VintageComics

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!

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 think I was spending too much time on Instagram watching people overpaying for almost everything and then getting congratulated by everyone on the "deal" they just got. That was just ridiculous. I had some younger dealers calling me up and literally wanting to buy 9.8 bronze at full GPA to resell, and I couldn't get rid of it fast enough. I gotcha. I think this is a good idea. I'm not going to hold you to it, but how many comics do you think would need to be included in such an index? How many per genre, or per age? I don't know. That would be a great crowdsource thread and an even better discussion.

How do I account for why a certain individual decides to do something? The reasons are legion, but it comes down to the fact that they were willing to pay that much for it. The more pertinent question is what the MAJORITY of people are willing to pay for it. Values don't go up or down in a vertical line. What I meant was, how do we grab enough segments of the market to make the analysis reasonably representative of the market. I wasn't on the boards much in 2021, but I can tell you that as dealers we were talking about how unrealistic everything was. What impact does the sale of a Ferrari have on the sale of a Ford Focus? To me, this portion of the comic market is inconsequential to the broader market due to the limited supply, sales, and pool of individuals who are willing to spend the money. If Bezos and Musk get in a bidding war over that 9.8 Amazing Spider-Man #1 and it sells for a billion dollars, I don't think people will be able to sell their 2.0s for $200 million. Though I'm sure some people on eBay will try. I was speaking of personal interest for myself. We had chatted about how I saw some sales in the last Clink action that went well over GPA and was still following that line of thought. But, if Ferrari sales are spiking, you know the wealthy are spending and if Ferrari sales are dropping, you know they're not spending, so that is still useful information in the grand scheme of a discussion on economics. Anyway, I personally was discussing how to build a spreadsheet with a broad cross section of data, with samples from various areas of the market but it was all theoretical.

6'3" is only 5'11" in 1961 inches. Meh. It's all an illusion in Hollywood. MOST actors are MUCH shorter than you think they are in real life because shorter people cast well in a square screen. Some actors are much taller but they need to be made to look shorter for film to match the rest of the cast. How about Gimli and the dwarves in Lord of the Rings (or even the hobbits)? They were all full grown men. Tom Cruise? short. It's all camera tricks and real life height is totally irrelevant for Hollywood movie magic.

I worked in the automotive industry for 13 or 14 years or so, and during that time my wages climbed. I went from $18 an hour bit at one point toward the end I was making a solid 6 figures for a few years. The, the industry felt they needed to cut costs, so guess what they cut? Our wages. No matter how much we screamed and yelled, and it was genuinely unfair, there was nothing we could do. For the next 8 or so years, we basically worked much harder for the same pay and eventually I left the industry entirely because I didn't want to argue with a big corporation for a fair wage. It sucks, but thankfully in the West here, there are options and sometimes it's better to move from a position of weakness while you can before you get pushed out. This is one of the reasons it's important to live within your means, because sometimes you don't know what tomorrow brings and your 'cushion' can quickly disappear.

And is that a new trend (of having so many flops?) I saw Irishmen and it was not great. It was long and slow and frankly, the actors didn't look great. Not sure if it was poor makeup, or what but to me it almost looked like it had the quality of sub-par a 1950's movie. Not the type of stuff Scorsese is known for. Sony seems to be onto something with Spider-Man and they could quite literally build an entire MCU type universe around this one character, if done well.

Bosco, because there is so much talk about Disney's movie profitability, do you have any statistics that compare genre to genre? Like, let's say in 2023, are there movies that are outperforming Disney in the comic book / action hero / superhero genre? I'd be interested in profitability and also gross revenue. For example, we talked about Blumhouse movies which generate less overall revenue but are highly profitable but those horror movies are an entirely different genre. Are ALL movies flopping this badly? Are some movies or genres more profitable than others? I realize this is an apples, oranges and pomegranates question but I'm trying to figure out if there are other comps to the Marvels flop that can help pinpoint whether it's comic book movie fatigue or is it an industry wide problem that people are spending less in theaters in general?

The evidence about "privilege" is manufactured. Men are less agreeable psychologically. Women are MORE agreeable psychologically. This is why many men succeed where women don't. They push harder and sacrifice their relationships where women acquiesce more and won't sacrifice relationships to succeed as readily. This is ALSO why WOMEN succeed where men don't. This leads women to dominate in certain industries and men to dominate in other industries. For example, there is FEMALE PRIVILEGE in the caregiving industry, because women are more conscientious. Should we try to force men into there, or should women dominate that industry? Forcing men in would in my opinion allow less qualified people into that industry. This is why men succeed in industries where sacrificing their families is necessary. The majority of people who die young, get addicted, turn to crime, end up in jail or die from crime are all men. Wait, where's the privilege? Do you REALLY want EVERYTHING to be equal? Your logic is not sound.

This is utterly ridiculous, political baiting and you did it (unsuccessfully) in the Mary Shelley Frankenstein discussion as well. As someone with many successful daughters and female ex's and friends, you're doing yourself a disservice by baiting people this way constantly.

Dude, you've been following me around and talking about me for weeks whenever I post something you don't want to read. There were like 6 different people involved in the conversation, it diverged slightly, as ALL conversations do and now it's over. What is wrong with people these days when a few people can't have a polite conversation without everyone always trying to make things worse. Relax and put me on ignore.