paqart

Do you have any idea the effort it takes to go rooting through piles of papers from almost thirty years ago just to find something that will convince a total stranger what a normal page rate was back in 1994? Do you realize how many other ways there are to get similar data? As for other rates, no, there is no documentation of that because the information was all conveyed verbally. That happens sometimes, particularly before the Internet age. True, the most recent salary data was given to me last week by someone at NYCC but I doubt he'd appreciate my mentioning his name here in connection with it.

Here's another, similar story. When I was around twelve myself (in 1977), a kid broke into my bedroom and stole some comics. He was caught but not before he'd sold most of them. Thanks to my carefully kept inventory, his parent's insurance company paid me around $400 as compensation for the missing comics. I took that money and hopped on a bus to Palo Alto to a store called (I think) Comics and Comix. Inside, they had a copy of Frazetta's first comic, Thun'Da #1. I bought it for $375. Not a very good buy in retrospect but I was very proud of it at the time. If I recall, the condition wasn't great, VF at best, more likely F.

My mother forced me to sell my collection, all 25 boxes of it, in 1979. I sold them to a dealer in Chico, CA. He had a coin, stamp, and comic shop.

Did I make any claim on this? I sure don't remember doing so. I know quite a lot of things on a lot of subjects thanks to an interesting career that has spanned over 30 years. There are also a lot of things I don't know. One thing that is totally new to me is every single thing that has happened in comics since around 1996. That said, my impression is that I am allowed to read about comics now that my interest is rekindled, and to perform some analyses based on the few data points I've been able to find, without juvenile barbs such as this from you. I am even allowed to talk to my friends in the comic book industry from time to time, and to listen to their answers to questions, some of which I've shared here. As an ambassador of this hobby, I can't recommend the job you are doing.

Funny you should mention that. I spotted this also, as Seuling was a big topic of conversation at the store I worked at in 1977. The reason? The direct market he'd created, and with it, the 60% discount we got at the store and all the lovely back issues we didn't have to return. The reason I don't care is that this has no meaningful impact on the conclusion that market availability of newsstand editions decreases over time, until the point they are next to impossible to find.

It therefore applies to all comics. You were making an argument that a title wouldn't be continued if it was unprofitable. Mark says that Marvel and DC did that frequently. So that would make you wrong if Mark is right, and it would be tough to find someone more knowledgeable about these things than Mark. As for the newsstand/direct split and the idea that they would allow a title in general to be unprofitable but not the newsstand variant of the same title, I don't follow that logic.

I did work in a comic store named Comics and Fantasies starting in around 1977, when I was twelve. I was hired so that I would stop taking business from the guy who hired me. At the time, local shops would hire me to grade collections they were thinking of buying, such as when Recycle Books brought me in to grade and price out a full collection of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. Back then, I spent a lot of my time memorizing the price guide, which I did every year. I was a kid but had an unusually good memory and ability to grade and value comics.

That is pretty much what I wrote.

The ratio is different for every book. Also keep in mind that sample size has a lot to do with how well it generalizes to the population of comics printed in any given print run. The higher the sample, the more reliable the number. That said, by the time you hit 2010, there are a lot of comics that get rounded down to 100:1. Here are some random examples: ASM #252 (1984), 385 auctioned, app 250,000 print run, that means that the sample size is good for 95% confidence, plus or minus 5%, meaning that the rarity index for this issue is reliably expected to fall between 90%-100% accurate. The rarity index is .98, meaning the newsstand version is slightly more common than the direct version but because it falls within the margin of error, they are statistically identical with this sample size. A larger sample size would be needed to refine the figure. On this basis, I wouldn't buy a newsstand copy of ASM 252 on the basis of presumed rarity. ASM #300 (1988), 290 auctioned, app 325,000 print run, sample size good for 95% confidence with 6 point margin of error. Not as good a sample as ASM 252 but good enough to determine whether the comic is rare enough to justify a multiplier. For this issue, the rarity index is 5.47, thanks to a very low number of newsstand editions (n=13 above 9.0, n=30 below 9.2, total n=43). This indicates that direct editions of ASM 300 are five times as common as newsstand editions regardless of condition. If you are only looking for 9.2 and up, the rarity index goes up to 13.00. On that basis, it is worth a premium for rarity. How much of a premium is the question. If you charged 5x the going rate for this comic in low grades or 13x for high grades, it would be prohibitively expensive to most collectors. ASM #700 (2013), 146 offered on ebay, 8 of which are newsstand copies, app 262,626 print run (based on adding up Diamond sales for the four months sales are recorded for this issue), sample size for this has a 7 point margin of error, showing that less data degrades the results. Still, 7 points is better than none.Rarity index for this comic is 18.25, or 18.25 direct copies for every newsstand copy offered. That is a very high rarity, easily justifying a rarity premium. It is a highly collectible title, character, issue number, story, has a good cover, good interior art by popular artists, and is a "00" milestone issue, all of which contribute to making this what should be a sought after and valuable issue. Personally, I'd rather buy these than ASM 300 because the upside is better and the cost at the moment is substantially lower. I can get ten or more of these for what a single copy of ASM 300 would cost.

Every dealer I asked for a discount from, gave it to me with no haggling. One guy, the comics added up to $116. He said I could have them for $110. I told him there were comics I wasn't even sure I wanted but threw them in so that I would be comfortable paying $100. He took the c-note.

I do, but that isn't the kind of thing I'm willing to post. I also think it is an audacious request on your part. At a certain point your distrust makes no sense and harms your own knowledge. For instance, I know the numbers are accurate because I have direct access. I also know that you don't trust them. That means I have more information than you and I know it for a fact. This makes me suspicious of your claims about Nobel publishing inaccurate information. Speaking of which, what information exactly is inaccurate? From what I saw, he references ComiChron for sales figures and describes how he uses those numbers. Unless he has falsified the ComiChron numbers or used some other method to arrive at his estimates, then he hasn't misrepresented anything. I certainly haven't seen any reason to doubt that he is borrowing ComiChron numbers accurately because what he has written falls within the range of what I've seen on ComiChron. The same is true of his estimates, which he describes as estimates, and which he provides a basis. If the estimate is wrong, that isn't due to any dishonesty in the way the numbers are presented but because either ComiChron's data is faulty or missing data would fill in the picture in such a way that Nobel's numbers could be shown to be wrong. On that subject, I assume they are all wrong because they are estimates. However, they are a lot closer than not having an estimate at all, or an estimate that isn't based on anything. Where are the more accurate numbers you are comparing his numbers to? I would be curious to see them.

What, you want me to pull out my pay stubs from 1994? Don't be ridiculous. Also, it isn't as if I tape record my conversations with friends. That would be as silly as this request of yours. Besides, why do you want the information? What good would it do you? You can take my word for it or not. If not, it's no skin off my nose but if the information is valuable to you, it might be some skin off yours.

The conclusion I've drawn from what I've read there and what I've seen "in the wild" is that newsstand editions, particularly those printed after about 2005, are hard to find. I define "hard to find" as: I haven't found any copies at all that are for sale for some of these comics, many of them actually. I don't see that as an erroneous conclusion after I have gone through literally every long and short box at NYCC, every box at every LCS I know of, garage sales, flea markets, and checking auctions every day. This isn't a fake phenomenon. Nobel may be wrong about some of the details but the thrust of his argument is correct: newsstand comics are hard to find, even rare in the context of the number of collectors there are for high profile titles. My biggest quibble with his data is that I have found newsstand editions from the eighties that are outnumbered by a factor anywhere from 4x to 80x by direct titles, despite supposedly having higher or near equal print runs. As a collector, that matters to me because it means it is more difficult to find those issues. Nobel's estimates, which appear to be good faith praiseworthy efforts btw, are based more on print run estimates than survivability, though he is aware of that factor. He, like you, me, and everyone else, is working with partial data. It is all there is, so if any decisions are made, that is what they have to be based on even if the data is imperfect. Sometimes, when the bomb is about to explode, you run, without worrying first if the light is green. From what I have seen, in combination with what training I've had in statistics, there is plenty of information available to establish that newsstand editions can be much rarer than direct counterparts, and to estimate what that rarity is. When you have 115 copies of a comic auctioned and none are newsstand comics, you cannot extrapolate that none of the comics in the print run are newsstand comics. However, if you have industry estimates of 2%-1% newsstand comics for any given print run for the period, one can say that 115 auctioned direct and zero auctioned newsstand supports both of those numbers. When you have dozens of examples like that, the sample size is large enough to describe the population of comics in question. For instance, if you look up ten ASM issues in the 600-700 issue range, there are more than ten that will return results that support a 1-2% newsstand figure that have sold more than 100 times. That gives you a sample size of 1000+ to cover 2,000,000 comics, if you assume each of those copies of ASM had 200,000 copies printed. To determine whether those 1000 samples accurately represent the target population of 2m comics at a 99% confidence level with a confidence interval of 4 (meaning the true number will lie between 95%-100%), you would need 1040 samples, which is about what can be found by spending a few hours looking up auctions for those comics. These aren't seat of the pants estimates. They are statistically valid at levels higher than what is needed for pharmaceutical companies to release potentially dangerous drugs on the market.

Not sure what you mean by that or what would make you say it in the first place. A shill for what? Rarity of newsstand comics? I happen to think they are interesting, searched the term, found an interesting discussion on the topic here, and have contributed. How is that any different from what others have written in the newsstand threads?

I mean the $27,000 cover price at the retailer. I wasn't sure what the discount was or I might have used a different number but thought I remembered the direct discount as 60% and newsstand at 40% from when I worked at a comic shop in the 70's. Wasn't sure if those discounts stayed the same over the years or if they were adjusted later. As for costs, I know what the page rates were because I know what I was paid and what many of my friends in industry were paid. I also know what I paid comic book artists when I became an art director (though not in the comic book industry) and what friends in the industry with more experience than me told me about rates. A typical low end comic costs about $500/page though it can be as low as $300/pg for absolute beginners. Three hundred a page breaks down as approximately $100/pg for pencils, $75/pg inks, $50/pg for the -script, and $75/pg for letters and coloring. Five hundred a page is around $175/pg for pencils, $125/inks, $100/pg for the -script, and then the same breakdown for color and lettering. The rates vary considerably based on who you are talking about, their negotiating skills, and which title they are on. The $500/pg creators are names you would be familiar with, the $300/pg guys are either people who never made it in the industry and switched to something else, or those who went on to do very well later in their careers, like Romita jr and McFarlane. High end page rates vary too much to estimate, but I recall reading somewhere that Byrne was at one time paid $450/pg, then $750/pg plus royalties. At Mad, page rates are ridiculously high, or were. At Mad, some artists got as much as $5k/ pg (Mort Drucker, Jack Davis) and others as low as $3k/page (this confirmed by one such artist just last week.)

According to industry veteran Mark Evanier, who said this to me on multiple occasions in private conversations, many Marvel and DC titles were unprofitable but they kept them running because they were hoping for a movie or TV deal. The way he told it, apart from movies and TV, the primary profit center was royalties on toys and other merchandise, not the comics themselves. According to him, the comics were essentially functioning as advertisements for other products. The few data points I have on newsstand rarity come from a combination of Comichron sales estimates and a number of articles I've read on https://rarecomics.wordpress.com/, most of which are written by Benjamin Nobel, but some aren't. Again, the bottom line is that the newsstand issues are definitely hard to find for collectors. That is more important than any of the other things described as potential reasons why they are hard to find. As a collector, if I want a high grade copy os ASM 694, it will be hard to find one for sale, let alone at a price that I am comfortable with. That is the bottom line, and that is well-known to any collector who has tried to fill newsstand runs of many modern titles. When every comic book store and online auction fails to produce even a single low-grade example of the comic you are looking for, it is "rare" in the only sense that matters to you, the comic simply cannot be had, regardless of price.

Your sarcasm is showing. Never mind, it hardly matters one way or another.

I said 9.8 to be conservative. Frankly, if you'd seen them, you might have been thinking they were a pair of 10's. I graded comics for a number of stores in the San Jose area at the time, when they had big collections come in, so I knew my way around grading comics. I remember at the time comparing them to straight out of the box John Byrne X-Men but the FF 5 and ASM 6 were clearly better. When I mentioned this to my boss at the time, Roger Grant-Ribal of Comics and Fantasies in San Jose, he didn't believe me until I brought the comics to the store from home. He believed me after that. According to him, "Pristine Mint".

First off, just so you know, I don't have a horse in this race and don't care who is right or wrong about any given detail, including myself. I did not intend to write something that was so exciting and alarming, so please keep that in mind if you choose to respond to this. I am just as interested in discovering the correct information as you seem to be. At the moment, I am working with the information I have, and that is all. If it is flawed, I hope that comes out. If not, it would be great if there were alternate sources to support it. That said, you are still making logical arguments. They make sense to me but they disagree with what others have said actually happened. Doesn't mean you are wrong but there is a discrepancy to be accounted for. I've seen more than one company take a loss for no good reason, so I am disinclined to assume competence as the basis for arguing that Marvel and DC couldn't have had extremely low newsstand print runs. I've seen it argued, for instance, that the publishers continued newsstand distribution in some cases just to time out existing contracts. If that is what they were doing, they would have no incentive to try and sell more product to those customers. I have also read that some newsstand dealers were deliberately shorted some months to drive customers to comic shops instead. When talking about best selling superhero comics in the fifties, I lumped in superheroes from the forties. I was thinking of Captain Marvel Adventures, which did sell in the multiple millions per month. I have heard of some single issue Disneys that sold over ten million units btw, so not unheard of but not a regular occurrence either, a bit like the aberrant sales of the early nineties, late eighties, around the time Image was founded. Those multi-million unit sales disappeared pretty fast and came out of nowhere but they did happen. Speaking of costs and salaries, here is a logical argument for you: A typical comic book will cost a publisher a minimum of $10,000 in creative fees. That is for an under-performing artist, writer, letterer, and colorist. Add in administration on the issue, and you could be looking at $12.5k/issue. For top creative teams, you might be looking at closer to $30k/issue just to get it made. On the low end, that means a comic has to make about $27k in sales to break even. On the high end, more like $75k. For the time period we're talking about (2000-2013), that translates to sales of between 10,000-25,000 units. Despite this, there are dozens of comics that fall below the low number in this range every month. And yet, the titles continued to be made. Clearly, profitability isn't the only concern. An example is my own comic, Harsh Realm, published by Harris Comics. I have no idea what the sales were but I never received a royalty, so they were below the threshold where royalties would be paid. After the mini-series concluded in 1994, it pretty much disappeared until 1999, when Fox television decided to make a TV show based on it with uber-producer Chris Carter (X-Files). Then, when writer James Hudnall and I filed a lawsuit against Harris, Fox, and Carter for violating our contract to make the deal for the TV series, Harris noticed that, although they never had the rights to the series, if they didn't quickly publish a graphic novel compilation within a few months, they would lose the right to represent James and I in any negotiations. To prevent that, they published a graphic novel but with the minimum print run necessary to fulfill the contractual obligation needed to prevent full reversion of rights. They did not publish the graphic novel to make money but but to retain rights.

The last time I got a deal at a convention was BayCon, held in San Francisco in 1976. I got what would be graded today as a pair of 9.8's: FF#5 and ASM#6. The pair were $175.

I wanted to get a Wolverine v2 #67 but didn't see a single copy, though it is modern. I also wanted a few of the later ASM issues in newsstand editions but didn't see most of them in any version, let alone newsstand. I did get a newsstand copy of #500, but that was the only comic on my list that I actually found, out of about thirty comics and in two days of looking. I bought maybe 50 comics but 49 of them were bought to trade with other people, not for my collection.

When I was at NYCC last week I negotiated a discount on almost all of my purchases. There were a couple of occasions however, where I didn't ask because the prices were so clearly rock bottom that it would have been pointless.

It’s easier to send you to my website, www.paqart.com . As you’ll see, I worked as an editorial artist making illustrations for magazines and books, then a comic book artist at Marvel and DC. My claim to fame in comics is Harsh Realm, which became a TV series. Then I worked in video games as a 3D artist, in film (on Space Jam, Spider-man, Daredevil, and others) as a CG artist, then an art director in video games, a fine artist, started a school in the Netherlands for game developers, wrote a bunch of non-fiction books, some scientific journal articles, got my PhD at King’s College, London, and now do commercial photography. I still miss comics. It is a great medium from an artistic perspective but doesn’t do a very good job of paying the bills. For example, it is an unusually successful comic book artist that makes more than $50k/year, but that is the starting salary for most CG artists. Also, there are only a few hundred regularly employed comic book artists in the country, but tens of thousands of CG artists. Also, there are fun perks to working outside of comics, one of which is that you can hire comic book artists to do production design. In that way, I’ve hired Kyle Baker, Mike Royer, Dan Spiegle, Bernie Wrightson, and a couple of others. A note on my website: I make no claim to having been a great comic book artist when I was working in that industry. At best I was a beginner with some potential. I think I would be good at it now but am out of the industry at this point. To see why I say this, take a look at my storyboards page.

Me too. I just bought The ASM giant-size run from 1 (Dracula guest star) to 4 (Punisher guest star). Love the group. Also, hate to say this, but I drew a story for a Daredevil annual, because I was new to the business as an artist. It was fun to draw Daredevil but as a collector I wouldn’t be interested in the issue.

Hmm...regardless, what matters to collectors is the supply available to them, not the hypothetical number of copies that exist. If they aren’t in the collector’s market, they may as well not be there at all. For example, there are Disney’s and superhero comics from the 1950’s that sold in the 5-10 million copies a month range, yet the comics are hard to find now. the industry insider is not Chuck Rozakis btw. I wouldn’t even describe Rosakis that way because he is a dealer not someone who ever worked for a publisher. The guy I’m thinking of worked for Marvel. I’d have to look up his name to remember it but he would have had knowledge of print runs as part of his job. One thing about logical arguments that I don’t like is that they are often wrong. Sometimes things don’t make sense but they happen anyway. If a Marvel VP of marketing says it was 1%, and Jim Shooter says it was 2%, I’ll believe the number is closer to either of those two numbers than the larger numbers you mention, which, by the way, appear to be based on logical assumptions, not any kind of estimate from someone with knowledge of actual print runs. again, the number printed is less meaningful than the number available for purchase, but the number printed does give an idea of the maximum that could be available. I agree that 40 copies a state seems ridiculous, but it may be that by the time Marvel was at the lowest numbers for newsstand distribution they were only selling to a few stores around the Country — exactly as they say they were doing. Maybe those stores were in only ten or twenty states. Also keep in mind that although their total order may have been a few hundred comics per month, they would be divided by a number of titles. When I worked at a comic book store in the seventies, there were some titles we didn’t order at all, and others that we ordered only a few copies of. Given the number of titles Marvel was pumping out around 2013, it wouldn’t surprise me if Barnes and Noble and Waldenbooks ordered only a few copies of each title, resulting in a total order of maybe one or two boxes of comics.