shadroch

New to me, How was the show, and more importantly, how are you doing?

It depends on the year. I'll buy any Big Diamond Marvel I find, as they were a very small fraction of the print run. In the 80s, Direct copies and newsstand are pretty much interchangeable, except some issues have completely different covers for the two markets. Spider-Man Annual 21 and Man of Steel #1 come to mind, but there are others. By the late 90s, newsstand copies are in the minority and some are scarce. Marvel and Dc did a few books with nine or ten cent cover prices for the Direct market and the newsstand copies were supposed to be regular price but a few of the special prices escaped into the newsstand run. These are scarce. Also, a few companies that were almost exclusively Direct did small newsstand distribution in their home areas. Now did it in Chicago, Comico did it in Pennsylvania, Modern did it in NY. These are very hard to find, but there isn't much demand for them either. However, the spread in price some large dealers ask for the two is insane.

I'd go 6.5

My thoughts, as well

Star Wars was greenlit in 1976, I would imagine. Comic Cons were nowhere near as influential as they are today, and even then Star Trek wasn't that big at them. Can't speak about the rest of the country but in NY, Creation shows were all about comics, they didn't transition into Star Trek until the mid to late 1980s. Phil Seulings shows were almost all comics and pulps. No big Star Trek presence. I do remember a few kooks entering the costume Parade as Klingons but they looked more like elves, with their pointy ears.

So maybe you should be comparing it to Law and Order instead of Star Wars. Even as a television franchise, how many top ten ratings does it have? How many Emmys? It's a middle of the road television franchise that slogs along due to there being 300 channels. Enterprise couldn't even survive in that shallow pool. Don't get me wrong, I like most Star Trek series and enjoyed some of the movies, but linking the two makes as much sense as linking Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings simply because they both have wizards.

Totals $875,000,000 $1,400,952,879 $2,266,473,168 Averages $67,307,692 $30,645,305 $107,765,606 $174,344,090 Thirteen movies, $875 million to make, with domestic returns of 1.4 billion. Rule of thumb for a success is double costs in domestic revenue. Out of thirteen movies, a few have been box office success, a few have been flops but most are nothing special. Any Academy Awards in the bunch? Any Nominations? Star Wars started earlier, but did 1.8 billion in only six movies.

Everyone collects differently. No one way is 100% correct, and very few are 100% wrong. Enjoy, I just didn't understand the purpose of the box of thirty. Never heard of the Box of Twenty concept. Best of luck whatever you choose.

What is the purpose of the box? Is it to be put away and never opened until its time to finance your great grandchildrens college or is just for fun?

It bugs me when people lump Star Wars and Star Trek together. One was an overnight success that is wildly popular with the public. The other is a failed tv show, that evolved into a mediocre movie franchise. One has produced multiple hit comics, Star Trek comics have never been a hit.

Fantastic. Much as I'd love one, I would never ever be able to do that. Great workshop, by the way.

7:30 to 11? Bankers hours.

Ditto.

After you have done some more research, take some of the better books and post pictures of them in the grading forum. Do not assume because they have been in plastic they are near mint. did they have backing boards? Depending on the type of bag they are in, the bags may actually have cause damage to the books. Bags sold in comic shops in the early 80s were often the type meant only for short term storage and eventually leaked chemicals into the books. It's hard for a beginner to grade accurately. A book you describe as Near Mint( 9.4) might sell for $25 in Very Fine (8.5) or $300 in 9.6 Don't go by any grades your father wrote on the books as grading standards are much tighter than they were thirty years ago. I had a shop when many of those books came out. As an example, I had 5 Spider-Man 252s that I had graded as NM. When I submitted the best three, one came back 9.4, one 9.2 and one 8.5. I'd suggest you call several dealers, or put the full list here. Trying to sell individual books is a pain and very time consuming. Selling them as a collection will net you less money than individual sales but save you a lot of time and trouble. Most books from the era are pretty common and don't sell for much. A great source is to look at the sold listings on ebay, and to go to mycomicshop.com and check out both their books for sale section to see what they are selling a book for and their buying section to see if they are buying the book and what they pay. They, and some other dealers offer a trouble free consignment service where you send them the books, they decide which books are worth getting graded, or even pressed , grade the others and work with you to set prices on the books. They then offer them on the sites, list them on ebay, do all the shipping and take care of all the fees. All for a very modest percentage of the final sale price. I use MCS all the time and find them great to deal with. However, they may not take many of your books as they are pretty common.

Buy more books. The more books you buy, the more shipping material you have to repurpose. Surely your spouse can't gripe about you buying more shipping supplies.

I've never seen a loyalty club like this, and while I had planned to use it in my own store if and when I ever got around to opening what would have been my fourth store, allow me to share it here.. People who join your loyalty club get no discounts on new books. Period. None. They pay full price. This is VERY important to your cash flow. To succeed, you need steady cash flow and you need to maximize it however possible. Discounting new books is suicidal until you have your ordering down to a science. What the people get instead is a credit towards a select group of back issues and trade paperbacks. Spend $40 on 15 new books, get 15 back issues free, or $40 credit towards older trades. You can make it half credit, or full . your choice. For this to work, you have to have a good supply of fresh back issues, but as you can replace them at a quarter a pop and hopefully have thousands to begin with, it works well in that you are getting full price for the new books and helping your customers expand their reading and hopefully they find stuff they like and come back and buy more back issues or trades from that run.

Sounds like the book has a hidden defect. Many dealers seem to only grade covers.

I'd go with Genesis, rather than Genesis Comics. Personal preference.

I read somewhere that Marvel published more Kirby books per month after he left ( with no compensation to him) than they ever did while he was with them. You'd think after going bankrupt and destroying the market once, they might have learned their lesson, but that's not to be.

I'd like to sell sales figures to show Watchmen has sold even a million copies, let alone millions. Unless you want to argue each monthly copy should count . In which case, Youngblood has also sold millions of copies. While a critical success, it was by no means a sales sensation when it came out. In my shop, I'd say less than half the people that bought the first issue stuck around for the twelfth one. Even TPB sales weren't that great for the first year or two. While it is a perennial best seller, it doesn't sell millions of copies.

Image beat Marvel in sales in the first year they existed. Marvel was on its way to being the third ranked company until Pearlman blew up the market.

They created a very successful model based on the then current market. Then Pearlman came along and destroyed the industry. Pearlman self distributed and flooded the market. Marvel put out hundreds of new issues a month and basically said either you order all our titles or you order none of them. Between the increased cost of shipping and having to buy so many extra Marvel titles, many shops had to cut down on their other stuff. Then as Distributor after Distributor went belly up after losing the ability to distribute Marvels, they went out of business owing companies like Valiant and Image hundreds of thousands. Image was creator owned and managed to survive. Valiant was run by investors who didn't know anything except that they weren't getting the returns they were promised and they bailed.

Before comic shops, other genres flourished. If you look at a DC comic from 1974, you'll see superhero comics were a minority of their offerings. They had successful War and Horror lines, and perhaps a not so successful Sci-Fi, Strange line. Detective Comics went bimonthly for a while and the JLA was published 8 times a year. For whatever reason, the Direct Market never catered to anything other than Super Heroes ,with very few exceptions.

Another fine job by our boys in Sarasota.

I would not say the industry was healthy in 1960. Far from it. Marvel couldn't even find a distributor and had to piggy back off of DC's distribution center. It took years for Marvel to surpass DC in sales. I'd argue that Image, and even Valiant was just as much a game changer when they arrived than Marvel was in 1960/61. Who knows what might have happened if Marvel( and when I say Marvel I mean Ron Pearlman) hadn't changed the rules mid game. The industry had a half dozen distributors and thousands of shops. When Marvels experiment with self distribution ended in bankruptcy, the market got stuck with one distributor and two thirds of the shops gone, taking many smaller companies with it. Joe Lisner showed that one can self publish and make a ton of money. Dave Sim and the Pini's preceded him, but they never reached the heights he did with the early Dawns. With some many people self publishing, the chances of an entire universe springing up are scarce. Kurt Busieks Astro City is an exception but its on a minute scale.