Have you sold all of your comics to buy art? 0

[buyatari]

Comic books are just catalogs in the eyes of the art collector.  

 

[zhamlau]

I have sold some of the nicer pieces of my comic collection to fund art purchases, but its not fair to say i sold off my comics in total. im still working on a 35 cent price variant set and finishing every 80s marvel comic.

[PhilipB2k17]

On ‎7‎/‎6‎/‎2018 at 1:09 PM, BCarter27 said:

This week, the Wife and I went down to our storage unit and loaded up 800 lbs of the remainder of our comics onto a freight pallet and shipped them off to a buyer. It was back-breaking work and I feel relieved and sad all at once.

With that albatross off of my shoulders, I wish I had all of the time back that I spent listing, packing, and shipping the first half of the collection. The money gained was not worth the time. I should have bulked it all out right from the beginning, no matter the money left on the table. But who knows, maybe I needed that time to "say goodbye"!

If you are ever in a similar position and unless you enjoy the selling aspect as part of the hobby, I would recommend not dealing with it. Also, bulking it out with some margin left on it will help stimulate the back issue market.

Other random thoughts...

The non-CGC back issue market is dead. There are very few run collectors left. I attribute this almost completely to digital. If you are thinking of selling, do it ASAP before it falls further. I missed the boat by just 2-3 years.

I don't want to think about how much my storage costs ate into the value of the comics. Another cost of small apartment NYC living.

Packing and shipping is most of the work in selling. If you don't have the right boxes/mailers on hand at all times, it can be a nightmare.

I'm down to 3 shortboxes -- 2 of books I haven't read yet and 1 box of keepers (mostly sentimental.) That's out of the 35 shortboxes I just sent out and probably another 30 or so I sold over the last 2-3 years.

We kept our print/poster collection and a few boxes of comic-related art books and promo oddities (which I will eventually sell). But if we could get it digitally or at the library, off it went!

OA takes up a lot less room, is more liquid, and seems like it will hold its value better (at least over the next 5-10 years, imo). And it is an easy way for us to stay engaged in this hobby that brings us a lot of joy -- without the logistics of mountains of books.

So if you still buy physical copies, toss them around, read them, and then give them to some young person when you are done.

So, how 'bout it? Anyone else sell all/most of their comics to buy art?

I'm getting close to liquidating my collection. I might keep a short box, and all the comics I have where my art is from. I do want to have a copy of the published book for my art that I've collected. But, my new little method is to bring a few books to sell at a con, so as to offset some of the costs of buying new art. I just do it piecemeal so far. I brought some graded books (I had duplicates of all of them) and it helped out.

The problem with keeping all your keys, is that nobody will take your bulk collection without the keys mixed in. Or, you will not get much of a price for it.

[PhilipB2k17]

On ‎7‎/‎6‎/‎2018 at 1:24 PM, Jay Olie Espy said:

I never had a large of collection you as did, but because of storage issues, my collection hovered around 800-1000. In the last 5 years I started selling them at various venues from eBay to local comic shows. And yes, this was all to buy art! A month ago, I just sold half of my collection (maybe 45%?) of 300 books to a dealer for 60 cents a piece. It stung selling them for so cheap but it was a huge relief to unload them. My lament was that I wish I had given him more of my book because our landlord is selling the house we rent, forcing us to move out of the Bay Area and likely to another state altogether (I heard NYC is cheap, maybe we'll move there :P) As an aside, I thought I had one more year to sell the rest of the collection via the ‘Bay, which would have earned me more than 60 cents a pop; but yeah, the time it takes to list, pack, and ship is such a waste if you compare it to minimum wage, but I do enjoying selling. Furthermore, I was able to streamline the process to make it more time and cost effective.

Anyway, what you say is true in some respects: the back issue market is nearly dead. It's not worth saving comics, or buying them altogether. And I don't treat them as delicately as I used. But I say "nearly dead" because the local dealer I sold them too can't keep enough inventory. He has done very well selling random back issues at comic cons. Last year he had no interest in my collection, now he was desperate for anything. 

Congratulations on selling that bulk. I did see the listing.

That's what I;m seeing. A couple of local dealers who used to only stock new books, and trades (and maybe about a year or two worth of back issues, based on unsold inventory) suddenly started selling older stuff. It was like back in the old days. I think people actually are starting to get interested in the original books. They may not pay what they once did, but they like owning them.

[SquareChaos]

I personally sold off many of the keys out of my collection and then donated the rest to a non-profit, tax deductible charity. Win-win in my opinion - it may be an option for some of the rest of you if you don't feel the need to squeeze every nickle out of your collection.