Hamlet

2 minutes ago, the blob said:

Yeah, I keep on buying those issues when I see them cheap, but they might have peaked 25 years ago...

Yup, kinda like the McFarlane Spideys. 

1 minute ago, the blob said:

I see some $3-$5 potential in there if they aren't water stained and what not.  That Superman Neal Adams is a good one and the Punisher Captain America one.  The Hobgoblin Spideys don't get as much love as they used to, but 5 movies from now when they feature him...

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.  

6 minutes ago, Hamlet said:

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. ?

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? ?

1 hour ago, the blob said:

Many dealers manage to do both just fine.  Zapp sells his cheapies and better stuff in an organized and professional manner, for example. The stuff on the wall makes the real money, I know, but $50, $100, $200 there for piles of cheapies can't hurt.

 

The effort is finding those $1,000 books at a price that gives you a profit margin.

 

But yeah, unless you get the dollar stuff for free-ish, I can't imagine doing that as your main line. maybe in boxes under the table that has the better stuff on top.

 

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. ?

1 hour ago, Artboy99 said:

I love buyers with lists as well but they are becoming less and less.

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-

7 minutes ago, jsilverjanet said:

It would appear to me that the reason many of these books are readily available is that the quality isn't very good. If the quality was decent, more people would be buying these books. This is a problem that cannot be fixed.

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.

2 minutes ago, 1Cool said:

There has to be a way to market this stuff to people who just like kitschy stuff.  Maybe start up a business of selling 20 punisher comic book with each punisher shirt that sells.  Sell comic books along with paper mache  product and have people cover lap shades with them.  Make spinners out of them that can be set fire!  They just sit in long boxes all over the country collecting dust but now has never been a better time to get those books into the general populous.  Better minds have to have come up with some good ideas by now but I'm still looking. 

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?

1 hour ago, 1Cool said:

I like your statement about the quality of 4x$1 books.  They are quarter bin books!  Use to be you had ok books in the $1 bins and the quarter in books were tattered junk which were destined for the junk heap if not sold soon.  Now the $1 bin books are the old full price books that have not sold in a year and the quarter bins are filled with the old $1 books.  Strange market for sure.

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.

4 minutes ago, NoMan said:

Does anyone think there will come a time when the run collectors will have their revenge? A time when filler books will be expensive and tough to find/acquire?

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.

19 minutes ago, 1Cool said:

Giving away a book to the kids worked great at the Cons I set up at last year.  Even if the kids didn't buy any other books the mob around the table prompted other people to stop by and take a look.  Worse thing you can have is an empty booth.  There is a tipping point where it's too busy but I'd rather be closer to that end.  Giving away a free book to anyone under 18 led to me selling 1,200 $1 books at one 3 day con with all of them being 90s drek.

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?

7 hours ago, thehumantorch said:

That's a chicken or an egg problem.  Is the dealer influencing collectors or are collecting patterns influencing what a dealer values and is willing to buy.  My basement is full of run books I've tried to sell repeatedly and at lower and lower prices.  Meanwhile I'm getting offered collections with more of the same.  Ultimately I'll buy almost everything and the price I pay depends on how quick it will sell, how many copies I have buried in my basement and how much it will ultimately sell based on experience.

I may be reinforcing the stereotype for unloved books but I think the buyer has set the trend.  Of course a lot of the buyers are part time dealers looking to flip.

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

3 hours ago, kimik said:

I have been commenting on this for a while now. Keys and hot covers are where the action will be in the future for the hobby (just like it is for sportscards, stamps, coins, etc.) Due to the various reprint formats available to readers, there is no need to fill runs any more with more expensive back issues. Instead, collectors will just buy the key/hot cover book and read the rest via reprints. It is the way all hobbies evolve. 

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.  

1 hour ago, Philflound said:

Despite the fact of Overstreet putting higher values for GD and VG for mid to late 60s Marvels and DC, these are available by the ton. There is no shortage of pretty much any of these books, especially in low to midgrade.  I think for the most part it isn't worth the effort of most dealers to bring lower priced books to cons. The return isn't worth lugging and using up valuable booth space. I saw a lot of $5 boxes at C2E2, so I think at least at major cons, that will be the lower sale boxes for most dealers.

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.

2 hours ago, 1Cool said:

I hear people all the time saying comics are more expensive and the pricing people out of the market.  Those people have not gone to a show and hit up the $1 bins since I find beater Silver-Age books in the $1 bins all the time.  They tend to be DCs or off brands like later TAA or TOS but they are there.  When you can walk away from a Con with a stack of 50 year old comic goodness for $30 I just can't see how people can say the market is inflated.  Keys are inflated but everything else is very cheap.

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.  

1 hour ago, Sqeggs said:

Could the 4.0 that sold for $30K on CC a month ago become a $15K book?  The price 4.0s were selling for waaaay back in 2016?  Yeah, I think I can see that happening.

The way this will likely end is that prices start to erode a bit and some of the people holding mid-grade copies begin to think, "You know, maybe it's time to cash out my winnings." They try to consign the books and find that the auction houses have a bunch of other mid-grade copies that people have consigned, so they won't be able to list the book for months.  Uh oh ... now what?  They consign with a dealer at a price, say, 10% below GPA.  "Yeah, I hate to sell low, but that's not too bad." But ... buyers are looking around and thinking, "Lot of mid-grade copies to choose from suddenly. Maybe if I wait a bit I can get one cheaper."  And then some low auction results happen and ...  You can finish the story.

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.

15 hours ago, Ken Aldred said:

I wouldn't have thought that it would take too long for them to figure out there's considerable retail overpricing and insurance overvaluation going on in this case, maybe facilitated by a lot of online discussion, historical and current.

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".

On ‎4‎/‎27‎/‎2017 at 10:32 AM, Chuck Gower said:

Neil Gaiman DID write Sandman again... it was a series called Sandman Overture, a 6 issue series from 2013-2015. It sold in the Top Ten its first two issues 92,000 and 89,000 copies, falling just outside the Top Ten for #3 and #4 (73,000, and 58,000) and falling to 29 (53,000) for #5 and back up to 18 (though only 48,000) for the finale.

Meaning, it sold about 413,000 copies. At $4.99 for #1 and $3.99 for the others, and figuring if DC makes 40%, NOT counting all of their other usual expenses... the profit would be roughly $675,000 on the whole series....

BUT after the usual expenses... another 100,000 dollars? $200,000? Printing, editorial, paying the artist, staff, shipping...

yeah...to give him a million dollars to write it... they'd have lost their butt on the deal.

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.

2 hours ago, Doktor said:

I don't mean to say that digital is 100% awful, but that buying digital is a horrible value choice. Marvel Unlimited is OK (I still don't really like it much, but to each their own) but it's extremely limited. They have a horrible tendency of missing 1 issue in the middle of pretty much every single storyline I ever tried reading on there, so I just gave up & cancelled my subscription.

For reading back issues only, it's OK (even great, if it doesn't decide to randomly not have, for instance, part 4 of the 6 issue arc you're trying to read). But if you have any interest in staying even remotely current, it's worthless. It's 6-8 months behind on every title. And with Marvel publishing some titles at 16 issues per year, you're like 8-10 issues behind on some books. So comparing it to buying new comics at any price-point is an apples & oranges comparison. Marvel Unlimited is for reading old comics. Buying new comics is for reading new comics. They're not the same thing.

And it still doesn't change that you don't own any of it. And if for instance, they decided to launch a whole new distribution platform tomorrow & phase out their (for instance) Comixology association, all those comics you bought through Comixology? They vanish. As I mentioned above, if any part of the licensing of any of the content in the book expires, those books vanish from your collection. You're renting comics if you go digital. It's that simple. That rent might be for 6 years or 6 months or 6 days. You don't know until they just vanish because a license expired.

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. 

8 hours ago, Doktor said:

Well, even if they did... it wouldn't be for an indefinite period of time. It would be a contract that went from Day X to Day Y and when it expired, there wouldn't be any more copies of the collected editions printed/shipped to stores, and any digital copies that you "bought" from a digital distributor would simply vanish from your collection unless it was downloaded locally (and even then, I believe many of those apps can simply erase stuff that they aren't legally permitted to distribute anymore). It's like the longest Blockbuster rental in history that didn't include a late fee.

Point blank, digital sucks because it's an indefinite rental & not a purchase & can vanish without warning because a distribution/licensing contract ends. I mean, I take that risk every time I buy a movie or tv show from iTunes. But it's why I also make sure I download it to my local media server so that even if I can't watch it from my iTunes purchase history, I CAN watch it from my local media server on my appleTV.

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.

13 hours ago, Chuck Gower said:

The one thing about people who read comics digitally that you can completely 100% count on is that they're doing it because they actually like to read the comics. 

Buying multiple copies, collecting #1's and 1st appearances, variant covers... none of it really plays a part in digital readership, so it'd be great if we could see those numbers. 

We'd have a great idea of what people actually read. 

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"