MyNameIsLegion

you have to keep "abreast" of these things.... oh...you mean that pump and dump.....

"I heard a rumor"....wait that's the gal from Umbrella Academy.

filing a complaint and filing out a questionnaire is how they know who NOT to invite!

@valiantman

and I will argue all these new, more detailed attributes will get used and abused, ignored and mis-identified, and a year form now it will be a holy mess. The non-comic dealers, the casual listers, pawn shops, listing services don't really have the time or inclination to be product experts. Again, eBay is pounding a square peg in a round hole with a screwdriver. They want it to be like an orderly catalog, with very tight commodity and product definitions for these product widgets to neatly place them in the right bucket by size, shape, color, function, brand, manufacturer etc. That's way too high an expectation to think crowdsourcing it via all the myriad types of listers will achieve that, without active category management. If they had machine learning behind it, to help analyze, steer and sift the products and their respective attributes, that would be one thing. I see no evidence of that whatsoever. The more complex the taxonomy, the more errors you will get. I've seen products that now no longer appear in the seller's store or item list, yet they have active listings that you can access from old links that have become orphaned from their sellers page. This is FUBAR.

and, the last 20 years, since BIN was introduced, we know that eBay HATES auctions. They want everything to be BIN. Sure, in some categories auctions seem reasonable and even expected, but on the whole, their core business is to just turn product as quickly as possible, and auctions slow that down. If a savvy competitor were to come along that ONLY did auctions, they'd really have the advantage...oh wait. The jokes on us ha, ha, HA HA.

if you are having trouble with anything ebay related in the last 48 hours, it's likely related to this thread:

the fact that they didn't map era category to the individual listing era is possibly the most egregiously incompetent thing I've ever seen from a billion dollar tech company- I mean it's several orders of magnitude dumb. You don't throw away product attributes and expect all the individual sellers to re-enter the same or similar attributes for 6 million listings just in the comics category. You map it in the database and run a ---script, not push that responsibility to paying customers and tank all search options, ruins search filters, and royally PO buyers and sellers off all at once. They've broken their own site and made it each individual sellers responsibility to fix when most don't even know what or why or how. Rank amateurs and rank extreme arrogance. I hope they just go out of business.

this change confirms what I've long suspected. Ebay's gone all in on curated search results. The net result of that, when it comes to hobby's and collectibles is that more granular search results dissuades casual browsing. We've all trained ourselves to "browse" not search for specific results. Ebay want's to be like google and have the most targeted and relevant search results (according to what they think the user want's not what we ask for) and not show anything else. I did a search in Comics for "Buscema" By default it gives search results that say only the most "relevant" results are shown, all others are filtered out. Result: 998. Uncheck the most relevant filter and you get over 6000. Thats just an example. I tried a few others and the disparity in the number of results could be quite huge. HTH Ebay's determined what "relevant" results are is a black box. But they want to only show what they think you want to see. They don't want you to browse, or shop, they want you to just search and buy. They don't want to facilitate people like us scouring the new listings in broad categories for under-priced BIN, poorly described listings, items in the wrong category, or auctions closing in the dead of night that look ripe for sniping. They just want you to search for a specific item, get an immediate result, put it in your basket and checkout.(and I don't doubt they will tweak the results to favor showing what they will make more money on in terms of fees) I bet over the years I've bought more things that I wasn't searching for than items I was searching for - this all but kills that.

what a cluster. The Original Comic Art category is now a flaming dumpster fire, along with the rest of the comics categories.

I agree with all of this, but Ed and I are the same age.

ehhh, I'm sorry, but Dan's right. Copper ended when Image began, its one of the most definite, easily pinpointed events that defines any of the eras which everyone debates as being fuzzy by a few years. The only thing left to debate is when does "modern" end since we is in Now, and now is "modern" given that we are now almost 30 years since 92, we probably need to carve out 2 ages hence in addition to now. Let's just try to agree on the major high-points of the last 30 years. You mentioned a couple in the late 90's What defines the earlier 00's? Low distribution, the rise of CGC, Decompression? the 1st wave of comic book movies? the MCU starting in 2008? The Key/1st appearance focus of the last 5-6 years and the death of run collectors? The end of Diamond Exclusivity?

I just have a hard time extending Copper into the Image era, and post Image era, which is what Heroes Reborn really was, the concession that the big talents that defected to start Image (mostly) couldn't create enduring characters, so kiss and make-up with Marvel (and DC later for Jim Lee ) because we aren't as rich as we thought we were gonna be. Copper to me is quintessentially the Direct Market, Pacific, Eclipse, The Dark Knight, Miller DD, Crisis, Secret Wars, Mutant Madness, Watchmen, Sandman, it was the Writer's era, they dominated what defined comics, Image was the next age, all style without substance, looks over depth, gold foil scratch and sniff covers, flooding the market with unsold copies of Turok, Trencher and Brigade. Carl Ikahn, trying to license everything to raise cash. Oversaturation of popular characters. etc etc. Very different from what was going on in 1983. Once Shooter left Marvel and was ousted from Valiant, the lunatics were running the asylum. 61-72/73-82/83-94/95-2007/2008-Present (hindsight in the future may say the MCU era ended with Endgame in 2019)

What to call "now" is always a challenge compared to time and distance from the past, but clearly the "modern" era can't be 20+ years. I'd argue that the modern era (now) began with the MCU in 2008. The Movie era, specifically the MCU has transformed the hobby as we know it today. Previous movie hype never had as dramatic an effect with Batman, Super-man, the Fox Movies (any of them) or even the Raimi Spidey films. I'd mark Copper's end with what defines the beginning of the Chromium age in my mind- with the launch of Image.

It's the only Gil Kane cover where you can't see up anyone's nose. That's why it's so jarring. It's not even typical Kane. It looks like someone blew up a panel from a random comic and made a cover of it. Then there's the 3 inkers on the interior, one being Chic Stone who should never ink BWS, and one page penciled by Sal and it looks like High School leftovers for Friday lunch.

oh without a doubt, Bob would be apoplectic, but that's pop culture. The best of the best will retains some nominal value for it's historical significance, but everything else will whither. The same will happen to a good portion of the GA comics, the non-hero, non-adventure, non-horror. Think of all the funny animal that are not in Disney or TW portfolio. Andy Panda? Oswald the Rabbit? All the photo covers of 50's TV, Westerns, Classics Illustrated, 4-color, Dells? Dead money in 10 years if not sooner. Older Boomers have no one to pass that junk on to. The can just watch MeTV and clear out some space in their house.

virtually no one living has any genuine childhood nostalgia for anything Platinum. It would not surprise me if Overstreet drops the Platinum section of the guide entirely before the decade is out.

can anyone confirm a 3-pack from1977 for Marvel Premiere #37, Thor #261, and Avengers #156? I got these 3 for Xmas in 1977. I can't rightly remember if it was in a 3-pack but seems likely. I'd love to get one if there is.

now with red hair- might work!

wow. My copies aren't above VF. I'll have to be be content with this I guess....

But if you inherit that Action 1, you get a step up in basis, and when YOU sell it, you can declare it's sale price against current market value, not 10 cents. HUGE difference.

Peed-i-greed...

@1Cool & @fastballspecial didn't we just spend the last page discussing that you only deduct inventory as an expense when the item sold? How does remaining inventory factor into the equation? Deducting the expenses of the other comics you bought with the money from sales that didn't sell to offset profits is not correct. You don't realize the gains, or declare the loss until that item sells. So if you sell $10k, Profit $5K, spend 3K of that profit on more books, your profit is still 5K and that's what you are to be taxed on. Next year if you sell that $3K worth at a loss of $1K, and sell an additional $8K at a profit of $4K, you can deduct that $1K loss, for a next profit of $3K. that seems like pretty simple math to me but the tracking of what rate it's taxed at if the asset was held less than a year seems like a giant PIA. Is that the part you are referring to in factoring in the equation? You may be doing it all right, but many people are using the straight up purchase of books for their collections as "expenses" to basically fund their hobby as a zero profit pursuit.

and isn't there something about unsold inventory older than a year being taxed, or recorded or something?