Hamlet

Nobody cares about 2nd appearances. ASM 194 has been a key book for over a decade. The recent jump in price is silly, but that doesn't mean that the book isn't important to a lot of Spiderman collectors. I have a rough VG copy, and I've been too cheap to upgrade it for at least 10 years, but I have been mildly interested in doing so that whole time. I'm pretty sure it isn't going to happen anytime soon.

I would say that ASM 194 is a much more important book than any of those examples. Any Spidey collector who read the Spectacular Spiderman in the 1980s is going to want a copy of this book. It’s an actual key book, rather than a pure speculation driven book like those. That said, I think the prices people are paying for it are pretty crazy right now ( I would say that about most key books, TBH ). It is also a very common book that is always readily available. There will be better times to buy it, IMO.

The 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies are really best suited for watching the highlight scenes on YouTube. It's funny how the first movie is so amazing and groundbreaking, while the rest are just kind of blah. I think it shares something in common with the Terminator movies. The first movie was very original, and T2 was one of the best SciFi/action movies ever made, but after that the premise just can't hold anything up. It gets too convoluted and the suspension of disbelief breaks down. These kind of movies need to keep things moving fast enough so that the plot holes and silly SciFi stuff can't be analyzed while you are watching it.

If you make a good faith effort to come up with a cost basis, I doubt very much that you'll have any issues. Honestly, the odds of an audit is pretty tiny if you report numbers that are plausible. The IRS is pretty understaffed. If their computers don't flag your return as in error, it is really unlikely that you are going to have a problem.

It depends on how many copies you are trying to buy. 😀 I have a few books that I buy every time I find them for $1-2. My goal with one of them is to fill a long box ( I’ve still got a long way to go ). I’m keeping that one to myself. I doubt that it will ever pop, but if it does.. 😀

If everyone else is focusing on the movie criteria, it seems like that should make books that are coveted mainly for the other criteria you mentioned more available. Take advantage of that when you can for your collecting enjoyment.

Yup. People forget in bull markets how long and bad a bear market can get. It is even worse than you state, because these numbers don’t take inflation into account. The 1965 to 1982 trough was even worse than it looks because that was also a period of very high inflation. So it took seventeen years to get back to even and on top of that an investor would have lost 2/3 of their purchasing power to inflation. Dividends would have helped some, but not enough to match that inflation. It seems like we have to relearn this lesson every 20-30 years.

You’re not picky? Some of us just buy pretty much any presentable raw copy when the price is right and call it done.

All I know is that I’m eventually going to feel stupid buying a copy to fill that hole in my MTU run. It’s always been a run that I’ve mostly pulled out of dollar boxes. I’m not a 9.8 guy, so it looks like I will feel $30 stupid, not $500 stupid, but still.

Buy more of the few books that I am speculating on/hoarding. Buy good deals that I find on books that I think are cool. Sell enough books to cover those purchases.

Well, to be fair, collecting in general doesn’t make much logical sense. And none of this is huge money. If someone decides to spend $100 to buy the Magneto cover of X-men 1 in 9.8 because it looks cool, that isn’t really that big of a deal for most people financially. I suppose in some sense it is a fairly important issue historically. I’ve certainly spent $100 in dumber ways than that, many, many times. Heck, I have a long box of books that I had passed on for $1/each that I bought a week later for 4/$1. This was in the past month. That $70 purchase does not make much logical sense. The whole collecting world is trying to shed themselves of drek, and here I am hoovering it up. There aren’t any X-men 1s in that box, but there were a whole bunch of 90s Batmans and Detectives, along with the 87 series of Silver Surfer, Micronauts, The Nam, New Mutants, X-factor, 80s Conans, etc. They all share the characteristic that no one was willing to pay a dollar for them. As you can see, I really don’t like to go home empty-handed. 😀

It has gone up a lot, although the numbers people are talking about are here for private schools. In-state tuition at state schools are quite a bit better ( although still painfully expensive). For example, in-state tuition at the U of Minn is about 15k per year.

I don’t think anyone is thinking they are “smart” for holding onto these books, they were just pointing out that it actually turned out to be okay money-wise. I think most of the people who held onto them did so for the same reason I hold onto a bunch of worthless books- it is more work to do anything else with them, and occasionally some of them “pop”. As collectors, we tend to accumulate worthless books. If we are people who buy collections and/or do a little dealing, we accumulate a lot of worthless books. I bought a few collections in the late 80s and every one of them had a set of Secret Wars in it. Those books were absolutely worthless when I bought them, but I carried them around with me anyway. At some point people started to care about SW8 and also started to buy sets on Ebay. I sold all the complete sets I had for what was small money, but pure gravy to me, since I considered the books mostly worthless, and I had multiples. I was left with my personal set, a really nice extra SW8, and a couple extra SW1s. I sold the SW8 for $100 at MCS ( way too early turns out ). That was more than I paid for the whole collection it came in. That doesn’t make me a brilliant investor. It’s just found money to me. I’m not hanging onto my Wolverine 50s and MCP 90s ( my original failed spec books ) because I think I’ll make a killing with them eventually. I mentally wrote that money off in the 90s. I’m hanging onto them because there isn’t any real downside to having them sit in a long box in the corner of my comic book room, and they aren’t worth the energy to sell for pennies. If they become worth selling, it isn’t going to make me a brilliant investor, but I will think “hey, I actually did okay with those, who would have thunk?”

I think the big difference between X-men 1 and Superman 75 is that Superman 75 had way more interest for it outside of the hardcore collecting community. I’m pretty sure Superman 75 sold to more individuals, but I bet more collectors bought multiples of X-men 1. Plus stores had lots of leftover issues of X-men 1, since the long box of overstocked X-men 1s was a staple of the dollar boxes for years ( decades? ) afterwards. I don’t remember seeing a similar glut of Superman 75s anywhere.

I buy a lot of dollar books. I still find stuff that I think is kind of cool in dollar boxes these days. Not as cool as a few years back, but still more books than I am ever actually going to get around to reading. But yeah, there is a lot of stuff these days that is priced to the point where I’m more likely to sell what I have than collect what I’m missing. It has me thinking a lot more about what my collecting focus really should be.

X-force 1 should be in the conversation too. I actually dug mine out when people were paying money for the ones with the Deadpool card ( I didn’t have any 😀). I opened one and read it for the first time. What a complete garbage book.

X-men 1 was probably one of the most speculated on books in the history of comics. It would probably be my guess for the number one spot personally. The fact that anyone can sell it for anything above a dollar shocks me, TBH. Doesn’t it hold the record for its total print run? Lots and lots of people had hundreds of copies of those books. I’m pretty sure lots and lots of people still have hundreds of copies of those books. I’ve found whole long boxes of them in dollar bins at least as recently as 5-10 years ago. I don’t think it makes sense to think someone needed a crystal ball to be speculating on a book that almost everyone was speculating on at the time.

I remember waiting to buy my FF 49 in CGC 7.5 OW-W specifically so that it would match my 48 and 50. I probably would have passed up one with W pages in that instance. 😀

He’s not saying they all need to be 9.8s. In his X-men 1 example, he needed two 9.8s to pay for the 50 copies he bought. The other copies aren’t worthless anymore either. The 9.6s of the Magneto cover appear to be getting north of $60, which probably makes a little money for someone as long as they do enough volume to minimize shipping costs. Even the raw books can be sold these days. They aren’t pure sub-dollar box books anymore. Obviously, most of the people who speculated with books like this off the stands did not do well. However, it is starting to look like the people who bought the stores’ overstock out for pennies on the dollar are now sitting pretty good.

I think some of you are getting a little pedantic about this. I think the main point of the post was that people are paying quite a bit of money for books that we all thought were completely worthless 5-10 years ago. It's not just CGC copies either. Look at the sales for Spawn 1. That book is selling for $25+ for a decent copy on Ebay. It doesn't have to be 9.6-9.8 . I never would have guessed that the market would support prices like that for a book so over-printed. I saw a set of the five Jim Lee X-men 1 covers sell raw in a mycomicshop auction for enough to justify shipping them and paying the selling fees for the lot. I'm amazed that those books are being sold at anything more than a dollar given how many of them there are.

From my buying, I don’t think I’ve ever had a surprise defect that wasn’t called out in the notes. They are really good about pointing out all of the hidden gotchas- loose centerfold, centerfold loose at one staple, popped staple, water damage, etc. I got a book with a coupon cut out once, but I’m pretty sure that it was missed in grading rather than not noted. The return for that was as smooth as a return can go.

That is a pretty copy of that book.

New arrivals-

Is anyone else wondering how a module could be for levels 4-20 ? Seems to wide to me 😀

Something interesting that occurred to me today as I was loading up on drek- When I started collecting in 1985, Amazing Fantasy 15 seemed like an ancient book. It was 23 years old. The books I bought today ranged from the late 70s to mid-90s. They are all older than AF15 was when I started collecting. When I started collecting, cheap books were sold in a quarter box ( sometimes bagged, never boarded ). I just bought these for a quarter — inflation adjusted, that is the equivalent of paying 10/$1 in 1985. For bagged and boarded books that are more than 25 years old. Someone lost a lot of money and wasted a lot of effort somewhere along the line before these books came to me. I’m under no illusions that these are a good buy from a financial standpoint- these are all books that no one at the sale ( including me ) was willing to pay a dollar for. But they are still kind of cool. The early ones, with their 50 and 60 cent Marvel logos, remind me of why I started collecting. The later ones, with their $1.00, 1.25, and up prices, reminded why I stopped buying comics in the early 90s 😀