC on their websites - but easy access to FREE digital copies takes its toll as well.

SERVICE - I can probably name, maybe... three comic book stores in my life that I ever went into that I thought the service was GREAT. Most have been terrible. Not welcoming at all. Add to that an inability to market themselves properly and... that's a disaster for ANY type of business. 

AGE - It's an aging fanbase. Dying off or quitting every year.

I would add that the old comic book structure of producing a small piece of entertainment once a month just isn’t how many people want to consume content these days.  I want content to adhere to my schedule of consumption, and more and more of it does.  The idea of waiting to watch a TV show on a specific day and time once a week is dying.  I’d rather just wait until the season is complete and then stream it whenever I want to watch it.  I think the idea of going to the comic book store once a week for new releases is kind of in the same category. 

Trades seem so much better to me.  I think the only reason floppies are still around is nostalgia from people that grew up collecting like that.  I can’t imagine someone new who wanted to read comics preferring that experience to buying trades.  I don’t know anything about Manga, but isn’t it mostly sold in a trade format?

 

On 11/25/2023 at 1:53 PM, Chip Cataldo said:

I get that, but no other store uses that business model...which is my opinion is ridiculous. Deliberately overprice everything just because it's difficult to restock those items? If Chuck was more concerned about cash flow he'd be a billionaire. Lol

Aren’t most of the listings on E-bay using that model?  

On 11/23/2023 at 10:19 PM, Readcomix said:

His premium pricing model is not new. He was higher than other mail-order houses in the early 80’s when he was taking those Marvel centerfold ads.

My MHC experience then was I sent some books in trade, then I placed an order for a few seemingly well-priced outliers, usually low-grade early silver, and got maybe one book and a “Trade Credit Memo” that expires in six months. Then you try to pick something else…lather, rinse, repeat….I still have the expired trade credits somewhere…. I was done with Mile High Comics by 1980 or so.

Yeah, my favorite part of those ads was that he mostly charged NM prices but the condition was stated as “VG or better”.  Even in the mid-80s that seemed like a pretty bad way to try and buy comics.  I never ordered anything from him.

On 11/15/2023 at 4:27 PM, Hamlet said:

It looks like the $6 VG copies at MCS have sold now.  So the $12 VF copies sold first and quickly, and then people moved down to the VG copies, leaving the $9 Fine copies still there.

Copies are selling on EBay and new copies are popping up to replace them.  Top end seems to be $20 for NM looking copies, although it looks like there is a nice $10 copy sitting there now.  
 

Speculation has commenced.

Someone cleaned out the MCS Fines today.  So MCS is currently out of stock.

The E-bay price seems to be edging up.  One surprising thing is that I’ve seem a few lots of the whole series sell at decent amounts- the speculators usually stick to the 1st appearance.  Maybe there is some actual interest in reading the series. 

On 11/22/2023 at 11:55 AM, mjoeyoung said:

Very interesting.  If you filter to Auctions, there are only about 300,000.  I wonder if that number has decreased substantially.  The pessimist in me thinks that there are a lot of people who bought at inflated prices that are trying to sell.  

They still have auctions on EBay?

On 11/22/2023 at 8:56 AM, 1Cool said:

I've got a small tidbit of data that I find interesting.  On 8/1/22 I checked and there was 2.9 million comic books available on e-bay with 1.52 million comics having been sold over the previous 3 months.  Here we are almost 16 months later and there are currently 5.1 million comic books available on e-bay while the same 1.52 million comic books have sold in 3 months.  So comics are still selling (no telling about the price of the 1.52 million books sold) while the number of books available has skyrocketed up by almost 76%.  Not sure if this is due to brick on mortar stores having to post everything they have in stock due to less foot traffic or people are trying to clear out stuff from their basement but the numbers are kind of shocking.

It’s the people who were buying because comics were going up now selling because comics are going down

On 11/21/2023 at 4:40 PM, electricprune said:

Threshold also increases to $5000.

That seems like a sensible number to me.

On 11/14/2023 at 11:16 PM, FlyingDonut said:

Alien Legion 1 just popped. About time someone made this into a movie - it is a great book, very highly recommended.

This is a book I’ve made a point to grab out of the dollar box when I saw it.  I don’t have a huge number, but I probably have 6-7 copies.

My friends and I loved this book when it came out.  The crazy thing was that it had a $2 cover price in 1984, when a regular comic was 60 cents.  So I always got a kick buying it out of a dollar box after 35+ years of inflation.

On 11/15/2023 at 5:05 PM, MAR1979 said:

Less Lemmings than in past. 

Don't believe it until you see it.

We’re seeing it now.  What was a dollar box book is now selling on E-bay for $10-15.  Those buyers are almost all speculators, IMO. 

 

It looks like the $6 VG copies at MCS have sold now.  So the $12 VF copies sold first and quickly, and then people moved down to the VG copies, leaving the $9 Fine copies still there.

Copies are selling on EBay and new copies are popping up to replace them.  Top end seems to be $20 for NM looking copies, although it looks like there is a nice $10 copy sitting there now.  
 

Speculation has commenced.

On 11/15/2023 at 12:04 PM, eastbayrudy said:

Agreed. Todd did a great Spiderman but his human characters looked awful. Crazy how he never good called out considering how much hate Liefeld gets. 

So much of it for me was how bad ASM was for the years before McFarlane drew it.  The first issue I got off of the stands was 260, which was a cool Hobgoblin book.  From there until McFarlane took over at 298, they were pretty much all bad issues if wasn’t a Hobgoblin appearance or Kraven’s last hunt.  I was so excited to see issues that weren’t Spider Kid or Frogman or Beyonder garbage that I was going to be extremely forgiving.
 

Luckily my LCS had extensive back issues of ASM.

On 11/14/2023 at 9:15 PM, Axelrod said:

Really?  A book I own suddenly "hot?" 

Can't last, I'm sure.  

Well, “hot” is relative.  The $12 VF copies at MCS sold today, but the $9 Fine copies are still there.

On the plus side, I’ve picked a few of them out of dollar boxes over the years.  

Those Alien Legion 1’s are getting snapped up off of E-bay

On 11/9/2023 at 1:31 AM, BA773 said:

Now that i am owner of a first print, i had put my third print on the market, there is a vf- (7.5) got an offer of 55usd.

Accept? Or keep it in a chest and get out in 10 years? Is a good price i think and we have to consider that is a third print, but the fact is that when the value of the original up the value of the reprint up. And above all did you remind that this book was worth nothing few years ago ?

Imagine that you didn’t have the book, but had $55 that you had earmarked for comic books.  If you saw that book for sale for $55, would you buy it?  Or would you buy something else?  If there are books you’d rather own than it, you should probably sell it.

If the only reason you want to hold onto it is that you think it might go up and you have FOMS ( fear of missing something ), you should sell.

That is the rational decision process, but I’m telling you that as the owner of many, many books that I would never buy at their current prices.

On 10/29/2023 at 2:28 AM, Happy Noodle Boy said:

I have a bunch of raw golden age stuff to sell--EC's, Marvel Family, pre-code horror--and I'm considering consigning with MCS since I don't want the hassle or the risk of using ebay. But I'm not much of a grader and since MCS seems to grade pretty strictly anyway, my grade estimates would probably end up being too high compared to theirs. This means it would be difficult for me to come up with the right consignment price for my books. Since MCS is going to grade the books themselves anyway, would it be possible to ask them to set the consignment price at FMV, whatever that would be, based on the grades they've given my books?

One helpful thing at MCS is that they allow you to look at their sales history for other copies of the books you are selling, so that you can see what your book has gone for in the past in similar grades.  If you’re selling books that trade hands often, that will give you a pretty clear indication of reasonable pricing.

On 11/2/2023 at 11:13 AM, whomerjay said:

75.

 

Someone with better search skills than me can find it. Maybe it was as long as 5 years ago, not sure, but I remember distinctly thinking how little people appreciate SS and that the availability of this book must just be too great. 

I’m pretty sure that you are mis-remembering.

On 5/19/2023 at 10:43 PM, toro said:

Has anyone dealt with Collectibles Comics? 

Whether it is an auction or a marketplace sale they don't charge any fees, how do they make money?

https://collectorscomics.com

 

On 11/1/2023 at 8:50 AM, ramithard said:

How does MCS work?...you ship them the book?

You give them a list of books you want to sell.  They approve it, and you ship those books to them.  They put them into their system, and then you can list them as Buy-it-Nows or put them in one of their auctions.  When they sell, MCS handles everything, takes their commission, and either cuts you a check or drops the money in your account.  It’s really easy.

The only drawback is that they can be slow to get raw books into their system because they have to grade them.  The turnaround on that is dependent on how busy they are. Also, the minimum $7 fee on raw books makes it a bad way to sell real cheap books.

So I can sell books by shipping one box and I never have to deal with anyone crazy.

I haven’t done in it a couple of years though.  Turns out shipping that one box is a bigger barrier for me than it should be

It might just be that I am lazy ( I am ), but I can’t imagine selling on EBay when MCS exists ( assuming you’re selling at the $50+ price point that makes sense on MCS ).

On 10/23/2023 at 7:52 AM, Randall Dowling said:

I forget every other issue that had them.  But pretty sure I've seen the insert in these others:

• Iron Man 168
• Marvel Tales 149
• X-men 167
• Captain America 279
• Thor 329
• Avengers 229
• Conan 144

Probably other issues, as well.  I don't think these had the insert in every issue printed.  May have been regional or similar to Mark Jewelers?  I don't know.

My suspicion is that Marvel had extra Tatooz after putting them in ASM 238 and FF 252, and just thru the rest into these other books to use them up.  So ASM 238 and FF 252 were all supposed to have Tatooz ( although as you mentioned, many of them may not have actually gotten them ), and these other books had a small number of copies with the extras.

I have no proof of this, but it seems likely to me.