Hamlet

Sure, but in the runup to the crash all anyone said was that there hadn't been a national real estate crash since the Great Depression. You mention that real estate investors weren't prepared for the worst, and I agree. That doesn't appear different than many of the people investing in comics today though. I see the same mentality that they are investing in things that can't go down significantly. I'm not worried about the guy spending $800 on a Hulk 181. I'm worried about the person putting 200k into GA/SA/BA keys because "they never go down". I see an awful lot of talk that SA keys are can't miss investments, almost regardless of price. That kind of thinking usually gets corrected pretty painfully. It's only dangerous If you use the past as an absolute, and aren't prepared for the worse, which is something a lot of real estate investors weren't prepared for. A lot of those people weren't even prepared to buy real estate in the first place, let alone prepared for the worse. Using the past to predict future outcomes can be a great tool when utilized correctly, though it can be dangerous when the full spectrum isn't taken into account. I think people took the real estate market value for granted, and If they had taken a closer look at how real estate has played out in previous times, they may have been a bit more hesitant to invest their money into it. I think ignoring past behavior can be an even more dangerous move than trying to incorporate it to your advantage. Comics can be relatively inexpensive (especially compared to real estate). If someone was to invest $800 in Hulk 181, and the book crashed, then so what? You may have lost $800, but you certainly won't need to file bankruptcy (unlike the real estate crash). On the flip side, If someone was to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into the same book, then yeah, it's risky, because If that book crashes, you now have to face a major loss. The solution here is to not put all your eggs in one basket. Regardless, there's always two sides to a coin. I'm not saying it's impossible for there to be an AF 15 crash, or a Hulk 181 crash, but I am saying that investing in comics doesn't have to be as risky or dangerous as some people here are making it out to be.

They were saying the exact same thing about real estate in 2006. There is a tendency for people to assume that past behavior predicts future results in investing, and it is an incredibly dangerous tendency. It leads to people piling into investments just because they have gone up in the recent past, which is one of the most dangerous ways to invest. When people think that they can't lose, they are almost always making a very dangerous investment without knowing it.

Time will tell how sustainable it is. I'd be curious to know how many people own multiple copies of this books as an "investment". How much supply of this book will come onto the market at the first hint of weakness? One thing I will always remember is the sales thread here where someone was selling a dozen or so copies of Showcase 22. That's a tougher book than AF15 to find, but obviously it wasn't really that tough a book to find. People have been accumulating AF15 for many years thinking that it can never go down in value. However, it isn't a scarce book at all. I wouldn't be stunned to see its price get cut in half if the momentum moves to selling instead of buying.

Honestly, I suspect the prices you are citing are probably rational relative to each other. When a comic has a print run of 1.7 million, and pretty much all of them are saved, it's going to be very hard for it to get expensive, no matter how much demand there is for it. Everyone who has the slightest interest in Spawn can easily get a copy or ten, and the dealers with long box after long box of the book will just pull out another couple dozen to sell. On the other hand, even a little demand for the other stuff will drive up prices somewhat, since there aren't that many of them, compared to the Spawn #1. I think its all pretty silly, but you can say that about most of the "hot" books right now. I think that most of the money chasing "hot" books is going to be lost by most of the people doing the chasing in the next couple years. A few people losing a little of that money on weird preview stuff instead of FF45 isn't all that important, IMO.

I have a Crowley with no stamp, which seemed a little strange to me. Is that unusual or are there a fair number missing stamps? Or perhaps some stamped internally? I haven't cracked the slab to look for a stamp inside. It's a Captain Midnight 17.

I must have missed this. What movie hype is driving SA 205?

I guess that it depends on how bad the stuff actually is, and what else you have going on. If someone didn't have a job or family commitments, and had an empty spot to put it all, I can think of worse things to mess around with. Going through boxes of comics is entertaining, even when it is pretty much drek. I think it would make sense for a group of folks to buy and split up without looking at anything. 15-20 longboxes of this stuff would be a lot more fun than 170, IMO.

I know who Pauly Shore is, but that doesn't make him A-list.

It's not that I would bet against a Deadpool movie being successful. I would bet against a successful Deadpool movie driving the value of NM98 any higher than it already is in the long-term. I think a very successful movie is required to even maintain these current prices.

I've read some ToS, IM1, some BA issues here and there, and a bunch of 80s ones. The Tony Stark character was never particularly interesting in the comics. He was just some rich guy with pretty much no personality, IMO. RDJ changed that in a big way. The other advantage is that the technology looks much cooler in the movies than it ever looked in the comics, IMO. Really? How many Iron Man comics have you read, and from which time period?

But why choose a flavor-of-the-month book to begin with? RR#1 is almost unreadable. Movie hype is the only reason anyone is remotely interested in it, and that won't last forever. Pick something enjoyable that isn't currently hot if you are on a budget, rather than a book that only has interest purely from speculation.

I think something to keep in mind about Ironman is that it translated to movies better than just about any other character, and that RDJ's performance actually made the character better than it was in any of the Ironman comics I've read. When I saw the first Toby Maguire Spiderman, I loved it because I felt it captured the spirit of the Spiderman comics. When I saw the first Ironman movie, I loved it because it re-imagined the character in a much better way than the comics ever did, IMO. It generated interest among comic collectors for a character than was really 3rd tier before the movies. That is going to be a tough thing to duplicate, and buying a NM98 because you're expecting a Deadpool movie to generate even more interest from collectors that are already extremely interested in getting a NM98 is a bad bet, IMO.

Pretty low feedback seller.

I agree. I sometimes think it would be interesting and tough to try to put together a high-grade (say 8.0+) non-pedigree run of and EC title.

If people don't play nice, I'll try to move my discussion about CPI with RMA to this thread too, and everyone will have to read about the price of milk in 2001. It's generally a very civil place here, although people tend to read way too much into emoticons . . . (for example)

Well, I made it through about half the episode. It's pretty awful. I'll power through the rest later. I get that they have to lay some groundwork, but its just a mess. There is absolutely no subtly to it. I kept flashing to scenes from the Evil Dead whenever someone was possessed. Unless it gets a lot better, this isn't going to last long.

Their handling of Dr. Doom ruined both movies for me. I didn't actually hate them otherwise.

Which source material? They appear to be modelling the movies off of the Ultimate Spiderman books. Everything originates with Oscorp in those as well. It's a C+/B- movie to me. Better than the first reboot, much better than the 3rd Tobey movie, but not as good as the first two Tobey movies.

I love this kind of stuff. You can get some great deals on non-key books if you aren't looking for high grade and you have a wide selection of titles you are interested in.

I wonder how many copies of these RMA already has

My understanding is that they generally get just over 50% of the domestic box office. If they only get 25% of the international box office then they probably aren't doing great with this movie.

I would give the movie a B-. I much preferred Toby as Peter Parker, but this second movie was an okay presentation of Ultimate Spiderman. I liked it more than the first ASM, which I felt was sub-par, say a C-. I'd be curious to know how valuable the international revenues are compared to the domestic revenues. I know that the studio generally gets a smaller cut of the international revenues, but I've never seen good numbers on how much smaller. Is this movie successful because of those revenues or not?

They were also selling five of the six "Kraven's Last Hunt" books for 3/$1. They were missing the first Amazing for it, but they had two copies of all of the others. There were a ton of Marvel Tales under 100 in there as well (mid grade). I bought the ones that reprinted ASM 121 and 122 because they have some interest now. Honestly, though, the later McFarlanes have not been selling for much around here. I've seen them at the last several conventions for about $2/each, and they haven't appeared to have been selling. I probably wouldn't have bought them for more, since I already have more than one copy of the ones they had.

I'm starting to think that a lot of the McFarlane Spideys are currently in the category of undervalued. I've been seeing them in bargain boxes more and more. I pulled a few out of a 3/$1 box at a little convention yesterday (a 307, 313, and a couple of the later ones). The dealer I bought them from runs a LCS around here. I asked him about it, and he said that he had so much of that stuff that he just needed to get rid of some of it. These were books I felt were wildly overvalued when they originally got hot, but now I'm finding a fair number of them in $1-$2 boxes around here. I'm generally not one to buy books purely for resale (my wife and I call it buying a chore), but at 3/$1 I couldn't help myself.

Bid $1 Ask $3 I wasn't the one who first valued them at $1....and the offer is for all of them. How many buyers do you know who will do that...?