Hamlet

Well, I filled a long box full of books that weren’t worth a dollar to me last week, but I justified buying today for 4/$1. I was able to get 280 bagged and boarded books into that long box. Getting them out was a little harder 😀 I have to be honest, it’s a pretty drekky haul. I got a bunch of The Nam issues, a whole bunch of early 90s Batmans and Detectives that no one wants, a chunk of Micronauts, 80s Silver Surfers, some Alpha Flights, X-factors, New Mutants, Conans, the 90s Demon run, and some Byrne Wonder Womans. A lot of the books that I was planning on getting must have been sold as dollar books last weekend after I left. I wasn’t going home empty handed though 😀

The guys from Honest Trailers described my feelings on Captain Marvel almost exactly. I definitely want to get my daughter to watch i with me now that she is old enough-

They’ll become my dollar boxes when I do conventions in retirement.

These are all bagged and boarded already, and the bags aren’t even completely disgusting. I will rebag anything that I want to keep in my more permanent collection, and put the rest in my overflow boxes. Well, they actually have unbagged books that are even cheaper, but those are all newer books than I am interested in. I gravitate towards drek from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I’m sure than I’m missing some flippable books buy not paying much attention to the newer areas of the market, but I just can’t get that interested.

Here is a real mark of my sickness- when I’m digging thru ultra-cheap boxes ( 50 cents or 3/$1 typically ), I often grab annuals and other double-sized issues since they are so cheap for that much reading ( even though I rarely end up actually reading them these days ). I was just counting books in one of my long boxes to get a feel for roughly how many boarded books a long box holds ( ~250 maybe more if I pack them tight ), and it occurred to me that when you are filling a box instead of paying per book, the double-sized books cost you more.

Both of the Pediatrician offices that we go to have aquariums. One has a saltwater setup and one has an African cichlid tank. Goldfish can get huge. They are closely related to carp. For me, I’m mostly interested in breeding the fish. I’ve bred about 15 different species of tropical fish so far. The club has a Breeder’s program where we donate fry for points that the club then auctions off to pay club expenses. There is a similar program for live plants.

She’s onto me with that one. ”So you bought yourself a chore”

I forgot the group that I was dealing with. My wife thinks I’m a hoarder, you guys would look at my collection and ask where the rest of it is 😀 It’s like the Aquarium club I go to. When I tell them I have 12 fish tanks, they respond with “why only 12?”

A local comic store has dollar box sales from time to time so that they don't get buried alive in their inventory. They rent a space, and put a few hundred dollar boxes out for people to go through. They had one last week, and I bought 66 dollar books. That's pretty normal for me. I just got a notice that they are doing the same thing this weekend, but they are getting serious about moving books, so they are going let people fill a long box for $70. Am I going to go and fill a long box with books that I didn't want for a dollar but am willing to buy for ~ 3/$1 ? I suspect that I will. I need some help.

Frankly, given recent history, I can't really blame them. Keys are hard for them to replace, and they seem to eventually get the prices they want. I end up buying a lot of dollar books from dealers with wall books I barely look at because the prices are so crazy to me.

Zatanna seems like a place to look

Yeah, Creepy 15 never seems to get the same love as other Frazetta covers, and I’m not sure why. It’s good book, and very available in most non-nosebleed grades.

I think another issue is that bags and boards for magazines were not nearly as common back in the day. I think they were treated as less “collectable” by a lot of people.

He’s got the same agent as Nicholas Cage-

I went to a local dollar box sale today, and they had a few pre-Unity Valiants. I missed the Valiant boat originally, but I figured for $1, why not? The Solar 10s are one of each print, although the condition on the 1st print is marginal-

One nice thing about magazine collecting is that there aren’t a lot of super expensive books if you are okay with mid-grade books ( Vampi 1 being an exception). I’m a big fan of Vampi 5, 7, and 11, as well as Eerie 23, 25 and Creepy 16. Those are all desirable books, but they are really only “grails” in high grade. Eerie 23 is probably the most expensive of those, but if you’re okay with what looks like a VG-, it’s available on Ebay for about $75. The other nice thing is that they are tough in high grade, so you can make collecting them very challenging if you want to get picky about condition. Although that does get expensive. 😀

I’m saving this photo.

That one is going to get me to the theater. I just watched the trailer and I’m pretty excited to see Alfred Molina again. The box office for that will be very interesting to watch.

As other people have mentioned, the split with the theaters and the cost of advertising make these numbers bad from a profit/loss standpoint. This current environment is not good for movies in general, so we’ll have to see what things look like down the road ( and with more established characters), but I don’t think anyone at Disney was celebrating these numbers.

Funny you should mention Star Wars. My understanding is that Disney was originally planning to have a Star Wars movie every year. A main movie every two years and a stand-alone on the off years. Solo tanked and they scaled back their plans. They had found the limit of how many Star Wars movies people would watch in numbers large enough to support their budgets. Every movie genre and franchise has limits to what the market will support. It ebbs and flows with the quality of the movies and the moods of the viewing public. The box office numbers for Black Widow, Chang-Shi, and Eternals have been lackluster. Some of that is the pandemic, some of it is probably specific to these movies, and some of it is releasing them on Disney+ to support their platform. It’s harder these days to quantify the profitability of movies that are on streaming platforms, since the amount of the streaming revenue you should attribute to any particular movie is somewhat subjective. However, they don’t look like they’ve been all that profitable by traditional metrics. That may be a temporary setback due to the current environment. Certainly I would expect the new Spiderman movie to do well. I’m starting to think that the public’s appetite for the lesser properties might be waning, though.

wow

Holy rare books Batman! Congrats to both of you.

I think the main issue for me is that I don’t want to see all of them anymore. It’s not that Black Widow was a bad movie, it’s just that I didn’t really need to see it after I’ve seen all of the others. If I hadn’t seen 20 other similar movies, I would have enjoyed it more. I’ve reached the point where I’m probably only going to bother with a couple of comic movies a year. Which means I won’t see most of them.

I mentioned the Marvel movie formula, but I wasn’t speaking just about specifically Marvel movies.