FineCollector

This is what you said that stuck with me. Buying comics you don't care about will 100% make you unhappy, so I'm glad you didn't. However, piling up keys for $$$ reasons also didn't seem to excite you. I think there's a third option you're ignoring. Stop looking at comics like a retailer, which ones do you actually enjoy? Is there any material that still intrigues you or that makes you happy to leaf through it? If you feel like you've read it all, and comics are just pork bellies, then yes, it's time to get out. I'm happy with my hoard, and still buying more. I'm 41, so not concerned about my final years yet. The most frustrating thing about comics for me is seeing people collecting for money with no attachment to the books. Two things that people don't get excited about are mutual funds, and investment comics. Facebook is really frustrating for me because the new collectors there buy for money without knowing what they're buying, and they burn out after 5 years. Take money out of the equation, and it's easier to be happy with comics.

All but a handful are raw, I don't have room for slabs. Not much that would excite you guys anyway. Keepers get cracked and put in mylar, the ones I'm less pleased with stay slabbed in case I upgrade and need to sell. I understand the OPs desire to own everything. Comics are sequential stories, and I enjoy runs, not random, unrelated keys. You have to like what you're buying, though. When I was younger, I bought Frank Miller and Neal Adams because I was supposed to, but didn't really appreciate them at the time. It was a chore, and I hated them. Keeping books you find in collections are one thing, but buying singles you care about to plug holes is what burns. I recommend working on, at most, 5 or 6 titles you like, and when you're close to finishing one, start on another one you like.

My collection is 60+ longs (plus some Bowen minibusts pictured). I like the books I have, and few are unrelated to anything else in the collection. Everything is ordered, boxes are labelled, the collection is documented in CLZ. I take great joy going through my collection, and have no difficulty finding anything.

That's why you put the cheap stuff on top. When they get sick of looking up $5 books, they ask how much you want to pay for everything.

Make sets of Indy and DC stuff, and sell Marvel at $1 each, it'll move. You might've seen those issues a hundred times, but they're still new to some collectors.

I think the past sale of $290 is making the OP overthink this. Yes, someone got it for $290, but if all the other copies available are more expensive, then $290 is just shoulda-coulda-woulda, and no longer relevant.

I don't care what my books are worth, I buy them for the pleasure of owning and reading them. I won't break a run to sell something that popped, so the only time the value matters is after I'm dead

Stories in keys are better than in non-keys? That's a Facebook excuse, and I'm calling B.S. on that. If you like seeing your books increase in price, that's reason enough, dont shovel in the rest of that. I'm a run collector, mostly superhero, 18k books in, and I'm happy with what I've been able to put together. Since I was a kid, I've had the mentality that if I have some, I might as well have them all. Bronze age is my least favorite era, so I have some titles to cut if I run out of space.

UPS is not taking signatures, they don't want to hand over the ipad and light pen to anyone. If the package has a required signature, they're supposed to note the name of the person taking possession. Unfortunately, UPS drivers will sometimes drop and run, and note the signature as "met receiver man," without ever meeting anyone.

Water stained, and the dry sticker isn't coming off, but happy with a cheap eBay win.

Nominate him now, put down all the facts while they're fresh. If there's some reason he won't be able to respond in 30 days, the mods will tell us. Presumably, he won't be back anyway.

I want to shop where you shop... where I am, I'm paying good money for a lot of this unless it's VG or less.

A collector buys a stack/box/collection, keeps the ones he wants, and sells the ones he doesn't. 100% agree, you have to focus, and sometimes make hard choices when space or funds are limited. The difference is when you buy the books knowing you don't want any of them. That's not collecting. If anything, you're getting in the way of collectors. Someone's going to say they're helping collectors by bringing books to market that wouldn't be found. I call BS on that, and that's still not collecting.

Then you are both. There's no harm in admitting it, but some people hide the dealer part, and that's where hard feelings come from.

A collector sells to curate his collection. A dealer sells to profit from the book. If you buy books with no intention of keeping them, but instead want to put the proceeds towards other ends, that sounds like a dealer to me.

I despise the phrase "quality over quantity". I built a run of Tales of Suspense 58-99, and Captain America 100-454 some years ago which still makes me very happy. According to you experts, how much of that is quality, and how much is quantity?

Glad the reports are mediocre... preordered off Amazon.ca a while ago. They didn't have a delivery date a week after it came out, and when it finally popped up, I was only getting my copy at the end of September. Meanwhile, they say order now, they have 10 copies left. Heck with that, cancel and rethink who I buy a copy from.

C for... Captain Marvel Adventures?

I asked in a Facebook group, and lots of people argued with me about how much they loved their CPV collection. I couldn't find anyone who paid a premium to get them, though...

All due respect, if you look at a lot like that and say "volume isnt my thing," I'm rather glad you didnt get it.

Is there room for a dissenting opinion? If you're willing to buy a single page, would you be willing to buy the coverless book without a centerfold that the pages were cut from? You see an iconic page, I see a book that was chopped up for profit. I'm not at all a fan.

People aren't stupid. When you put wet, damaged, worthless books in a dollar bin, they stagnate. Successful dollar bins are clearance of books that are worth at least a dollar. If it looks like garbage, and the store owner treats it like garbage, people are going to think it's garbage.

You don't seem to like the opinions so far, so I'll ask a question: do you want people to grab books in stacks a foot high with quick turnover between customers, or do you want one customer to take an hour to pull one or two books?

Please sort them. If I'm flipping through bins, and see a mini or a run all together, I might be inclined to buy them. If they're scattered across the boxes, I'll recognize that I've seen them, but I'm not going back to find them. If they're ordered, I'll check the numbers on my lists. I don't mind paying $2 for clean moderns, but only bagged and boarded. If you want more than a dollar, you'd better spend the extra 10 cents on supplies. Some books should never be more than a dollar, though. If you're asking $2 each for Arion of Atlantis, 90s Starman, and damaged copies of Classic X-Men, I'm going to stop looking, discount or not.

My only issue with promoting Thor and Galactus is you can't find any of the current Thor issues on the stands anymore.