VintageComics

How are what they do any different than the pump and dump people on this forum? They just have a larger audience.

Everyone is just looking for one 'silver bullet' answer. What is affecting the market is more than one thing. It's societal. All of these are tied into my greater picture. 1) The corporate structure of the industry has diminished the ability of artists to put out the art form as they see fit. They have to bend their creations to the will of their overlords. This is proven by examples I've given like the corporate interference in the purposeful demise of the John Carter film, the cancelling of Marvel's flagship superteam The Fantastic Four a decade ago and the need of corporations to virtue signal "social justice" through their products to maintain a relatively high ESG score (also proven). This prevents the art form from being just pure art for the sake of art, and instead is the medium becomes an investment vehicle for alternative purposes other than storytelling. Even @EastEnd1 , who worked pretty high up at a competitor for Disney confirmed that the comics are no longer the end product. They're just incubators to create Intellectual Properties for greater industries. 2) The shortening of attention spans of the general public, a product of a much more competitive market field AND socially engineering the patience out of people have reduced how and what sort of content is desirable for entertainment. People want their quicker sugar / crack / serotonin fixes than the longform complex carbs of sitting through a long reading. This was proven by CAHokie's charts of how the numbers of people who read for entertainment voluntarily are dropping. No, this doesn't mean spending 100 hours on a video game makes it a "complex carb" type of entertainment. That's ridiculous. All the 100 hours on a video game means, is that you have your crack supply set to last 100 hours. And this dovetails into my 3rd point: 3) Children, as they grow up are being programmed by social media and education systems to not want to read and rely on short form communication. The proof being that kids these days can't form entire sentences and proper grammer, hardly comment on social media and get anxiety when they need to have a voice conversation. Raising better children is a root product to greater success for those kids. There are probably more points. One would be that because the general public's voices are being censored, and that big Legacy Media has basically been co-opted by special interest groups, especially in the West, people are vocally and purposefully pushing back on #1 by voting for what they approve of with their dollars, which is the only recourse they have left, although you can look for that option to disappear soon as many currencies becomes digital and how you choose to spend your money also becomes more limited. In short, the problem is not just comics. It's society in general. The general public doesn't really find that walking to the local store, buying something to read, sitting down with a good book, in a quiet room, with no rush to go anywhere as something productive right now. That's how all of us used to do it, right? And I hope that the pendulum swings back, because that really is the root solution to many of the worlds problems IMO.

Then your point is just pure bull. It might be closer to being true for slab collectors, but that is nothing. I asked which age range you were in and you never answered. I ask because you sound quite a bit younger than me. More impatient, your timeline focus is very narrow (I'm surprised you didn't throw in an "OK Boomer") and you have trouble following the string of discussion. My entire point rested on this post from a long time (comic) book store owner, before the conversation became distracted by Team Derail. These are all points brought up in the recent string of discussion: Comics today have less text. Comics today are driven more by the art than the story. I mean, isn't this a common complaint about comic writers over the past few years? Collectors today, who are the readers of yesterday (and yesterday can be as soon as 5-10 years ago) are less interested in content and more interested in splashy pages and covers. You combine those things and they are all definitely working against selling more reading material. What I tried to show, through many different avenues was that reading material as entertainment is less sought out than it was yesterday, and CAHokie's graphs clearly showed that and backed up my discussion points. It seems to be pretty unequivocal. So what exactly are you disagreeing with and more importantly, WHY?

You're focusing on Origin stories, and while I was trying to make my point you and a few others kept trying to derail the conversation. My point is not whether origin stories are still relevant or not. They will always be relevant. My point was always that story content has become far less important now to comic collectors than covers have become and I simply used origin stories as ONE EXAMPLE of this. Another other example I used was L.B. Cole covers. Baker covers are another. Nobody reads Baker stories or L.B Cole stories anymore and before the slab age, nobody really chased them as much. I know because I was buying Baker covers for $100 a pop a decade ago. They were always collectible but in the cover age they have taken off exponentially so that books that could have been had for a few $100 are now costing you $1000's and even $10,000's and I think this is indicative of how the social media age has changed markets. People's attention spans have gotten shorter, they've been programmed to find the serotonin hit in everything as fast as possible, and I believe that this need for instant gratification through the same social engineering that is affecting everyone outside of comics, is slowing the sales of comics and books when compared to things like video games, dating apps, porn, instagram and whatever else gives people that quick sugar rush. It's similar for music. Nobody can take the time to listen to a 5 or an 8 minute song. Everyone wants their sugar fix in under 3 minutes. I needed to show examples OVER TIME. You don't get to qualify the time frame for the point I'M TRYING TO MAKE. I have now shown a pattern over a period of 50 years, from past to present. If you'd stop deriding me for long enough to allow me to finish a thought, you'd see that but instead all you do is deride people you disagree with. It's something this forum is getting tired of. Now you can take my data and my point and discuss it, but if your discussion points can't be established in a marketplace of free ideas, they don't deserve any air.

Just to finish off the point I was trying to make in this conversation, I think that if we did a study comparing many comparable Origin books, which were valuable for their story content, to classic covers where are only valuable for their cover content, I think more often than not we'd see a divergence with the cover books taking off compared to a much more flat curve for the books known for their internal content. As I said, I think Tec #31 and #33 are perfect examples for this comparison. They're unique because they are only 2 issues apart (so same era), and Tec #33 was a more valuable book back in the day but has now gone on to be eclipsed by Tec #31 simply because of the slab generation. The slab generation is a microcosm of what's happened out in the real world. The internet has driven toward the sparkle and dazzle of good serotonin hit (similar to taking in a simple sugar) and what has suffered is good content (complex carbs). I think the graphs of the two curves are the most obvious tells. Detective Comics #31 CGC 4.0 Detective Comics #33 CGC 4.0

Nah. More like everybody be like 'dis:

Thank you for giving me the benefit if the doubt. If all conversations were this respectful the world would be a better place. It's genuinely appreciated.

I don't want to post my own books for privacy reasons, but based on my experiences, and I've been posting about them in this thread all year, there are still many books (even regular, non-key SA in high and highest grades) that still fetch strong numbers with many going over GPA. Anyway, thanks for answering. I was just curious as to how that came to be the list.

I'm asking who chose the specific list that DC is following and updating prices about? Was it just random? Did people give suggestions? How was that specific list compiled? And I wasn't asking you specifically, I was asking anyone that might know. No worries.

I'm asking WHICH cross section of the market. Who made up the list to follow?

You can definitely argue that Superman is Sci Fi. He's an alien, pure and simple and alien life is still within the realm of [human] possibility.

Why would I need a digital camera to photograph something from 1977? Any camera will work. I didn't cash the check because somehow, in a family of 8, it was forgotten about. And as far as premonitions go, I believe in them and live them. After this conversation matured into what it is now, I was thinking exactly that: That it is amazing that 36 years later, saving this check BY ACCIDENT worked out very well for me. But then I truly believe that nothing in life is co-incidence and that everything truly and genuinely happens for a reason. I know a lot of people just say that, but believe it and live that way every day.

He never stated that the results he presents were all-inclusive of the auction results. Just a subset of regularly transacted books. And I never stated it was all-inclusive either. I said what I did because many people are under the perception that the list is representative of the market in general, but it's not so I'm curious to know how the list of books to follow was compiled.

To everyone else, I'm sorry about all of this. I'm trying to have a genuine discussion here but I'm going to step away for a bit to turn down the heat because I'm sure this is tiring for everyone.

So you're going to stop trying? I'm trying to show you a pattern over time. I just posted examples from the 1970's, the 1980's and the 2000's. What criteria do you think is sufficient? Just using data from the last 10 years? Are you saying you DISAGREE that people read and care less about comic content now than they used to?

I should have known the best response some people would have for this would be to bring up things from decades ago. I am very glad you mentioned that. I was waiting for you to say that so that I could show you in detail how the hobby has changed over the years. So we've covered the 70's and 80's. I posted those examples to show you that origin issues were originally considered prime material because comics used to be based on reading the content and not the covers. The only way to show you this is to show you how the hobby evolved through the documented Bible we have, the OSPG. Now I'm going to show you this from 2006. This book was probably the first OSPG where I started to notice huge jumps in key prices that I believe were directly related to the CGC market. If you all remember, the big SA keys took HUGE jumps around this time: Now look at the same issues I documented from the 1970's and 80's Superman. You'll notice that there are even MORE origin stories broken out with Superman #3 noting origin reprint from Action #5. But you'll also notice that Superman #53 is now broken out as the 3rd telling of the Superman origin! So, in 2006, 68 years after the 1st origin of Superman, and 23 years after the last OSPG I posted (which you mocked for being "decades old", the OSPG is STILL breaking out Origin stories and in greater detail than ever before. I'm doing this to show you that Origin stories were always considered important historically, no matter how people feel about them today. Detective Comics #31 vs #33 Strange Tales: And finally, Marvel Tales (issue #75 is the origin reprint of the origin retelling in ASM #94):

I may not be using the exact, correct numbers to represent each genre because I'm guessing off the top of my head, but the gist of my post still stands. The numbers generally dropped from millions or 100,000's of each coming to 10,000's or even 1000's of each comic across 80 years (with some outliers, which don't count). I made a mistake using the word 'subscription'. I was caught up in typing the reply. I meant publication numbers. Does that make my point more clear to you?

Sorry, gang. You can't rewrite history. I know a lot of people question the things I say but I can back up everything. Every. Single. Thing. I say. Origin stories whether reprinted or not were ALWAYS considered highly collectible until the digital age when covers took over. And the digital age has caused a moving away from CONTENT TO COVERS (merit over appearance) in every field imaginable, from comics, to academics, to...well...literally everything. It is a THE #1 root problem in society, and that's a fact that nobody can deny. All this to say that readers are not the driver in comics anymore.

@Lazyboy But wait, there's more! You say origin retellings are BORING. Well, we all know Spider-man's origin was retold in ASM #94, but if this was boring why did the OSPG break out the Marvel Tales reprint of ASM #94 with a notation of origin retold AND a different price in 1983?

Which age range are you in? Older or younger? I'm over 50 so I remember pouring over the OSPG in the 70's and 80s and trying to find every origin story of every character. I did it because origin retellings were considered important collecting material, whether they were reprints or retellings. No old school collector can deny this. This is why Overstreet broke Origin stories EVEN IF THEY WERE REPRINTS. Because collectors sought them out. They say a picture is worth 1000 words, so here we go (1974 Overstreet) 1974 Superman Origin story broken out in issue #53. Why break it out if it's so boring? You'll notice they broke it out AGAIN in issue #61. Check out Strange Tales #115 (origin of Dr. Strange) and #135 (Origin of Nick Fury). They were broken out even though they were the same price as surrounding issues. How about Detective Comics #31 vs #33? Same thing. Broken out and #33 was more expensive than #31.

Thanks. It's unequivocal. Kids read less than they used to. I can't believe anyone can even question that. Many kids these days don't even know how to type a sentence or speak in a conversation anymore. Why they read less is a different discussion but I've already covered that. If a kid has a choice between reading a book or watching a movie / playing a video game / another form of distraction like Instagram, they're going to choose the distraction over the book the majority of the time. And I've already mentioned declining subscription numbers IN THIS THREAD. Nobody commented on them. Now all of a sudden everyone is interested in them. I mentioned that comics used to be printed by the MILLIONS in the GA. Then they went to being printed by the 100,000's in the SA and by the 10,000's in the BA. The better question is not whether subscription numbers are plummeting or not. Everyone knows they are. The better question might be to ask which subscription numbers are staying higher than their peers within each era? And WHY? I know. Too complicated, but hey, what do I know?

My mom always had great color cameras growing up and my own personal, childhood horror story is her loaning me a prized Nikon camera around 1980 or 1981 that I lost in Niagara Falls, Canada on a school trip. She still reminds me of it over 40 years later. But yeah, I still have the check in my possession. I never cashed it. The fact that someone would question a lifelong collector of 5 decades, like myself, about doing mail order pre internet days is about as ridiculous as it gets on these forums. We all did it.

There are quite a few highest graded SA books that I followed that set GPA highs (some by a significant margin) that are not on your list which just goes to show how subjective this list is.

That does not even come close to making sense. Let's roll back the clock decades ago when you and I were children. I did not have a checkbook. You did? It sounds like you're calling me a liar, which seems to be a common theme these days. This is a refund I received from Simon and Schuster for overpaying when I purchased a box of Fireside books (Origins, Son of Origins, etc) back in 1977. Does this make more sense to you now? M'kay? Thanks.

Fixed that for you.