My preferences have changed- these days I despise the flat, overly bright, garish hideousness of 99% of Marvel and DC Silver Age reprints. Before I started buying 60s and 70s singles I didn't realise how lifeless the garish flat colouring looked in reprints. I'll come back in a couple of mins and edit in some examples.

You're definitely right about Silver Age prices generally going up and up. They would have proven better investments than anticipated (while 99% of 90s comics onwards have so far not gone up at all- mostly down!)

Here's an example: Original / faithful textured restoration / garish lazy recolouring


I can't stand how everything ends up looking flat, fake and plastic. 

It's been 4 months since I came across an auction where price per issue was below $1. Still, up to $2 each is cheap nowadays. Many auctions begin with $1, so I don't think this is eBay, this is the market.

I'd say the reprint you dislike is more faithful to the original color. It looks like traditional Galactus purple, dunno why it went reddish on the first reprint. The problem isn't a recoloring in this case, but paper and process used to apply the original colors, which result in a different end color. This should be taken into account, I wonder why they don't.

As far as job lots of comics go, hasn't eBay utterly dominated that market?

12/13 years ago, before this price boom I've just become aware of in the last week or two (yeah, I've been out of the loop), I picked up the complete Howard the Duck run for £10, for example. (Howard the Duck comics being the highlights of the 'junk' lot I linked to).

Edit: My favourite lots were long runs- FF: 150-199, 200-249, 250-299 etc. I bought a bunch of those!! These days you'd just be competing with dealers looking to separate them up, rather than those that collect for pleasure

Right place right time is super important, for sure- still great deals to be had. I've had some cracking bargains over the years, and very few real let downs. A few of my best runs of classic titles all came from the same individual I stumbled across on eBay. He'd collected damn near every major title from 1968-1988, not missing an issue, and I bought one of the first things he sold. He told me what else he was selling and I ended up buying at least 800 or 900 comics from him. I'd have actually bought more from him, maybe twice as many again, but he was extremely hard to deal with and was shouting and ranting and raving when we spoke on the phone. I was happy to laugh it off while deals were working out, but he messed me about by cherry picking away some key issues and also demanding I stop paying via eBay/PayPal, which was another red flag. Still, delighted with what I got!

? Of course. My point being that old comics are MUCH more of a business than they were 12/13 years ago. The vast majority of people seem to want to buy the comics for different reasons to me- I want to read them.

This is all absolutely correct. And describes the way I bought back issue comics in the 60's and 70's. Popular fanzines of that time such as Rocket Blast Comic Collector and Comic Book Buyers Guide were mostly adds from bigger dealers, small classified ads from other individuals. These were monthly pubs, 60-100 pages each and published for several decades. During the 80's with comic shops now popping up, many fanzines began publishing regular articles and columns on  advice for collecting back issues

Yes prices have gone up. Prices always go up. In 1986 I was getting Kirby Fourth World books for 50 cents a pop out of the basement storage of my local shop. Ten years later those books were commanding premium prices. Nothing about that had anything to do with slabbing or the nature of the business changing, it had to do with collectors getting older and now wanting the books of their youth and that youth was the 70s not the 40s, 50s, 60s. As they got older, they had more disposable income, their search for the books increased demand and increased demand always results in higher prices on collectibles. The internet changed things int hat it created an environment where demand could affect prices over a wider area, but it didn't change the essential model of demand driving prices. And demand can be fickle. How many hot 80s books skyrocketed in price right after release in the 80s (see Adventurers for one example) that have been languishing in bargain bins since the 90s. Why were they hot? Artificial demand, usually from advertisers like East Coast Comics and the like putting ads in comic hyping those books and selling them at inflated prices, getting people to buy in to those books and those prices for a time, thinking they were hot and could be resold for better prices and then when folks realized there was no actual end customers who wanted those books, they crashed hard. It was the black and white boom/bust of the 80s, all driven by people who were collecting for things other than to read the books. 90s speculator boom, sale deal. Comics repeated their mistakes because they lacked institutional and/or generational memory. Slabbing, same deal, movie and TV announcements fueling demand that peaks and crashes...same deal. But the common thread-people weren't buying books to read, they were buying to resell and make money and then it was apparent there were no actual end customers for those books, there were market corrections. It was happening in the 80s. It was happening in the 90s. It was happening in the early 2000s, it was happening in the 20teens, and it's happening now. The minutiae changes, the principle that lots of folks but back issues not to read but as a business looking to flip them for profit hasn't changed. Robert Bell was buying books to resell in the 60s. Gary Dolgoff. Chuck from Mile High. Buddy Saunders of Lone Star. All these guys were around buying books to resell long before slabbing, long before the internet, so no, I don't think things have changed significantly in the last 10 years. There were people buying and bagging and boarding comics without ever reading them long before CGC slabbed their first book. And I would argue that CGC is a result of that trend in comic collecting and not the cause of it. There wouldn't be a market for slabbed books if there wasn't already a significant number of collectors who were buying and selling books for profit not reading who would make use of such a service. If not, they wouldn't have had any customers available to launch their service. In fact, I knew one collector who owned a complete run of X-Men from #1 (1963) until the issues coming out circa 2012. He had discovered X-Men via the cartoon and decided to collect all the comics, but he has never read a single comic book in his lie. Never cracked open a single copy of a comic he bought. He had them all, and when he learned about CGC was pure joy that he could get all his books slabbed to display and never have to worry about them ever being damaged by someone actually opening one to read, and that he wished it had been around in the 90s when he started buying X-Men comics.

If you never noticed the same behaviors and patterns of collecting we have seen since 2012 in the hobby of the 80s, 90s, and early 200s, you're just not looking hard enough or in the right places, because it was all there on display. Internet may have allowed it to increase in scale and make it easier, slabbing too, but those were enabling existing behaviors, not creating new ones. They were effects and outgrowths of existing behavior patterns in the hobby, not causal factors of new ones.

As for prices going up-when have prices not gone up in comic collecting as a whole? And what factors do you consider legitimate reasons for prices to go up? What are legitimate reasons for pries to go up that aren't tied to increases in demand, whether natural or manipulated by sellers in the market? And no, I don't see it as a pile of weird coincidences. I see it as a continuation of the same behavior patterns manifesting over and over again within the collecting field because people willfully or not deny the existence of those patterns of behavior over and over again and collectors keep repeating the same mistakes because of it. How many boom/bust crashes based on speculation do we have to have that drive shops out of business before we learn our lesson. How many times over the decades do we have to get fooled by "hot books" before we learn to see through it? It happened in the 70s, It happened in the 80s, It happened in the 90s, It happened in the early and mid 2000s, it's happening in the 2020s. Are prices higher? Yes. Even before the pandemic affected pricing of goods everywhere-in what area of entertainment were prices lower than they had been? Comics were mass market product. Now they are a niche product. Niche products are always more expensive than a comparable mass market product. That's not a change of recent vintage. Comics became a niche product when they lost their discover market an became available only in niche destination shops via the direct market only. Much of what is happening now with the pricing of comics as new releases is the result of the poor decisions and short term thinking made by the industry in the late 80s, early 90s and early 2000s. You could see it happening if you were paying attention and understood the factors at play.

And as far as back issue prices-they have always fluctuated based on demand, and spikes in demand caused spikes in prices. And when the demand shrinks, prices go down in market corrections, but rarely do they go all the way down to pre-demand surge prices. And when the next surge happens, they go up again. As to what causes these surges-it can be anything-Overstreet labelling a book as having low distribution (which is misleading) or scarce (often inaccurate), some Overstreet advisor touting the book as the next big thing, some retailer running ads in new comics touting the book as the next big thing, some zine like CBG, Wizard, or Amazing Heroes touting an artist as the next big thing sending people scurrying for books they work on, some new character getting touted as the next big thing in those zines, a movie or a TV show features a character, an old character getting a spit shine and putting them in the spotlight, Stan Lee appearing on the Home Shopping Network hawking books, a newspaper article reporting on a publisher's plan to kill a beloved storyline, etc. etc. They all are things driving demand, some occur naturally, some are manipulated by publishers, retailer, creators, sellers, etc. It's been happening since collecting comics has been a hobby. The details change, the behaviors are the same.

-M