RockMyAmadeus

My mom maintains a newspaper subscription to this day. When I'm at her house, I read the funnies. Every chance I get, I read them. I seek them out when I'm there. I do not own a single example of those funnies, and once I've read them, into the recycling bin they go. That makes me an avid reader...and definitely not a collector.

If everyone is a comic collector, then no one is a comic collector.

Don't hate the playa....

So, it's Ross swiping Kirby, eh...? No wonder there aren't the obvious Ross markers, except perhaps in Johnny's face. Looks like Ross phoned this one in.

72 is the best one. Hulk can beat Thor.

And then, since it's anecdotal, toss that number out completely as a realistic estimate.

I went to the flea market, but all they had were ticks, so I came home.

No. Nobody knows the print runs for virtually anything, because Marvel, DC, and other publishers do not reveal this information. The closest you're going to get is a store or other vendor exclusive, and they reveal that information. Until and unless publishers decide to release this information, it's all just guess work, and you shouldn't believe anyone saying "the print run was thus and such", because they don't know, either.

It does! That has a nice classic look to it!

I grade this friggin' sexy. 10 cent DC war FTW!

I'm excited for this new opportunity at finer Australian universities.

Is Jennifer transitioning F2M....?

I wish #50 was the cover to #48. I understand why it's not. Really. But #50 is easily the greatest SS cover of the 60s. Sigh.

For me...your mileage may vary. If you had a book at $369, and GPA was around that, I would think $340 was a reasonable offer. Sometimes, you get crickets. It hasn't happened a lot, but there have been a couple of times where I didn't take an offer I thought was a little low...and it ended up being a reallly good offer in the end, because the book tanked. I'm looking at you, NYX #4 in 9.8!

Really? Interesting, I had no idea that I needed to up my BIN part, thanks. See I feel bad because I had a listing at $369 and was offered $315, which was automatically rejected due to my listing there have been other threads RMA that you said that it was possible to reach out to rejected bid's and make an offer. I told them I'd go as low as $340, and I heard crickets.... I don't quite get what you're saying here....? I was responding to Mad Genius, if that helps clarify.

I agree with you. It's totally token, and not at all a serious negotiation counter. It's a subtle "eff you." If you'd offered 10% off my books, I would have accepted in a heartbeat.

Finding a 9.8 set of all 14 printings has been a back burner goal for a long time. I *think* I have all 14...maybe missing the 12th...but man, are those later printings tough to even find, let alone in 9.8 potential. And I can forget a Bolland 9.8 SS set.

That sound you heard was the collective eyes rolling out of everyone's heads and landing on the floor.

This is the music I generally hear when I open up a box from CGC:

WTF...? Was this guy in a sultry jazz club while he opened up that box....? "Set to Jimmy Forrest's "Night Train", this box will keep you calm, cool, and collectified. So all you cats and dolls out there sit back, take a swig, and enjoy the show!"

I had an entire thread about sellers listing for...shall we say...."much more than FMV" prices, who refused to negotiate, wondering if there could be a list maintained of the worst offenders, like the infamous Blackstar. After all, people complain about Chuck's prices on a regular basis. It didn't end well. "How DARE you!! People can ask whatever they want, and who are YOU to try and pressure them down?" I thought that was called "the work of the free market", but what do I know...?

Nice! I never see books like that with moderns out here... Man, I would have loved to be able to buy a book called "This Magazine Is Haunted!" when it came out.

It's important to define what a collector is. A collector is someone who has an interest in the material he/she is collecting, a focus for maintaining and preserving its condition, and a desire to have a "complete" set, tracking down what came before them, and buying that which comes out, however they define the parameters of their set. A collector of Spiderman, for example, wouldn't be content to only have a few random issues; they'd be putting effort towards getting all of them, even if it's a collection of, say, #100 to #200. And this is true even of TYPE collectors; in that case, they wish to own an example (or several examples) of each TYPE of comic; in that case, the completeness comes when they've obtained at least one issue of every "Batman title" for instance. The "gotta catch 'em all" mentality is chiefly what separates collectors from, say, hoarders who just like to acquire, irrespective of what and how, or speculators who only have interest in what can make them the most money. It's important to stress that more readers and more copies sold does not necessarily translate to more collectors. Edgar Church was a comic book collector, even if only incidentally. He went to some effort to keep and preserve his books, and even went to the trouble of tracking down issues he'd missed. He may not have had a great interest in the characters themselves, but he certainly was interested in maintaining what he had, and making sure he had everything he wanted...and he preserved that collection until he was at or near death. Stan Lee, on the other hand, is a great example of someone who was not a collector, even though he had comics in his possession. He showed little interest in the preservation of the books he owned, and only owned them as examples of his work. He had zero interest in obtaining any copies he missed or didn't keep for some reason, and when he had the opportunity to get rid of the vast majority of it, because someone showed interest in it, he did.

As noted before, "mass speculation" doesn't mean there was a larger collector base. There are people buying comics today who have zero interest in the artform, and see it merely as a vehicle for making money. No one would define these people as "collectors." That was certainly true then, too. How many people who go to SDCC, for example, are comic book collectors...? 10%? 5%? 1%? The vast majority of the attendees of SDCC and NYCC and the like aren't comic book collectors, and if they own comics, it's incidentally. They're pop culture fans who have zero interest in buying and maintaining a collection. As well, what does "mass speculation" mean? Did the entire print run sell out? 50% of it? (50% would have been a very healthy number.) Is a speculator a collector just because they own comics? What was the ratio of buyers to readers to collectors? How many people bought multiple copies, and how many copies did they buy? These are questions with answers that are virtually unknowable, but we do know that those ratios existed. Lots of people watched Batman...and that certainly translated into more sales of the comic....until the show was cancelled. In an era where Gunsmoke ran for 20 years, and Andy Griffith and Van Dyke ran for nearly 8 and 5 years respectively, Batman lasted a little over two years. Did the Batman show influence people to become comic collectors? Not to any great extent, no. Sales on the book returned to pre-show numbers after it was over.

Well.... via Imgflip Meme Generator