The Future of Comic Book Collecting & Investing

[CryptoDave]

I'm a Cryptographer by trade. And yes! the majority of my posts are concerned with the value/investment side of this hobby. Judging from the number of responses, it appears I'm not alone.

[fastballspecial]

25 years isn't as long as you think it is. I'm still living in '96 for the most part

 

He is not kidding I think I sold him ever 90s book I had left.

 

[MetalPSI]

[jools&jim]

 

25 years isn't as long as you think it is. I'm still living in '96 for the most part

Lightweight! I never really made it out of 1978...

 

 

[ThothAmon]

25 years isn't as long as you think it is. I'm still living in '96 for the most part

Lightweight! I never really made it out of 1978...

 

Did anyone see what the Professor did to Gilligan last night? What it's 1967, right?

[islandmisfittoys]

Few things:

1. Comic Books are being seen more and more as alternative investment vehicles. Collecting as a kid isn't a prerequisite.

2. From the market trends ive seen, kids are among the fastest growing market segment.

3. Scientists believe there is a "collecting" gene. Have seen many saying the younger generations wont collect anything in the future. These two things are opposite of each other. Not saying it will necessarily be comic books that's collected but it will be something imo. Ipods maybe, Pokémon cards, sneakers, classic video games.

4. As collectors get older and their collections mature they tend to go for older and rarer. Most of the people today collecting Tecs and Actions weren't around in the 30s and 40s.

[Beige]

Depends on the book.

 

1st appearances of genuine key characters will always be sought after.

 

Will they continue to grow in price over the next 25 years - possibly.

 

Will they stagnate - probably

 

But if a 'crash' should happen (and I think superheroes are entrenched in pop culture for ever) then Key Silver and Gold Age key 1st apps are the most likely to be cushioned from a huge loss.

 

Minor keys, and 'keys of the moment' will fluctuate as they always have and are the most likely to do poorly over time.

All things are cyclical - look at Vinyl records!

[mrwoogieman]

I'm a Cryptographer by trade. And yes! the majority of my posts are concerned with the value/investment side of this hobby. Judging from the number of responses, it appears I'm not alone.

 

I read Cryptonomicon and enjoyed it very much!

 

That's all I got!

 

[zosocane]

Here's my Question:

 

In about 20-30 years from now, will Comic Book Collecting still be hot?

 

It depends! 20 to 30 years from now, quality material -- by that, I refer to true keys and true semi-keys mostly in mid- to high-grade with good page quality published by Marvel or DC during the GA, SA, early BA (i.e., pre-1975), and a very limited number of high-grade CA keys (maybe throw in a modern like a WD1) all revolving around blue-chip, tried-and-tested super-hero or pop culture characters -- will continue to grow, albeit at a modest clip. The insane price appreciation we have all seen in the hobby since the release of Avengers in 2012 -- which, in my mind, is what opened the flood-gates for new collectors and speculators to come pouring in from 2012 to 2016 and got sellers to wake up and place a newly understood value on "movie books" -- will cool down soon enough as movie fatigue sets in.

 

But the die has been cast, as this new horde of collectors sees what a cool hobby this is. The setting of a record price for a CGC 9.8 FF52 isn't what impresses me about the long-term health of the hobby -- sales like those are generally to highly liquid (leveraged?), non-youthful buyers. Instead, it's that 20-something young professional woman -- or man -- who is going through a long-box at a con looking for, e.g., a late Silver Age ASM or early Bronze Age Batman and willing to dish out $25 or $35 for a copy. Go on YouTube and search "comic book haul" and look at the sheer number of young collectors showing off their newly acquired gems. That collector will be in her/his late 40s a couple of decades from now with real purchasing power and will enjoy the nostalgic effect of this current collecting era, before they had children and grew their family, when they bought books they could barely afford from long-boxes while left staring at "wall books" that they couldn't afford in 2016.

 

Books that don't fit the general criteria described above will likely long have fallen in value well before 20 to 30 years from now.

[fifties]

Llet's see...an average print run may be 100,000 copies today (I think in the 90's is was quite a bit higher)....

A whole hundred thousand or more issues, eh? My how times have changed. Take a look at the alleged readership of this book from the late '40's;

 

It's the culture that has changed. When this book came out, TV was in it's infancy in most of the country, and other than the movies, comics & magazines were the only other medium of entertainment.

Now you've got the internet and all kinds of wireless mediums, video games, etc, so comics aren't as important, nor as prominent, as they were then.

 

How this translates to what the comic book market will be in the future is anyone's guess, but I would speculate that there will always be a small, hardcore collecting community, interested in seeing covers and reading stories about WW2 superheros, 1920's gangsters, 1950's science fiction and horror, etc, not to mention some of the more recent genre's since then. And since there is only a finite number of these oldies, I would expect that they will always hold some value. I can't believe what PCH is going for now, as compared to just 15 - 20 years ago.

[lou_fine]

And this country (never mind the rest of the world, wait until Chinese kids have the means to buy old Spiderman or Batman) will not remain on the track-toward-ever-poorer indefinitely.

 

Dump 1.3 Billion Chinese into the market, and that may help a collection or two.....

 

They have already have things they aspire to buy when they get richer. Old Spider-Man or Batman comics from the U.S. are not among them.

 

+1

 

Exactly right!

 

For the Chinese people, it's inbred in their culture and pretty well in their make-up to aspire to land and real estate as the path to making their fortunes. Hence, for the Chinese with real money, I just don't see it going into AF 15's and IH 181's.

 

Especially when they can use leverage to make real money like what is happening in this city here, as opposed to making peanuts by trying to flip comic books, as per the following post which I made last month in another Forum here:

 

Only problem is that they are too busy collecting and flipping houses to spend any time on buying comic books.

 

Where else can you see a house go up from $3.2 million dollars and then be flipped 5 times before being sold off for $7.6 million dollars, all within the span of 2 short years.

[ninanina]

We did have a similar thread on the forum maybe 8 - 10 years ago several years after the 90's melt down. Comic sales were at an all time low and the future looked bleak.

 

My comment back then was that I believed there will always something that will come along to generate further interest in collecting. Currently we are in the midst of characters becoming so mainstream in movies and television. This will carry on for years to come and perhaps end once they finally get around to making a JLA/Avengers cross-over series which could last as long as the Star Wars or Star Trek franchises. In short, for many years to come.

 

I don't believe collecting will ever die. It will most certainly change over time, but someone somewhere will always want that back issue.

 

The next big push may very well be foreign collectors as someone has already mentioned. If that happens, the sky's the limit as to what these could be worth down the road.

 

Right now, it's a great time to be a collector and in my opinion, the best time. We should all be very excited for the future of this hobby.

[lou_fine]

 

The next big push may very well be foreign collectors as someone has already mentioned. If that happens, the sky's the limit as to what these could be worth down the road.

 

 

Are you referring to Ayman Hariri and his Not So Impossible Collection?

[vaillant]

China does not have a tradition of a native production of comics, so I doubt the chinese in general will develop an interest in a short time span, be it in american or other countries' comics.

[CartoonFanboy]

Wouldn't trying to predict the future 20-30 years from now be counter-intuitive to the meaning of a logical analysis? If you said a few years out, fine, perhaps there's some data you can use. If any of us could predict what happens in even 10 years, I assure you we wouldn't be chatting about it with you on a forum.

 

I can't tell you how good Kevin Durant will be next season or 5 seasons from now, but I can tell you that he'll almost surely be retired in 15 years and pushing up daisies in 100 years.

 

Very often, longer-term predictions are easier to make than shorter-term predictions.

 

But Kevin Durant's retirement or eventual demise does not tell me where the sport of Basketball will be in 30 years. I can make a pretty good guess where it will be in 5 years, but not 30.

[delekkerste]

Wouldn't trying to predict the future 20-30 years from now be counter-intuitive to the meaning of a logical analysis? If you said a few years out, fine, perhaps there's some data you can use. If any of us could predict what happens in even 10 years, I assure you we wouldn't be chatting about it with you on a forum.

 

I can't tell you how good Kevin Durant will be next season or 5 seasons from now, but I can tell you that he'll almost surely be retired in 15 years and pushing up daisies in 100 years.

 

Very often, longer-term predictions are easier to make than shorter-term predictions.

 

But Kevin Durant's retirement or eventual demise does not tell me where the sport of Basketball will be in 30 years. I can make a pretty good guess where it will be in 5 years, but not 30.

 

Sure. There are some things that you can linearly extrapolate over the short-term (e.g., the popularity of basketball) with a relatively high degree of confidence. There are also things that you can't linearly extrapolate over the long-term because there is a high probability, or, in the Durant example, near-absolute certainty (barring some kind of miracle anti-aging serum being developed) that an inflection point in his physical abilities will be reached during the timeframes discussed.

 

I think you can bet your bottom dollar/euro/yuan that a major inflection point will be reached in the vintage comic art market within 15-20 years (and that is best case) given the underlying demographics, social/technological trends (not just going forward, but also what has happened since the mid-1990s), long-term economic trends, etc. and that it will be obvious, entrenched and undeniable to even the most hardened optimist within 30 years.

[delekkerste]

Right now, it's a great time to be a collector and in my opinion, the best time. We should all be very excited for the future of this hobby.

 

Herb, just remember that, by definition, it always looks like it's the best time when things are going great and prices are hitting highs. Conversely, it always looks like the worst time when things are going badly and prices are in the tank!

 

Of course there will be future collectors. The question is whether there will be more, less or the same as today, and how much money they will be willing to put into the market. Will it be enough, in the aggregate, to buy up all the Gen X and Baby Boomer liquidations in the coming decades at current (or even higher) prices? The answer is simple: no. That would require torturing common sense and mathematics to such a convoluted extent such that you can call it a metaphysical impossibility right now. The only semi-realistic hope for future buyers to be able to clear the market without prices falling is a huge influx of foreign buyers and/or a large influx of super-rich buyers. I don't mean just a little bit here or there (remember: the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence"), I mean thousands of them with such aggregate buying power that prices can maintain an upward trajectory through the next generational changeover. That seems like a terrible long-term bet to me.

[grebal]

 

Such conviction by some members surprises.

 

Imo, perhaps it's time to worry when the shoeshine guy starts giving me comic tips.

[Sqeggs]

Right now, it's a great time to be a collector and in my opinion, the best time. We should all be very excited for the future of this hobby.

 

Herb, just remember that, by definition, it always looks like it's the best time when things are going great and prices are hitting highs. Conversely, it always looks like the worst time when things are going badly and prices are in the tank!

 

Of course there will be future collectors. The question is whether there will be more, less or the same as today, and how much money they will be willing to put into the market. Will it be enough, in the aggregate, to buy up all the Gen X and Baby Boomer liquidations in the coming decades at current (or even higher) prices? The answer is simple: no. That would require torturing common sense and mathematics to such a convoluted extent such that you can call it a metaphysical impossibility right now. The only semi-realistic hope for future buyers to be able to clear the market without prices falling is a huge influx of foreign buyers and/or a large influx of super-rich buyers. I don't mean just a little bit here or there (remember: the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence"), I mean thousands of them with such aggregate buying power that prices can maintain an upward trajectory through the next generational changeover. That seems like a terrible long-term bet to me.

 

I think this sums it up well. Just about everything that could have gone right for the comic market over the past 15 years has gone right: CGC, eBay, Heritage, CL, CC, success of superhero movie, baby boomers entering their peak earning years.

 

For prices to increase from here -- which is what you need, of course, if you are thinking of comics as investments -- requires future developments that will lead to a similar increase in demand. It's difficult to imagine what such developments might be.

 

One other factor: Although most GA collectors are not buying back their childhood as baby boomers might be doing with SA and BA books, they are buying books that are not too dissimilar to the comics they grew up with. For the most part, modern comics are an entirely different beast than GA/SA/BA books. So, to expect significant numbers of younger fans to eventually age into collecting those books is to expect them to identify with books that as far removed from their current interests as Platinum Age books are for people my age.

 

Sure, there are some current 20-somethings happily collecting GA/SA/BA books, but is it plausible to think they can adequately replace the boomers who are heading off to the great LCS in the sky?

[romanheart]

Modern collectors are quite happy to pick up TPBs as well. It's replacing the need to buy and store 12 issues in optimal condition.