Please educate me on the mid-ninties comic crash

[MisterX]

Or was it a correction?

 

During the ninties I collected three titles: Sandman, Hate and Eightball. So, I wasn't in the comic store that often.

 

I was aware of the Death of Superman, the variant cover craze, the rampant specualtion and overprinting, the fact that Marvel decided to become their own distributor, and that at some point, the music stopped and lots of people got burned.

 

And then what? There were the dark times, before CGC? What I'm really interested in is what exactly happened to the back issue market (let's say, Bronze era comics and earlier), while the modern market was picking up the pieces?

 

And what brought the market back? CGC? The first Spider-Man movie? Or decent art and writing in Modern comics for a change?

[MR.COMICBOOK]

Image was really late with thier books that made many retailers go belly up and Marvel tried to distribute thier own books with ended up with disaster

[Bronty]

The hg bronze market hadn't even really developed yet. Greggy bought sold and rebought his old ASM 101 cgc 9.8 during this time with the highest of those prices paid being around $200 (about 2x guide) IIRC. Fast forward 7 or 8 years and with the certification he sold it for what, $3500? Just to use his experiences in super hg as a guide.

 

My own experience was that there was just a big drop off in interest, in general. Sure the hardcores like me greggy and aardvark were still attending the local cons but the local cons were now in a smaller venue, and you could walk around easily, there wasn't much competition for books, little going on, period. Kind of a ghost town although obviously a few sales still happened and some good books still traded hands now and then.

 

Back 7 - 10 years before that the cons were at a much much larger venue and the customers were packed in like sardines. There were crowds around every dealer's table and there was always someone.... malodorous next to you. But it was an exciting time because so many people were into it and there was so much going on. The early to mid 90s were just kind of the death of the excitement, on the local scene, in Vancouver at least.

 

 

[s-man]

Wasnt this the age of multiple cross titles/foil covers and multiple covers?

[Comic_Diva]

Wasnt this the age of multiple cross titles/foil covers and multiple covers?

 

Yes that and "rob liefeld"

[Mr.Diggler]

Wasnt this the age of multiple cross titles/foil covers and multiple covers?

\

 

Minus the Foil covers, that sounds just like every damn Wednesday at the comic shop. You'd think they/we would have learned by now.

[towards2112]

1.Yes, it sucked.

2. It's still dead.

[Not*Sure*]

There was a glut of too many books. The comic industry got greedy. They said "Gee if we sell so many copies of this one book,let's split it into 5 titles and we'll sell hundreds of thousands of them too! Then we will make it a crossover so the customer has to buy a bunch of books they have never read before to get the whole story. If we make a few issues with multiple covers,they will have to buy the foil, velvet,gatefold, bullet hole, genuine plastic gem covers." "Well, since so many people bought 100 of each variant we should make a special edition call it 1/2 then lets make a 3/4, 1/4,0, 1.2, editions will fly off the shelves. Lets put them in a poly bag with a special collector card. There will be 5 different ones and they will have to buy them all to complete the set."

Marvel taking over their own distribution really stopped me as a store from ording new comics almost altogether. Sure you can have the hot X-titles everyone wants but for every one X you have to order 3 of these other less popular titles. While you are at it go ahead and fill out this 200 page application we want to know what you look like,what your employees wear,what stands next to your register,what is in your showcase,what is on your walls,how are our books displayed, what is your ratio of DC/Marvel, How do you advertise,what is your ad budget, on and on. Couple that with Diamond closing their warehouse nearby..we stopped carrying new comics. People would drop by and look at us in disbelief when we said "NO honest back issues only! books on the floor under tables are a quarter, lining the back wall .50, on the middle rows $1.00. First outside row and show cases price as marked. Last row half off price marked. " Then be sure to check out our fine collection of C.D.s which were actually selling.

 

I had a friend who delivered magazine and periodicals to a local chain of grocery stores. He would swing by and deliver scant copies for my subscription customers. A local friend who owned another comic store was happy to get me runs for speculative types who wanted huge runs of multiples.

 

I was buying other stores going out of business left and right. At one time there were 14 comic shops in my general area. By the time I stopped carrying back issues there were 4. I ran a flea market booth. There were a lot of guys with booths when I started in the end there were two. I got tired of waiting out in the heat all day and ending up BUYING more than I sold. One guy ended up with it all to himself.

 

Nearly everyday at my store guys dropped by and wanted to sell sell sell. They would be indignant when I told them those books weren't worth what the prices were quoted as in the Wizard Guide. I'd tell them to send the to Mr. Wizard but he wouldn't pay those prices either. I'd tell them to look and see all those lovely image books in my quarter box.

 

The smart ones were buying up my good Gold and Silver books!!

[the blob]

it seemed at that point that SA and GA in general was selling and BA keys were selling during this period, but the new stuff went down the toilet. killed my friend who owned a shop. he continued to do fine selling real vintage material, but seeing his new comic sales drop 50-75% (and basically having to relegate nearly all new comics to the 25 or 50 cent box as back issues) murdered him. i know some people were hunting them down, but high grade non-real key BA (other than maybe 15 or 20 cent spideys and X-Men) was not really viewed as a big deal. he'd usually sell it at half of 1996 guide if he was lucky. the final nail in the coffin was ebay, which cut into his back issue market (even though he was often cheaper than ebay (after S/H costs at least), but a bunch of his customers liked the novely and that was the end. he couldn't keep his doors open only making $150-$200 in sales a day. coupled with the death of sportcards, he was killed. In like 1989/90 before the sportcard crash and during the start of the comic boom, he estimated he was making a $250-$300K a year in profit off his store, most of which he blew at the track, of course.

 

honestly, the glut of new stuff brought everything else down with it. you simply can't have a collectible with a million copy print-run. when people tried to sell these "collectibles" once the frenzy wore off, there was no market for them.

 

obviously, what we have now is a bit different. variants might be silly, but a 1:10 probably has a 10K print-run at most, and less for a less popular title. of course, the base collectors' market is smaller by a lot now.

 

seriously, how many issues from the top 10 biggest companies are being pumped out per month now vs. 1993? 80-90% fewer would not surprise me. thankfully that means fewer warehouses of krapola being accumulated. lower print-runs in and of themselves won't make things collectible -- there were plenty of mainstream marvels and DCs (2d and 3d string titles) being printed in the 80's with 50-75K print-runs that are worthless now -- but it might help keep the numbers under control.

 

not to mention, something that occurred to me the other day....so many comic shops were opened and closed because the high volumbe of sales of new issues (and inflated new issue back issues) died. my guess is that 70-80% of the shops open in 1992 were closed by 2000 (the sportscard bust helped that too), creating a ton of inventory hitting the market. the people buying that stuff had to try and flip it, dumping it on the market (not all of it, sure, but what was once tucked away in store bins was now on the convention circuit and, a couple of years later, hitting ebay). it was bound to hurt prices on almost everything. having all that inventory sitting in thousands of stores around the country kept it off the market for the most part other than for the stores' customers, helping to prop up prices for relatively common stuff. think about it, if you wanted a copy of darkhawk 6 you had to hope your local shop(s) had it or a convention might come around near you. mail order sales were not so prevalent. it made it a heck of a lot easier for the shop to charge a buck or two for that back issue.

[kimik]

The mid/late 90s were a great time for buying collections. I still smile about buying two HG late SA/BA collections during 1996 - 1998 with all of the keys (sold on eBay for good $$ afterward) for $2-$3/per book when everything was averaged out. If you were a collector, this was a great time for buying multiple HG copies of books and then flipping the dupes on eBay for multiples of OSPG raw in high grade. (thumbs u

 

Looking at the comic scene here in Edmonton, I wonder how much the location of some LCSs led to their demise. A neighbourhood with with lots of young readers/collectors in the 80s would have seen most of them move away in the early/mid 90s to university and/or work which had to hurt sales. I know of a couple of stores here where demographics played more of a role than the downturn. The new chains that are thriving are more strategically located (close to the university, new growing areas of the city, etc.).

[Shootydog]

I quit reading comics at that time due to the very issues listed here. I couldn't continue to fork over the cash required to keep up with the 50+ titles I was reading.

 

It soured me of the modern market even today and there is some pretty good stuff out there. Im still not paying $4 for a new comic book.

[Aman619]

if the question is about what happened in the 90s to nearly kill the new comics industry, not the back issue market, the answer was the rapid widespread belief that new comics values would shoot up overnight. All sorts of non comics reading kids and adults were sucked in buying multiples of any comic that would "go up" in value.

 

At the same time, baseball cards had hit their glut, so baseball card stores added "hot collectible" comics to their stores, buying into the mania. (they all tried again with pogs too!) As a direct result of more stores pre-ordering "the next hot comic" DC and Marvel upped their print runs to supply the demand. Plus Image was just getting hot and Valiant had come along as the "next Marvel" and the thinking was that each Valiant #1 was like AF15 etc., getting in on the ground floor again, only with a case in every backroom "for later!"

 

Of course, the end came as there were so many comics piling up and, guess, what? the comics no longer "went up" that often. (I think Bloodshot 6 was the tipping point. It was released and a rumor went around that a brand new Valiant character appeared there, which didnt pan out. )

 

 

As for back issues slumping, the 90s saw huge internet bubble related profits in Wintel etc. Why buy a 10K GA book and after a year be "up" the 10% Overstreet selected for it when you could buy Intel etc and literally be up 10% a month. Sure books still sold to collectors, but "Investment-minded" collectors had better things to do with their cash.

 

 

[fastballspecial]

Lets also not forget the other hobbies that crashed during this time and their dealers came running into our hobby.

 

[everlongcomics]

The UK had a comic book price guide around that time, run by a guy who owned a large postal comic selling company, think they called themselves Stateside Comics. They had a big plan to put a comic shop in every virgin music shop. around the mid 1990s the price guide stopped, the company disappeared & the virgin comic stores never happened.

[comicstock]

Baseball card dealers/collectors began to speculate on sports cards. The short of it was that when that went down the tubes, some of those speculators turned to comic books buying crossovers, gimmick covers, multiple cover variations, etc. Comics had the same crash after about 12-24 months of this. There's plenty more to add to that but it's been well covered in previous posts.

 

The back issue market took a beating as new title counts escolated, meaning less money left over for back issues. Ebay began to gain traction (as mentioned in an earlier post) and other forms of entertainment sopped up dollars.

 

I sold my share in my comic store in Pennsylvania and moved down to South Florida in 1996. Back then, I could drive to probably 20 stores within an hour of me (north & south only-the Atlantic Ocean & Everglades are close by east and west). Today, I'm counting maybe 4-5 that I know of and probably 2-3 more hidden around.

 

I think I remember Diamond saying there was 9,000-10,000 comic stores during the peak and now we're down to 2,500-3,000. I don't know if that includes mail-order only operations.

 

At 3.99 a pop, I don't think the future looks good.

[MR.COMICBOOK]

Baseball card dealers/collectors began to speculate on sports cards. The short of it was that when that went down the tubes, some of those speculators turned to comic books buying crossovers, gimmick covers, multiple cover variations, etc. Comics had the same crash after about 12-24 months of this. There's plenty more to add to that but it's been well covered in previous posts.

 

The back issue market took a beating as new title counts escolated, meaning less money left over for back issues. Ebay began to gain traction (as mentioned in an earlier post) and other forms of entertainment sopped up dollars.

 

I sold my share in my comic store in Pennsylvania and moved down to South Florida in 1996. Back then, I could drive to probably 20 stores within an hour of me (north & south only-the Atlantic Ocean & Everglades are close by east and west). Today, I'm counting maybe 4-5 that I know of and probably 2-3 more hidden around.

 

I think I remember Diamond saying there was 9,000-10,000 comic stores during the peak and now we're down to 2,500-3,000. I don't know if that includes mail-order only operations.

 

At 3.99 a pop, I don't think the future looks good.

 

good points, plus playstation debuted in 1995,a lot of comic collectors burnt by comics turned to videogames instead.

[Flaming_Telepath]

The UK had a comic book price guide around that time, run by a guy who owned a large postal comic selling company, think they called themselves Stateside Comics. They had a big plan to put a comic shop in every virgin music shop. around the mid 1990s the price guide stopped, the company disappeared & the virgin comic stores never happened.

 

Well, apart from the eight that they were running, obviously.

 

And that would be Duncan McAlpine, who now writes for the BBC. A bit more lucrative, I think. He's also got one of the most sublime GA collections anywhere.

 

One of the reasons why the British price guide ceased was that it became increasingly redundant with more and more folks shopping direct with the US and the whole notion of ND, and the premium prices paid over surrounding issues, became moot.

[joe_collector]

My own experience was that there was just a big drop off in interest, in general. Sure the hardcores like me greggy and aardvark were still attending the local cons but the local cons were now in a smaller venue, and you could walk around easily, there wasn't much competition for books, little going on, period. Kind of a ghost town although obviously a few sales still happened and some good books still traded hands now and then.

 

That is EXACTLY what happened - once the "hobby flames" die down, the moths all fly away.

[Bronty]

I like your moth and flames analogy - that's a good way of putting it.

[Not*Sure*]

I would sell anything in my store that would bring cash pogs,beanies, Pokeman, Magic cards, Action figures. I would sell the new hot thing till the prices dropped then move on to the next fad. The trick is having an eye to spot the fad and get in and out with your cash. Don't let it drag on until the price drop and you get stcuk with 10,000 Spawgs.

 

I remember a girl coming in and wanting to sell me a tickle me elmo for $400 she said that is what they brought on Ebay..I told her to go ahead and sell them on Ebay then, the next year she brought me furby's I told her the same thing. I have an "in" on the next big christmas toys so I could buy them before the season started and be the one getting hundreds on Ebay. I would be done selling those by November/early Dec. at the lastest. Or else you'd be stuck with the toys.

 

Just like new comics those toys had a short lived shelf life at the high prices. Then they were worthless. Vintage truly collectible comics like gold and silver age with the exception of a few key issues. Never really goes out of style. The longer it goes on the less of them there are. With 90's issues there were just too many of them. Made them worth less than the paper they are printed on for the most part.