Hamlet

I recommend buying 1000 $10 books.

And how is that expressed in markets when things are going up? "I'd better buy it quick before it goes up more and I'm left behind". When a market is going down, it tends to turn to fear- "I'd better wait to buy it until it is done going down". If a person can override those impulses and do the opposite, they can avoid a lot of market pain.

I think you are underestimating the effects of fear and greed on people's buying decisions. People are excited to buy things at a small discount right now, because they are pretty certain that things will continue to go up. When prices start falling, people get scared and pull back. They don't provide that floor in prices that seemed rock solid. What will trigger it? Who knows? What triggered the stock market crash of 1929 or 2000? What triggered the drop in gold prices in the 1980s or over the last 6 years? Or the drop in comic book prices in the 90s? Its hard to pinpoint, and its never just one thing, just as bubbles aren't caused by just one thing in the first place. Note that it might not be a fast decline. Bubbles can take years to deflate. And, on occasion, the higher prices are sustained and it turns out not to have been a bubble. However, I wouldn't count on all of those buyers coming in and supporting prices if we have a sustained decline. They will probably have moved on to the next hot thing that currently going up at that time.

What is causing almost all key books to rise in unison? People are always excited to buy stuff at 90 cents on the dollar when it is going up. Typically, those people disappear when something is going down in value.

Have you not gone through a bubble before? As prices rise, it pulls in people who are mostly just interested in buying stuff while it is going up. All it takes for those people to start selling is to have the market correct a little. In the normal give and take of a healthy market, those people coming into and leaving the market are no big deal. However, in bubble markets, those people have driven prices so high that when they lose interest, the market price drops dramatically. People have seen pretty much all comic keys go up consistently and dramatically for a long time. A large percentage of the market now believes that they can essentially buy comic keys without much risk of long-term loss. That has driven them to buy many more key books at a much higher cost than they would in a normal market. When people re-learn that comic keys can go down as a group as well as go up as a group, the people who bought books primarily as speculation will start selling instead of buying. That is likely to cause a fairly dramatic change in values of most key comics. Sometimes it is slow and sometimes it is fast. Sometimes the market recovers, and sometimes it doesn't. The end of a new bubble is always just a little bit different than past bubbles, but when people are buying something while the price is increasing dramatically and assuming that it won't ever stop increasing, it almost always ends very badly eventually.

Frankly, a 9.2 for $4500 makes a little more sense than a 7.5 for $2000. While 9.2's aren't rare, there are a heck of a lot less of them than 7.5s. Even books that were saved with some eye to preserve condition may not have been stored well enough to be a 9.2. But there are a ton of 7.5's out there raw. I specifically bought a 7.5 back in the day because it's a nice looking book, but not so nice that it was attracting "investment" money. A few hundred bucks for a decent-looking copy of such an important ( and cool ) book seemed like a good deal. I have a hard time justifying hanging onto it at current prices though. I just don't think this is sustainable.

Yes, I meant all copies. There are about 1250 CGC copies certified in 7.5 or higher, which seems like a decent number of copies. Yes, the low end copies are just as nutty ( or worse, given how super common this book is in low grade ), but at least those dollar amounts can be managed by the bulk of people as entertainment expenses. I felt the book was undervalued when I bought it. I don’t now. Now I’m thinking that I’d rather have the money than the book, and I’m feeling that way about more and more of my collection.

I was looking at GPA for some of the books I own and it looks crazy to me. The last sale for an FF48 in CGC 7.5 is $2000. That is just nutty. I think I bought the book about 10 years ago for $350 or so. It a cool book, and a major key, but there are probably 10s of thousands of copies out there. It’s not hard to find in grade. Who is buying all of these books at these levels? I rarely go thru the effort to actually sell any of the books I buy, but I think I need to get off my butt and cash in on some of these.

I saw it last night. I thought they did a very good job. I'd put it below the first Avengers, but above all of the Thor movies and the 2nd Guardians of the Galaxy for sure. I like that the villain had some depth to him. He has the same complexity that I always liked about Magneto. The themes of the movie are not as simple as they usually are in comic movies. It's clear that I'm never going to be able to buy a copy of FF52 for a reasonable amount after this

My original LCS in Lacrosse WI sold coins, sports cards, and Commodore 64 computers and games.

FF 52. I just can't bring myself to pay more for one than I paid for my FF 48 a few years back.

Do you have a source for that? I can't imagine that there were many people who bought Web of Spider-man that didn't buy ASM, but I would expect lots of people did the reverse. I was a pretty dedicated Spidey collector, and I remember questioning whether Web was worth getting. I'm not saying I would expect it to be a tiny print run, but I would expect ASM to be significantly higher.

I would imagine the print run for this wasn't huge. I bought all of the spider man titles off the stands at the time, and I remember Web of Spider-man being mostly terrible from both an art and story standpoint. I remember my friends suggesting that I could probably get by without this series, and I never really could argue against them I'll have to take a look at my copy and refresh my memory of this issue.

We'll see if it is tough in grade in a year or two, now that it is on people's radar. I would have never imagined that people would pay a big premium for this book, but now that it has a little visibility, we'll see how many copies start appearing. There are currently 14 9.8s, which is actually quite a few more than a typical Web of Spider-man issue for the time, since typically no one bothers to submit them. If people are going to treat Tombstone as an important character though, 14 is tiny. Web of Spider-man 1 has almost 1000 in 9.8, for example, since there has been sustained demand for that book, and it was speculated on from day one. I don't remember anyone caring much about Tombstone when he came out (or anytime before this, for that matter). It will be an interesting book to watch over the next couple of years. Is there actual sustained interest in Tombstone, or is this just short term speculation that will move on to something else next year?

There are five sales at over $300 this year in GPA. Even the 9.6 and 9.4 sales are in the 70-100 range. That seems like an awful lot for this book. I think there are going to be a lot of submissions for this book if this keeps up.

I think you are overstating the amount this has really changed. I remember people talking exactly the same way about my generation ( Xer ) because we watched a lot of TV and played video games endlessly. Heck, for the generation before that, comics were the thing that was supposedly rotting their minds. For my kids, it is Netflix/YouTube and some Frozen version of Gemdrop. On summer days, I remember as a kid that my mother sometimes had to push me out of the house because I wanted to spend all day playing with my Atari 2600. Back then, good parents pushed their kids outside at some point, and I see nothing that makes me think its different in any meaningful way today.

You must be dealing with different kids than I am. When I was a kid, schools didn't even start trying to teach reading until 1st or 2nd grade. Kindergarten was nothing but shapes and colors and numbers. I didn't learn multiplication until the 3rd grade. My daughter's preschool started trying to teach her to read and write as soon as she could sit still enough. She came out of kindergarten being able to read simple books. She just entered 1st grade, and she is probably at least a year ahead of where I was. They are teaching her multiplication already. Her classmates are doing similar things. I think these kids are pretty smart and accomplished compared to the kids I went to school with. FYI-- My daughter and I read a lot of Marvel Unlimited on the iPad together.

The guy with the Archie #1 is a small local dealer here in the Midwest. I don't get the impression that he is someone who would knowingly sell a book with restoration. However, I also don't have any idea whether he knows how to spot restoration. I am not someone who knows much about restoration beyond checking for bleedthru from a sharpie color touch job. Regardless, there is no way I would ever buy a book that big raw. Actually there is no way I would ever buy a book that big period ?

I don't remember his name, but he's at that show all the time. He's an older guy with glasses and thinning hair ( like that narrows it down ? ) He's a nice guy and I buy a few books here and there from him. I definitely thought of you when I saw that book. I was honestly stunned that he would bring a book that big to that venue.

He was fine with it. He seemed a tiny bit annoyed, but I think that was simply because he obviously didn't think that there was any restoration or he would have called it out initially. Everyone pretty much agreed that he was probably best off submitting the book and sending it to one of the auction houses. I got the impression that he was really just showing the book off, since it was not a venue where a book like that was likely to change hands.

I was at a small, local convention last weekend, and I noticed one of the regular dealers had a nice looking raw Archie 1 on his wall. I said something along the lines of "Holy cow, is that an Archie 1". He pulled it down and took it out and started showing it to me and a couple of other people who were nearby. It was a nice looking book (very rough guess 4.0 with nice pages, which for that book is pretty darn nice). One of the other dealers watching chimed in that it looked like the staple had been replaced. I think he was probably right, since it was very bright and shiny, and there was a tiny bit of discoloration at the centerfold that seemed like it would have had to come from somewhere else, but restoration is not something I am particularly knowledgeable about, so who knows. How do people feel about the other dealer chiming in? I think it is always good to have people keeping an eye out for restoration so that people know what they have or are buying, but I can see it annoying the first dealer to have someone talking down their book. It's not like anyone in the room was real likely to buy a raw Archie 1 regardless ( or a certified one for that matter ), but I could see it creating hard feelings between dealers. Does anyone have an strong feelings about this?

The Onion spoofs of him are a national treasure.

I own the Spidey but not the FF4. FF4 is the more important book by far, IMO.

I think a dealer has to balance speed of turnover with the difficulty they have replacing inventory. I think most LCS seem to err by having prices too high and rarely turning over books. It's hard to judge for certain however, because I have no way of knowing if they get offered decent collections very often. Some of them could probably lower prices a decent amount and still be able to buy replacement inventory at a good buying Con though. One local shop actually appears to have the opposite issue. Their prices are very good, so they don't have much in back issues to sell. They appear to deal with this by getting clearance trades, toys, and other inventory. They turn stuff over fast, but they might do a little better raising prices to get a little more out of material that doesn't walk thru the door every day.

I actually thought that the first FF movie would have been okay if they hadn't butchered Dr. Doom. They did such a bad job with him that it really destroyed the movie for me. I thought the rest of the casting and general acting was fine. Maybe not stellar, but good enough for me to have enjoyed the movie. I'd love to see a "Doom Rising" movie of the FF annual 2 origin, but that would require them making a good FF movie introducing him first, and I really don't want to see another FF origin movie.