Hamlet

It depends on what you mean by succeed. If I'm going through convention boxes anyway, and buy a hot book that I know about because of this app ( or these boards for that matter ), and I can sell that book to reduce my collecting costs a little, I consider that success. Comics are a terrible way to try to earn serious money for the vast majority of collectors. However, lots of people can go through boxes and pull at least some of the mistakes ( or intentional bargains from some dealers ) to help defray their collecting costs. No one gets every mispriced book, but everyone has pricing knowledge for at least some subset of books.

Hey, if you want people to collect books because they have great stories and art, they are going to have to read them, which means they probably won’t be 9.8’s. Otherwise, you can buy the slabs and look at the cover and a label telling you it is the first appearance of Venom’s hairdresser. 🙂

Walmart bought a strip mall by my house with what I assume was a plan to build a Walmart. So the businesses closed once their leases ran out. However, the Walmart never got built. I believe they argued with the city about who was going to pay for the road improvements needed to handle the additional traffic. So now we have an empty mall where the best pizza place by us used to be.

Hey, all those books are still available in the dollar boxes Or cheaper. I was at a little convention today and one guy had 3/$1 boxes. I bought a bunch of 80s Avengers, some low grade 70s drek, and a bunch of the 280-299 X-men that I am too cheap to pay a whole dollar for, etc. In another 50 cent box I bought a large chunk of the Byrne FF. I already have all of them, but still. 🙂 Just so I have some modern mention, I bought some of those Gen 13 books. Not the one you all are posting that actually has value. Some of the other ones.

Yup. What is crazy to me is that the 1968 issues of Cap100/IH102/Sub1 go for more than the issues of TTA and TOS that started those characters’ runs that are several years older, and frankly more important books, IMO.

The 27, 28, and 50 were FFs comparing to FF 52. They all cost more than an FF 52 back in the day if I remember right. I don’t think a VG IM 1 was $50 in 2005. It was quite a bit less, because in 2011 it had been a hot book since the movie and had gone up quite a bit. It looks to me like IM is about $250 in VG currently.

I think assuming a movie is going to be a massive hit 18 months out simply because it features an Asian MCU character is pretty silly too. I think it is reasonably likely that Endgame will mark the peak of interest in Superhero movies.

I just looked. It didn’t actually do well in Asia. It’s box office outside of the US was only $64 million.

Sure, which meant you could probably get a VG copy for less than $50 pretty easily. It cost less than a 27, 28, or 50. It probably cost twice as much as a 51 or 55. Now a VG copy would cost nearly ten times as much as it did then. The other books have gone up, but not anywhere near as much. It went from a minor key to one that was nearly on par with FF 48 until that book exploded recently. Iron Man 1 has gone up by an order of magnitude as well. They weren’t big keys back then. I found a VGish Iron Man 1 with color touch (ball point pen on the cover creases) at a local convention in early 2011 for $15. I flipped it to someone on the boards for less than $50. That seemed like a lot to me for that book, because it had gone up some already from the movie hype. I was obviously a little early in selling it. 🙂

Well, it depends on how successful the movie is in generating new sustainable collector interest. Iron man was a 3rd tier character with little collector interest before the movies made him a 1st tier character, IMO. He translates well to the big screen and RDJ made him more interesting than the comics ever did. That translated into sustainable long term collector interest. Take it from someone who sold an Iron Man 1 into the first initial movie interest. 🙂 Likewise, FF 52 went from a very minor key to a pretty major one based on what appears to be real, long term, sustained demand created from the interest in the movies ( although it is still a little early to be 100% sure on that ). People buying SME 15 right now for the long term are betting that the movie will generate similar sustained increased demand in the character. I have bet against that by putting my copy up for sale, but only time will tell who is right. Who would have thought that people would still be paying real money for Guardians of the Galaxy books years after the movie? Certainly not me. 🙂

The buying power for the X-Men 1 is being generated by whoever is buying the X-men 94-142 from the person in question. It may make it easier for the person in question to justify spending the money to themselves, but ultimately it doesn't really matter to the market. Ultimately what matters to the market is that someone is willing to put $4000 of new money into the market to buy the X-men 94-142. The person selling the run to buy the X-Men 1 isn't driving prices of the comic market ( as a whole ) up or down. That person is just trading one group of books for another. Imagine that prices were still what they were 25 years ago and that person sold the group for $500 and bought the X-men 1 for $500. The overall price level of the comic book market ( as a whole ) doesn't matter to him, and he isn't affecting it.

Sure, but those don't contribute to net buying. You're selling an expensive book to buy an expensive book. In theory, you're selling SME 15 should contribute just as much to driving prices down as your purchase of another key pushes prices up.

You and I might need to be making that kind of money to be comfortable buying books at those price points. Many people appear to be willing to spend a much greater percentage of their income on comics than we are though. There are also a lot of people that buy the very occasional expensive book, but don’t do it often enough to impact their finances that much. Back when I was actively collecting, I budgeted about $250/month or $3000/year. If I bought above my budget, I would dial back the comic spending until my planned budget caught up. It wasn’t huge money for my income, but it added up over the years. Prices got high enough a couple years ago that I mostly stopped buying. Now they are high enough that I’m starting to sell books. The selling activity actually has generated a little collecting interest in me again. So I will be buying some books here and there that I still think are rationally priced, but I’m going to be a net seller unless something big changes in the market.

Yeah, I keep wondering who the end buyer for a lot of this stuff is. So much of it appears to be flippers selling to other flippers.

My memory is that ASM 252 was commanding a pretty big premium ( for the time ) right from the start. I started collecting on issue 260, and I remember having to pay $4.50 for my copy of 252. I don’t think anyone did badly speculating on ASM 252. Of course, the market was much more local then. If the LCS decided to price a book high, I didn’t have any easy alternatives. Mail order was a pain. You would send your order, and lists of alternates in case what you were ordering was sold out, and you hoped to get at least some of the books you wanted. I would get to other stores on family trips and stuff, but it was hard for me to find what are really common books now that the internet puts everything at our fingertips.

It’s probably in the 30-40% range. I have a lot of books that I acquired by buying a few collections in the late 80s/early 90s. I never read a lot of those books. Lately I’ve started reading books from Marvel Unlimited on my iPad. It’s just less work than digging books out and I don’t have to deal with missing issues.

My books got processed today so I could assign them to auctions or set a fixed price for them. I really like their setup for ease of use so far. I’ve put a few books into the upcoming auctions and put the rest at fixed prices. I must have priced one a little low because it sold while I was pricing the others 🙂 Their grading is really strict. Looking at their sales data, many of their raw books sell for more than a CGC of the same grade. The book that sold was a 9.0 Secret Wars 8 that I priced at $100. It was nicer than a 9.0, but how much more than $100 could I expect to get for any raw copy of that book? Hopefully the buyer is happy with it.

I wonder how many of Madoff’s customers took advantage of that low volatility by employing leverage when buying his fund? That is the real scary thing - when people think they’ve got a lock investment, there is a strong temptation to lever up to really take advantage of it. No matter how many times it blows up, the next time there is always someone willing to risk other people’s money on a “sure thing”.

I've started looking at the consignments at mycomicshop.com because I sent them a batch of books for consignment for the first time. There are a lot of sellers that are just trolling for a misclick sale, IMO. My favorite are the people who have their books priced much higher than nicer copies that mycomicshop.com already owns and has for sale. Or the raw 9.0 priced higher than the CGC 9.6.

I’m not arguing that you couldn’t make more money with the other books. I imagine its a lot easier to find and flip copies of ASM 300. I’m just saying that you can’t assume there is more overall demand for a cheap book than a really expensive book just because the expensive book trades infrequently. Just about every collector I know would rather have the Batman 11 than a ASM 300 (and I’m a Spidey guy). They just don’t want to spend the vastly higher price. I’m also not a Wall Street guy.

You’re ignoring Batman 11’s much higher price. I’d much rather have a Batman 11 than any of those books, but it costs much more than even the Hulk 181. Price a VF Batman 11 at $300 on a table next to a VF ASM 300 at the same price and see what the demand for the books really looks like. 🙂

There are people who buy books that aren’t first appearances? 🙂

Heck, I just downloaded the free version and it looks really handy to me. It sure beats dragging around a copy of Overstreet at conventions.

I'm actually not sure what those things are. I was kinda wondering that myself when I dug up the picture. I love finding this kind of stuff for $1-2. I've never been able to find a whole lot of it locally here in Minneapolis, because I generally don't grab it if it isn't at least a clean VG+, or something I actually actively collect. It's been a year or two since I've been to the local conventions. I'll probably go to a couple this Fall and see if the cheapo boxes look any different.

Trust me, I’m not counting on any of my comics ever selling for anything. The little smiley face after my comment about convention stock meant that I was mostly joking.