Hepcat

That's what I say. Sometimes they go up; sometimes they go down. Live with it. You can still enjoy what you have (until of course the government takes it from you).

Wow! Showcase 17 for $0.25. The major problem I had collecting up until around 2000 was the difficulty in finding Silver Age DC or Archie and Charlton superheroes. I'd see the prices in Overstreet for "mint" copies but that's all I'd ever see. No actual copies in comic shops or shows. All I could quickly see at the first comic con I attended which was held at the University of Western Ontario was Marvels and "new stuff" from about 1969 onward. When I hesitantly approached a dealer (from Rochester?), before I even had a chance to ask him anything he started giving me the hard sell on his subscription service for new comics. By paying him a premium per comic I'd get them all without being at the mercy of local newsstands! Oh wow. I decided the con wasn't for me and left. I'd restarted acquiring comics at the time but that experience had me putting my comic collecting activities on the back burner for another half dozen years.

Somehow I don't remember posters begging for "stability" or an end to wild "fluctuations" when prices were soaring. Funny that. (Sort of like the SEC. They never investigate when prices for a security are soaring; only when they've fallen through the floor.)

Do you really also have sympathy for people who bet on the craps table in the casino and lose? Or those who buy penny stocks and take a real bad haircut? Sometimes you win (but hardly ever at those games); sometimes you lose. C'est la vie. When investors/speculators treat comics as a trading vehicle, how is that any different? And I understand that not everyone who just started collecting is some sort of dirty flipper. But do newbies to actual collecting start out by buying a slabbed copy of Hulk 181 whose "value" they then track on a weekly basis? That's not the behaviour of the typical collector. And the old time collectors who finally completed their runs in 2021 by scoring a copy of the elusive Patsy and Hedy 2 or Homer the Happy Ghost 4 aren't the ones kvetching about prices dropping. They're just happy to have completed their quest (and probably moving on to the next one).

First Count Dragula though not yet named: Ad the first appearance of Temple McFlathead also as yet unnamed:

My Green Lantern covers co-featuring Alan Scott of Earth-2:

Here are three more doggie covers from the Playful Little Audrey title:

A seldom seen Gold Key:

An underwater variant of quicksand:

Al Capp's big winner! I was somehow aware of Li'l Abner as a kid but I saw the newspaper strip only very occasionally on family trips to Detroit where my uncle and aunt lived.

Light Lass!

Yes, the Monkees were a band made for TV by the producers of the show.

Those loveable rapscallions Heckle and Jeckle drove many a doggy bonkers:

Cool! It's the original Two-Gun Kid I really like.

Sadly Wildcat got very few cover appearances during his long crime fighting career. Here are a few:

Sun Boy!

I used to read this strip with delight in the London Free Press through the 1960's:

Excuse me but collectors are continually adding to their collections or else they wouldn't actually be collectors. It therefore makes perfect sense for them to be happy to be able to acquire items more cheaply. Freefall?! Prices dropping 10%-20% after increasing fiftyfold hardly constitutes a "freefall". How much higher are prices today than even a dozen years ago?

I neither said nor implied any such thing. Yes, I did effectively suggest that collectors aren't bothered by any "softening" of prices because quite simply they'd like to buy cheaper. But it's certainly not collectors doing the belly aching in this thread. Hang out in the "hot book of the week" or "is the market correcting" threads? Hardly. Even the most rudimentary Search would reveal that I hang out in the Silver and Gold forums. It's just that this thread is hard to ignore when it keeps cropping up at the top of the page in the General forum whenever I want to look in on my "Celebrating Redheads" thread. But you're correct. Like the vast majority of collectors, I don't price out the "value" of my collection every year or two. In fact the last time I "priced out" any comic that I own is when I bought and paid for it which could have been as much as 45+ years ago. So market fluctuations don't much matter to me. But this incessant bellyaching (360+ pages!) about "falling" prices does. It's an irritant. And since this is a discussion forum, I do reserve the right to comment on what's being posted. That's good because those who bought comics in the last three years hoping to quickly sell at a profit upon the premise that comic prices have to go up even further (Why?) after sixty years of staggering gains are sure not going to get any pity from me. That's absolutely correct. But despite that you specifically used the word "sad" to describe a drop in comic prices when it's more a case of "Yeah, so? Big deal. Sellers may not like that but buyers do."

My Pied Piper covers:

Doggies show up here, there and everywhere!

Here then are four more of my Daffy Duck comics: 22 23 24 30

Dallas Stephens

The Plunderer from Outer Space? Well then how about the superhero in Space Adventures?

Oh yeah! And it's #1 and #3 that have the best covers!