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Post by Randle-El on Sept 15, 2014 22:04:09 GMT -5
I do admit that when I'm working on a run, sometimes I feel like it's a goal I need to accomplish so I forget to slow down and enjoy the books... This has been a problem for me, as well, and when I start to feel it happening, I stop reading and put the run aside until it sounds like something fun that I want to do again. It's why you haven't seen me updating any review threads for the past few weeks Excellent policy. I think my "To Read" list is about 800 comics strong at this point. To be completely truthful, while the short box thing has been helpful in keeping my acquisitions from getting out of hand, but I do fudge it a little bit. Digital purchases don't count, since they can't be put in a box , so I have a long list of digital books that I need to get through on my next vacation. I also don't file unread trades in the short box, so I have a stack of those as well that I need to get through. That said, I'm pretty sure that I'm under the equivalent of 800 single issues in my reading queue. On the topic of runs that I'm slowing down on... currently working on the Larry Hama run of the first volume of Wolverine. I recently acquired a run of the first 70 or so issues of the Wolverine solo series thanks to a friend who gave me a bunch of comics that he needed to get rid of. It started off pretty well... I enjoyed the Claremont/Buscema issues that took place in Madripoor, as well as a few done-in-one issues in the 20s, but it started to go downhill for me when they started delving into the Weapon X project and filling in Logan's backstory. I have about six issues left, so the end is near, but my pace has definitely slowed.
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 15, 2014 21:40:50 GMT -5
I like to collect unbroken runs and read through them all at once. I think I'm compensating for my childhood when I acquired random issues here and there in ad hoc fashion, often in the middle of a story or status quo change and not knowing what was going on. That said, sometimes the temptation to not read the comics will get to me and I'll go through a stack even though I haven't completed the run yet. I justify it to myself with the reasoning that comics are meant to be read, not sitting in a pile, and I may die in car accident tomorrow and how unfortunate would it be if I never got to read at least some of that run of books I'm working on. I do admit that when I'm working on a run, sometimes I feel like it's a goal I need to accomplish so I forget to slow down and enjoy the books... more so when I the run is not that great. I find that I'm able to enjoy a book more after I've completed a run and I go back to cherry pick specific issues to re-read when it strikes my fancy. I take the time to read the letters pages, Stan's bits wisdom, the Hostess Fruit Pie ads... I try to be disciplined about not acquiring more books than I can read. To force myself, I have a short box that I keep filled with comics for my "to read" stash. If it gets completely full, I stop buying books, but so far that hasn't happened yet. The short box is solely for back issues, as I pretty much read new comics within a few days of release. My pull list is also pretty short, about a dozen titles or so, so it's not hard for me to keep up. I also occasionally buy digital comics from Comixology, usually long runs for cheap when they have their 99 cent sales. When I travel I like to load up a tablet with a bunch of books to read. I work from home, so I have a large office in the basement. I usually read on a big leather recliner late at night after everyone else has gone to bed. Oh, and I have mini-fridge well-stocked with beer.
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 14, 2014 22:06:43 GMT -5
My questions are: 1. What is an acceptable number of books to get signed per artist? I've seen people roll into a show with two or three short boxes, which I would feel is overkill, but what is reasonable? 2. Do I need to bring my own pens, specifically if I want a signature in a particular color, or will they have their own? 3. How do I go about requesting a sketch? Do I need to bring my own paper/book/etc.? How long does it take for them to finish it? I'm asking because the artist who draws My Little Pony will be there, and I wanted to get a unique sketch for each of my daughters if possible.
1) Personally, I'm not a big fan of bringing a whole big pile of books for one creator to sign -- especially if there's a line. I mean, do you really need every issue of a specific creator's run on a title signed? Personally, I just pick a few issues with covers that I particularly like, since the one of the main reasons I like to have books signed (besides the experience of meeting the creator) is to display them, so a nice cover plus a signature makes a great display piece. I'd say less than five books? Some creators put a hard limit on the number of books. There's also the consideration that you have to cart all the books you're getting signed around with you all day PLUS anything you purchase. 2) They all keep pens with them. Bring one only if you want a specific color. 3) Some people use sketchbooks for collecting sketches. And depending on the artist, you won't need to supply paper. As Shaxper mentioned, there are basically two types of sketches -- the quick and dirty sketch, and the finished sketch. The quick and dirty sketch you can often request and have completed in line. I got a quick and dirty Superman sketch by George Perez that he banged out in about 3-4 minutes after he signed my books. For the finished sketches, artists will usually accept the requests in advance until they hit their limit. If you go on a Saturday or Sunday, they may already be filled up by the time you get to them. Some artists use social media or e-mail to solicit sketch requests in advance of a con, and often will work on it ahead of time and have it ready for you there. Some artists, particularly the "rock stars" who will get mobbed, won't sketch at all, or very selectively. At Baltimore Comic Con, Greg Capullo wasn't sketching, and had a 3 book limit for signatures. His was by far the longest line I saw, with the possible exception of Jim Starlin or Dave Gibbons. Jim Lee rarely sketches, and when he does, it's always the quick and dirty. On the flip side, I heard he sketches for free, but he can afford to. Gene Ha will also do free sketches for kids.
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 12, 2014 22:47:15 GMT -5
Midtown Comics (or a Westfield, or a Mile High), which is basically an LCS
How many homes do you own? Surely not all of those businesses are local to you. Ha, no. I tend to think of an LCS as an independently-owned retailer who sells comics and related merchandise via a bricks-and-mortar facility, and is not backed by a large corporation. So that would disqualify large chains like Barnes and Noble, or online retailers like Amazon. Depending on the context of the discussion, whether or not they are local to me personally may not be relevant. I bring up retailers like Midtown, Westfield, and Mile High because even though the scale of their business is much larger than your typical LCS, and they have multiple locations as well as a strong online presence, under the previous definition they would still technically be counted as an LCS. The point I was trying to make was that, in most cases, when people talk about "supporting your LCS" they usually mean a small store, usually only one location, maybe two, that is generally at a disadvantage when it comes to things like price or deep inventory when compared to the corporate-backed entities. But does that ethos of "supporting your LCS" also apply to larger retailers? Do they really need our support like the little guys, or are they large enough that they can be considered a big box for all intents and purposes? There's a part of me that thinks the comic retailer market is heading towards greater consolidation, with smaller players slowly dying out and the larger stores taking up greater slices of the pie. In some ways that is sad. But in other ways, I think it might not be such a bad thing. These larger retailers, they must be doing something right to get so big and successful, no? And the ones that die out might be dying well-deserved deaths.
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 12, 2014 22:32:55 GMT -5
Great comic room! I love looking at collections that are elegantly displayed.
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 11, 2014 16:09:05 GMT -5
To clarify, I'm talking about my friend's private collection-not the store stock. And I seriously doubt his collection was/is the largest as well And just like his ownership of Action #1, he's not going to publicize his collection. I would think many collectors of valuable collector's items tend to want some anominity Are you talking about the Action #1 that sold most recently?
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 11, 2014 15:52:51 GMT -5
The problem I have is that once I got into digital comics, it completely changed my mindset as a reader. Actually, it started with the rise of the modern collected editions market; I simply lost interest in individual issues and maintaining storage boxes around 2000. Back when comics were 75 cents it was easy for me to justify taking a chance on something that could easily turn out to be mediocre, but now I just want the "good stuff" on my shelf: Kirby, Fantagraphic's collections, Marvel Masterworks, etc. I'm currently having this dilemma with the new Valiant titles. I was initially pulling all of them each month when they came out, but the $3.99 cover price, combined with the slow crawl of modern comic book decompression, pretty much made me give up on each after the first story arc. If they weren't going to floor me, they weren't worth the money. I noticed only recently that newer titles drop to about half price on mycomicshop.com after a year, so I started picking up the Valiant titles again in this way...and some of them are truly amazing. I can rationalize paying $2 an issue for them. BUT, if I buy the titles in this manner, I'm not supporting the publisher, and the publisher is a third party contender that absolutely needs the sales. So the books aren't worth it to me at $4 a pop, but I'm not actually supporting the publisher, nor my LCS, nor voting with my dollar, if I buy them at $2 a pop. The problem isn't the books -- it's the modern comic book price point. Anyway, I think I've taken us way off topic here. Shax, it's interesting that you raised this scenario. As much as I would agree with you that supporting a good LCS is the preferred way to get comics, this particular set of circumstances would seem to indicate that using a service like DCBS is not a bad option. As I see it, buying the Valiant titles from a place like DCBS would give you deep discounts over and above what any LCS could provide, while still enabling you to purchase the books as they come out. At the same time, since DCBS is presumably a Diamond-serviced account (and thus for all intents and purposes, equivalent to an LCS as far as sales data and flow of $$$ is concerned), it would still enable you to support the publisher. Which raises another interesting point -- some of these online pull services are run by LCSs, albeit perhaps LCSs that are not local to the customer. I think a lot of us can agree that it's important to support quality comic shops since they are a dying breed and provide a vital component of the comics ecosystem. So it's one thing to buy our books from an Amazon or other big-box equivalent vs. our local store. But aside from the geographic factor, is there any real difference between getting my pull list from my LCS vs. a Midtown Comics (or a Westfield, or a Mile High), which is basically an LCS (albeit a very large and successful one)? Or for that matter, is there any difference*** between buying locally vs. using another small LCS that is willing to offer me a deeper discount (enough to offset shipping) that's located remotely? ***By this I mean does it make any difference as far as staying true to the ethos of supporting a small business. Obviously it makes a difference in terms of user experience.
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 11, 2014 11:48:24 GMT -5
I think the qualification being made in the Guinness listing is that it is the largest privately owned collection, as opposed to institutionally-owned or retail inventory. Otherwise Chuck Rozanski could chime in and say that his 1,000,000+ inventory of comics is the world's largest collection. Store owners kinda blur the lines, since they often use their personal collection to stock their inventory and make the shelves look full. This guy is not a comics dealer, and all of his books were acquired for his personal reading.
Guinness records should always be taken with a grain of salt, since the record merely means it was the largest/fastest/whatever certified by the Guinness staff who usually come out to personally witness, record, enumerate, etc. the record. They can't certify what is not reported or what is not known to them. I'm sure there are probably people out there who have surpassed, or are capable of surpassing, records listed in Guinness, but they simply choose not to report them. Bob Bretall even acknowledges this in the interviews I linked:
Collecting is for fun not a competition!
I agree. I stumbled into this record when I realized that Guinness World Records had not yet created a category for largest comics collection. I didn’t set out to have this big a collection when I was 8. I submitted, did all the necessary work documenting & verifying my collection and am the 1st person to hold this particular record with Guinness. I fully expect someone to surpass me, but do the work! Don’t just shout out on internet message boards that “I have more comics than that guy”…
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 11, 2014 9:13:19 GMT -5
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 10, 2014 23:45:50 GMT -5
Saw this on Comicvine the other day: www.comicvine.com/articles/bob-bretall-holds-the-guinness-world-record-for-la/1100-149784/One of several details that blows my mind: Even with his large collection, he still buys 140 books A MONTH. That's got to be everything Marvel and DC publishes, plus a few indies thrown in for good measure. That translates into at least six long boxes added to his stash every year. I wonder how he finds time to read them all.
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 10, 2014 23:37:27 GMT -5
Quick update with my LCS: I stopped by today to pick up my weekly haul, and I mentioned to the main guy that works there that I've been a bit frustrated with the pull service. He explained that he had a teenager that's been working there helping him with the pulls, and that he's not the most detail-oriented employee. He said that another employee who used to work for him before was coming back to help out, and that he's much better, so I should see an improvement in the pull service.
I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and stick with them for now and see how things go. In spite of sounding like I'm anti-LCS at times, I really do want to support them and have them succeed, but they just need to give me good reasons for doing so.
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 8, 2014 20:59:12 GMT -5
As at least one other person has mentioned, I would also purchase Incredible Hulk #181, but not for the reason most people would. See, I hate Wolverine, but as I've written before, I have an OCD-like compulsion to complete runs once I've started them. So, if money were no object, I would use that wish to get a book that I wouldn't actually want to spend cash on, because I would not feel badly about buying an Iron Man #1 or Fantastic Four #48 with my own money at some point down the road. I guess you must be happy to know that Marvel is killing him off?
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 8, 2014 13:32:26 GMT -5
Nice comic room mrp. I have those same Alex Ross prints hanging in my office. That print of Clark ripping open his shirt is one of my favorite images. Besides the print, I also have the Superman Forever one-shot that uses that painting as the cover, as well as the 12-inch statue.
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 8, 2014 0:56:56 GMT -5
The simple math is that as sales decline cover prices will rise. It's what happens in niche hobbies because of the economics of scale. The next price point after $3.99 will not be $4.25 it will be $4.99. Just as a bit of a reference-for our studio-everytime we increase our print run by 50 or so copies, our price per copy drops anywhere from 10-20 cents, so in reverse every time we lower our print run it goes up 10 to 20 cents per copy-now our print runs are MUCH smaller than the big 2 and even most indy books Diamond deals with, so the price fluctuations are much larger for us, but there is significant increases in production costs the smaller the print runs go, and most publishers print to pre-orders based on Diamond orders, so prices will continue to rise the more sales drop on the floppies. Also expect trade prices to go up the less floppies sell, as floppy sales subsidize trade production costs and if they do not sell enough, the trades will go up to cover those additional costs. If you want to see what will happen to prices look at the war gaming market-up through the 80s war game sold in significant numbers and prices on theme were comparable to other hobby games. With the advent of computer games and other hobby games such as CCGs, the war game market shrunk and prices rose sharply. Now, a non-kickstarted war game will run you 5-6X the cost of another comparable size/production value hobby game simply because so few copies are made increasing the per unit production cost. It's the niche effect, which is the bottom end of that economy of scale. War games became so expensive and so few copies were being produced, they pretty much became direct order only and hobby/game stories stopped carrying them. The advent of crowd-funding changed the paradigm a bit, but not the fact that it's nearly impossible to find war games on the shelves of a game store or that those few that do hit the shelves are insanely expensive for what you get. It's a catch 22, the more expensive your cover price gets, the more sales drop, the more they drop, the higher prices go because production costs spiral up higher than the inflation rate everyone likes to point to when producing on a smaller scale. Inflation rate does impact cost on something like comics, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to increases in production costs on unit costs when scaling downwards in scale. -M PS look at it this way-there is usually a set cost to run a printing press, plus a price per copy. So if that set cost is x, and doesn't change if you print 1 copy or a thousand, the more you print the more you defray that cost. The longer a press runs, the less each copy costs, but X won't change no matter how long it runs. So if x =$5K, and price per copy is 20 cents at 100,000 copies but 30 cents at 50,000 copies, not only do you have to cover the extra 10 cents per copy if you only print 50K, you have to cover more of the $5k with each copy because the price per copy on that has doubled. Plus the cost per copy on creator salaries, delivery costs, etc. have doubled as well. If it dropped to 25K units produced, those costs have quadrupled compared to 100K, etc. etc. I think what you say is true, but I don't think it's so simple to attribute increased cover prices due to dwindling circulations. Marvel and DC are not, strictly speaking, publishers any more. They are IP licensing/merchendising/filmmaking houses that have a publishing division to act as an IP incubator. So Marvel and DC publishing are financially propped up by their own licensing. Even if the publishing side of each company wasn't making a lot of money, it's too valuable as a generator of IP for them to let atrophy. It would take a lot for them to be drastically affected by lower sales on their comic lines -- especially within the kinds of price increases we've seen from them in the window of time that those price increases have been instituted. I've been reading a lot about how the Direct Market is healthier than it's ever been in the last few years. This is also during the same period when Marvel and DC have been raking in the cash with their movies and licensing. I'm fairly confident that neither company is so strapped for cash to the point that raising the prices on their book by a dollar is going to be what saves them. Here's what I do think is at work. Consider this: 1) New 52 Superman was $2.99 for it's entire run, and struggled for most of it due to a rotating cast of creators. Then they announce Geoff Johns and John Romita Jr, two creators with major star power, are taking over the book. They make a huge marketing push. The book increases to $3.99 on the very issue that the new creative team takes over. 2) New 52 Batman started out $2.99. Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo have a monster hit with the Court of Owls storyline. Not even before the arc is finished, DC increases the price to $3.99. They assuage us by saying that back-up material will be included, but that goes away after a while when they realize people aren't leaving the book in droves. 3) Mark Waid relaunches Daredevil with a $2.99 price tag. The book is a critical darling, winning numerous awards, and sells well for them (though not on the level of a Batman). When the book relaunches again, with a new #1, Marvel increases the price to $3.99. I think the publishers will take every opportunity they can to increase the prices a bit more, starting with books that are proven hits, because they know those book will sell no matter what. Riskier or lower-tier character will still sell for less. But once they think people are used to paying $3.99 for book, it won't be long before those lower-tier titles will be increased too. Ms. Marvel seems to be a big hit for Marvel right now. I would not at all be surprised if they increased the book to $3.99 when the next relaunch happens. My own personal theory is that this is part of a larger phenomenon I see in America of people willing to shell out greater and greater percentages of their income for what amounts to "luxury". I remember when cable TV used to be a luxury. Now everybody has cable. It wasn't so long ago that smartphones were considered luxuries. Now kids have smartphones. And so it goes on...
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Post by Randle-El on Sept 7, 2014 23:40:40 GMT -5
I actually liked them because it provided at least some cursory explanation for what was going on. Back in the 80s when I was reading comics as a kid, I wasn't usually able to string together long runs, so more often than not I picked up haphazard issues here and there (thankfully there were a lot more-done-in-one stories back then). So those notes helped since I usually missed out on details from previous issues that I didn't have. And then on those rare occasions that I actually did have those issues, it made me feel like I was special for knowing what the characters were alluding to. Yes, I was easily pleased as a child.
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