Hamlet

Yup, kinda like the McFarlane Spideys.

Most of them are aren't in great shape, but not awful. I figure if I read them and a few are actually decent reads, I got my money's worth. The Spideys are pretty nice and I love the Hobgoblin, so I couldn't pass them up ( which is a little crazy, since I have at least two of them already). The ASM 260 is actually the first book I bought of the stands when I started collecting.

Here is today's haul out of the dollar and 50 cent boxes (16 books for $14). If read them all and then sell them in my own dollar box ten years from now, is that a win? ?

I gotta think that most dealers sell the dollar books mainly because they end up with lots of them buying collections to get the keys. So they probably think of them as free-ish. And then I "cherry pick" their dollar box for books I think could sell for $3. I read those books, bag and board them, and put them in a box in my comic room for the day a decade down the road when I actually have the time and energy to set up at a convention to find out if anyone else agrees that they are worth more than a dollar. I'm a low-value flipper that never actually gets around to the flipping part. ?

I have lists, but they are mostly Marvel SA, and I generally like a nice clean VG-FN at a price where I won't lose my shirt if I were to get a table and sell it myself. I don't find a lot to buy meeting those criteria. I can find lots of ragged books at what I consider mid grade prices, and I occasionally find ragged books on my list in bargain bins (which I buy). Lately I've been buying more non-Marvel stuff out of bargain bins because it is so cheap. I fine a lot more stuff like that in decent mid-grade condition. Here is my last haul out of $2 boxes mostly-

Well, we are really discussing two categories of books. There are a lot of good comics in that are in cheap boxes because there are just a lot of them. I assume those books sell to readers regularly, they just don't command any collecting premium because dealers have easy access to as many as will sell out of the cheap boxes.. Think about most of the Byrne FF and the Simonson Thor issues. I find those in 50 cent boxes all the time. I actually buy the Simonson Thors because I don't have all of them yet. They are good books, but there are plenty to go around, so they sell for modest amounts. The other category is books that don't sell at any price. At a certain point, I would think recycling might be the best option for those.

I don't think most Punisher books fall into the zero value books I described. There are people who like the Punisher and purchase those books to read. They don't have much value, but people will buy them out of quarter boxes to read (I assume). How about the New Universe titles? Is there anyone buying those at any price?

Ultimately, there are a lot of books with essentially zero value. If they have no collectible value, and no one wants to actually read them, they have the same value as old newspapers, IMO. We'd all worry about someone who filled their house with old newspapers, but since these are in comic form, we think it is normal to hoard them. I'm talking the real drekky drek. Stuff that is super common, and absolutely unreadable. It is stuff that everyone would be better off just recycling, except that every once in a great while the drekky drek becomes sellable for some reason (see Rocket Raccoon miniseries ) So everyone carts around dozens of long boxes of this stuff hoping to unload it on other people who will just cart it around.

It depends on what you mean by expensive/tough. New books become keys and some keys fade over the years. I bought a VG copy of FF67 and a F copy of Thor 165 for $5/each when I bought a bunch of $5 "filler" books on the boards a few years back before anyone cared about them. They aren't huge books now, but they could pay for most of that order. I think most run collectors do well simply by not chasing what is hot. If you are buying comics you enjoy for small amounts of money, you don't have to worry about getting your money out of books. If you can get something out of them when you are done with them, so much the better. For people buying keys, however, there is a lot more to worry about. If the market goes south on the guys with 6-figure collections of hot, key books, they probably won't be able to shrug it off.

That is a good idea. Get those books out of your hair and potentially create new customers over the long term.

Are there any currently any copies of this book for sale publicly besides the one on Comiclink mentioned in the thread?

You must be thinking of later books and higher prices than me. I don't see much of anything SA sit too long if it gets put in a dollar box. I see a lot of mangled SA books sit when priced too high though. Ultimately, for the later drekky stuff, the guy running a small local con here has a bunch of tables where you can fill a box for a pretty modest price. I think it works out to 3/$1. He moves a lot of books every convention. I don't think it is necessarily bad that the money is focusing on keys and higher grade books. Why should runs of common, low grade books cost much? Everyone has gotten so focused on the money that they've forgotten that the original purpose of these things was cheap entertainment.

RIP

Of course collectors could also take the next logical step and just buy reprints of the keys as well. ? The problem with these types of collectors is that they have a lot less personal interest in the hobby itself. I suspect they are simply buying keys because other people are buying them and they like buying the hot item with the rising price. In a downturn, these types of buyers can disappear fast, IMO. FYI-- if no one bothers with run books anymore, they won't be expensive. I enjoy buying 50+ year old books out of the dollar boxes.

Smaller cons are the best place to sell stuff like this, IMO. They are books that aren't worth shipping, but at a con with cheap tables they can be worthwhile. Stuff like this probably gets half my con dollars. At the last convention, it got 100% of my money. I don't get to the big cons with crazy table costs though.

Yeah, you can buy a lot of SA stuff cheap if you aren't particular about condition or need the main line titles. Some of the real off brand stuff you can even get in decent shape in the cheapo boxes. The last convention I went to had one seller who had about 10 long boxes of $2 SA stuff. I bought SA Uncle Scrooges, a bunch of ACG horror stuff, and a bunch of Adventure, Superman, and Lois Lanes. I also found a beater copy of TTA 91 (everything was attached, but just barely). There wasn't a ton of Marvel stuff outside of low grade Sgt Furys. I guess there were actually a fair number of late SA/early BA FF's in there as well (which I already had nicer copies of). Frankly, I'm way more interested in buying this stuff for $2 than buying keys at current prices.

When I started collecting ASM, I got a subscription, but the LCS always had the issue earlier, so I always broke done and bought it from the LCS to avoid waiting. So I ended up with doubles from about 262 to 274 or so.

Yup. There is something amazing about a bubble that just completely blinds people to the possibility that they could lose a lot of money until it happens. People race to buy at the top, and hem and haw about buying at the bottom. It will be interesting to see how the market plays out over the next 5-10 years.

I think you could make a case for the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, or for more modern-focused readers, Venom. For me, it is very close between the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus.

Here in the Minneapolis area, we have quite a few small one-day conventions that are mostly just comics. We just had a two-day show by the MCBA this weekend that has some modest cosplay, but is also mostly comics. It isn't the best convention for high-end books, but there are some great $2 boxes for lower grade, low demand SA. Here is what I bought for $54 ( I splurged for the dinosaur issues at 3/$10). Nothing is high grade, but there are a few decent books in there.

I would guess that the valuation of the material was discussed when Chuck's insurance rates were set. That may be very different than their full retail "value".

I think this is what a lot of people are missing. There just isn't much money to be made in physical comics ( or really any printed periodical these days ). One good movie makes more than they are ever going to make printing comics. So there just isn't much reason for Disney to spend much effort on the comics themselves. Like James Bond, the characters have moved past their original medium and are now movie franchises. The comics themselves really don't matter much anymore.

I guess since I haven't thought buying new comics was worth the money for about 25 years (outside of an issue here and there, and some Ultimate Spiderman trades), being 6 months behind hasn't bothered me. Frankly, its not the newest issues being released that I'm reading anyway. I did enjoy binge reading the Ultimate X-men, and Astonishing X-men, and a bunch of other stuff that would have cost hundreds of dollars to buy when it came out, but I didn't bother because who wants to pay $4 for a 10 minute read? At $6/month though, I enjoy being able to read say 6 hours of comics a month. That's a good value. New comics (especially most Marvel comics) are a terrible value, IMO.

I think digital is great given the extremely low price point of Marvel Unlimited. It's $69/year, which is less than $6/month. I don't read a ton, but even my light reading gets my cost down to under 0.50 per book. It doesn't preclude me from buying hard copies of books I feel that I want to own. It is simply a much better value proposition than buying new comics at their insane 3.99 price point.

On thing to keep in mind with digital readers, is that the business model is very different for Marvel as well. It is an all-you-can-eat model like Netflix or a gym membership. In the print world, your most profitable customer is one that reads everything, since they buy a copy of everything. In the digital model, your most profitable customers are the ones that sign up, but rarely actually read comics. It is also a little harder to see what is actually driving people to sign up and maintain memberships. You can see what they are reading, but you don't know if they would pay to read all of the titles, or if they are just reading them because they already have the access for something they feel is "must read"