VintageComics

Yeah, the music definitely stopped on book flipping. Selling his long box of IH 181s to fund his empire does not make me weepy. Apparently he wants to become the next Vince? Aren't these guys kids of Mark Wilson? Their dad was a monster comic dealer for decades and their uncle was well known too. These guys aren't amateurs. This is all just great fodder for video content. Here's the same guy interviewing his dad, who he introduces as one of the greatest comic book dealers of the 80's and 90's.

This also happened when I was buying a house. We struck an agreement and people were literally calling the house and driving by it while we were in it making an agreement offering to outbid our deal if they broke it. It's just sleazy and unacceptable behavior IMO.

Yes.

Nothing has changed in the 20 years I've been here or the 48 years I've been collecting. This is the circle of life in the hobby and it's nothing new. What really drove the market (all markets) IMO was stimulus money and crypto money. FAR too many people were given money they didn't need, and a lot of people made out like bandits with crypto. There was $8Trillion printed and $2Trillion in crypto profits cashed in. That's planet changing money. It's changed the world's economy forever.

We're moving the goalposts a bit. Prices were crazy high, but I don't think Buttock is arguing that the Promise book purchases were prudent. All that's being discussed is that 5% came back to market and a some people lost money, but that's not representative of the entire market. If you go reading the GA forums, you'll see the GA guys have a very different view of the Promise books than Comics General does and many bought to keep regardless of how much they paid. And I know at least a few of the buyers that sold early. Some just have too much money to know what to do with. Really. Not meant to be directed at you specifically, but as a society we tend to shift narratives slightly all the time to our advantage which a) always only leads to a game of broken telephone and b) we tend to take the narrative of the few and try to make it the narrative of the many

I wouldn't worry too much about the people losing money. It was their choice to spend it in the first place. I don't think anyone had a gun to their heads forcing them to bid. Some people buy things to gamble, some to upgrade and some because they have lots of money don't know what to do with it (as I know for a fact some buyers have). As a society, we try to shield too many people from the dumb things they do when they're worrying about it without our input. It's sad, but it's also important to remember that it's reality. You can't shield anyone from reality.

Those are all fair points...for a guy talking out if his buttock.

There was a lot of buzz on that collection. It was pumped really hard. The story behind the collection was touching, the grades the books got were extremely high, and when people tried to discuss the grades the discussion was hampered. It was just a really popular Pedigree and public excitement took over. Plus, it was selling at the peak of the pandemic asset bubble, so everything lined up against the buyers. It was perfect storm.

Not always, but many of them, yes. Like the people who took out massive loans to "cash in" on Bitcoin's rise and then lost everything. Duh. The 1st thing you did wrong is borrowed money you couldn't afford to lose and the 2nd thing you did wrong is bought into something on the way up and weren't able to hold...because you did the 1st thing wrong. People who are able to hold do much better than people who need to sell.

When a frenzy occurs like we saw the last few years, long-time collectors are far from immune from making bad decisions. On the contrary, they represent the FOMO contingent of the frenzied buying, and the fear is that the market could price them out before they secure the last few items to round out their collections. If you're saying that the populace in general are sheep, I agree. A couple of years ago I was driving in a truly deadly snowstorm. I'm never afraid of driving. To me it's like walking and it's 2nd hand, but this storm was really bad. There was ice under the snow on the freeway and it was treacherous. I'm pretty confident in my driving skills and how I mitigate risk, but I don't trust anyone else so I tried to keep my distance from surrounding cars. Inevitably, I'd have someone following me and tailgating. So I'd either speed up to lose them or pull over to the right and slow down. They would FREAKING FOLLOW MY EVERY MOVE, not realizing it's far deadlier if two cars collide than one goes skidding on an empty freeway. So I would pull over on the shoulder to a near stop, they would follow me until I'm down to walking speed, realize I'm stopping and pass me. Buffoons. Then, after they'd pass I'd carry on...until the next car starts tailgating me and I have to repeat the same thing. People are NOT being taught how to think and act independently. They're not being taught how to be objective or confident. They're being raised to conform, obey and FOLLOW and we are living in a society where the majority is incapable of making rational, objective decisions and it's terrifying to me, because THEY are the majority. They'd follow into oblivion. This is why all these bubbles form. If it's not a pileup on the freeway, it's a pileup somewhere else like we see in the hobby.

I hung out with Linda Hamilton at a NYC comic con once year. She was TINY!! Which was amazing considering how she looked larger than life in Terminator.

Yes, but what are their shoe sizes?

You've been holding out for years. Step on it.

You're talking to a guy who makes MUCH more from a WP, perfectly centered copy than not, so what I'm saying is actually less profitable for me, but I believe it's important to state because I actually don't think it's good for the overall market - it's just another bubble, and bubbles are never good. As a collector, it's a personal preference in the sense that I never mind spending a little extra for top quality but I won't spend a LOT extra for a slight difference in quality. But I don't begrudge anyone who wants to get into a bidding war. Go for it!

The REAL problem is the premiums people are paying for White pages and highest graded. When those two things match, the gloves come off. I'd much rather own pay less for an OWW book with a slight miswrap than pay a massive premium for a perfect White pager.

I genuinely feel terrible for that person, but while it sounds cruel that person gambled and lost. Nobody else is responsible for that person's decisions except for them, and that's coming from someone who was almost out in the streets in 1991. I lost my job a few weeks after I got married and the Canadian economy took a downturn at the same time. I ended up selling door to door 7 days a week, on weeknights, in the dead of Canadian winter to pay the bills and stay off the streets until I could find a job as a mechanic again, and when I got the job, it was a job I hated but it paid the bills. I didn't recover fully until about 2-3 years later, and then started a family and made sure not to make the same mistakes again. We quite literally scraped by, living week to week in the early years and when my first property tax bill arrived it was $1000 and I didn't know how I was going to pay it. True story. Life in the West is hard but doable. It's nothing more than a series of decisions and some people make bad ones. Downmarkets expose all the bad decisions, but if we weren't exposing bad decision making everyone would keep making them. That's a major problem today. Nobody wants anything bad exposed and so everything just keeps getting worse because society has been trained to avoid consequences rather than meet them head on and learn from them.

I view the markets very differently. The fundamental principle for every buyer in every economy is to buy as low as you can while remaining ethical and moral, and that necessarily will mean there are always going to be losers as well as winners. You can never eliminate the losers. Loss is not only a great way to learn a lesson, it's the best lesson someone can learn and hopefully they don't repeat the same mistakes. I don't think I've really seen anyone publicly revel on here in someone's personal loss by rubbing someone's nose in it. Putting out general statements like "someone's loss is your gain" is not derogatory or even negative. It's factual. I lost 5 figures when I dabbled in the art market many years ago. It was my decision to sell, not the buyer's. I hated the loss, but was happy for the buyer who I thought got a steal. I just took that loss, learned from it and rolled the money into something else that has grown into where I am today. It's on the seller to decide when is a good time to sell, not the buyer.

I have a cuter butt, but I agree that's close!

Dude, I've been here 20 years and almost everyone used to be on the same page. There was a general, central understanding of what was normal and what wasn't. Now, not only is everyone is on a different page, those pages are torn out of the book and scattered in the wind.

What is it with everyone's obsession to police every discussion with laser focus? The fun on this forum used to be the lively discussion. Is there some sort of mind drug that everyone's been exposed to that I'm immune to? It's like grandma forbidding discussion of Thanksgiving around the Christmas table while everyone is discussing turkey. Have a little spiked egg nog, grandma. It's was a small but relevant tangent that started with the discussion about how the Meyers made their business profitable by risking the cost of the restoration against future auction profits. That model was met with resistance by a few so I tried to show that other industries use the same model of risk / reward and that it wasn't just the Meyers. Conversations always meander a bit on the internet and then return back on topic.

I was just talking about this in the auction discussion thread. I've seen some crazy prices on high grade SA books in the past week.

Oh, I'm aware of how diverse the market is, but it's no different than trying to build an epidemiological or economic model for a large population. There are ways of doing it. This discussion is right up the alley of a good statistician but it's a layman's discussion that I thought would be interesting to have. So I think the discussion really is going to come down to which segments of the market need to be represented and how to weight them.

Different field, but the pain is the same. This article give a quick glimpse into what's coming and it's terrifying to me. Wow.

This thread stems from the auction discussion thread, which inevitably has morphed into discussing current market trends. The problem is that the market is vast and has so much depth and breadth to it that it seems almost impossible to tell whether the comic market overall is climbing or falling as each area of the market is doing something different. You have different markets in grade variations for the same book. You have market variations across genres, titles, eras. You have market variations for keys vs non-keys. If you wanted to wanted to build some sort of a model to try to track and gauge the direction of the entire market using data from various segments, would that be possible? Crowdsource this shizzle!

I don't think a breach of contract is the same as the risk we were talking about, where someone bets on themselves. People that mitigate risks in normal business situations operate under the common understanding that the rules won't be breached. What Disney did was fraudulent. Now, in high hazard businesses (like going to warm say) where the outcome is truly unpredictable, that would be understood. Looks like Disney didn't expect a pandemic to affect the release and paid the price for it.