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Oct 1, 2024 6:08:06 GMT -5
Ozymandias, tartanphantom, and 2 more like this
Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2024 6:08:06 GMT -5
I'll add some musings about the market for whatever they are worth.
I was introduced to the back issue market 40 years ago even though I started reading comics several years as a little kid before that. It all started with my first discovery of a comic book shop (versus the newsstand where I thought all comics were sold), and excitement that they might have Secret Wars #1 which kept getting advertised in my other books but my newsstand didn't carry it.
And they had Secret Wars...but they were already on issue #5. I sheepishly walked up to the counter and asked, "any chance you still have any earlier issues", sure in my mind that I probably had missed the boat forever. And then the reply, "oh yeah, they're in the back issue room". Back issue room?! What was this glorious place I had missed all my life, brimming with white boxes of sheer awesomeness. And what was that in a glass case away from the "commoner" books? A real life Golden Age Batman issue? Mind blown.
But I was quite happy to pick up Secret Wars #1-5 that day, they were still recent and priced modestly. I would lose myself quite a bit in that back issue room during many future visits. And for the most part, stuff was affordable even as a kid. And something that was quite out of reach like that Batman issue just added to the mystique, would I ever someday be able to afford a clearly special book like that? Stuff of dreams, it just added to the experience knowing it was out there.
Then I learned of "books taking off" like Alan Moore on Swamp Thing. All of a sudden #21 is on the display shelf at $20 because everyone was loving his run and how special that story was. It was a 75 cent book not too long ago! But there was an actual reason for the increase, something special had actually happened in terms of the content of the book itself. It still seemed fun for me that an early Miller Daredevil, some of the X-Men books from a few years back, etc., were cool enough to be highly sought after. You know it's funny, back on Swamp Thing #21, that book is relatively very affordable these days. And yet, if Disney announced a 5th tier character from back in the day is going to appear on a show that looks like it was filmed with an iPhone, everyone scrounges those dollar bin issues and slabs them and thinks they have something worth more than the "Anatomy Lesson". Now THAT has changed in the last 12/13 years.
But back to the mid-80's, fast forward a few years, now I'm a "sophisticated collector", I hang out at comic book shops, I know the cool books coming out that are "must haves". I'm bagging and boarding and looking for 1st printings of "the right books". And somehow in the midst of the B&W indy boom, I woke up one day and realized how much the books I've been buying flat out suck and I've been swept up in the collector community. Never again!! And I never went back to that mindset, but yeah, that part of today's mindset did exist back then.
However, that speaks more of the "instant collectibles" phenomenon versus older books that "become" collectible because, like Swamp Thing #21, the readers discovered quality versus it was "marketed" that way. And those are always bubbles that collapse, that's not new to the last 12/13 years, but I have no doubt the glut of that kind of material will fall out badly at some point.
Sticking with the more tried and true classic comics back issue markets up into the 2000's, it was fun, you could still get say Tales of Suspense #39 or Daredevil #1 all day long for relatively obtainable prices. Yeah, Action #1, AF #15, the REALLY big books were already up there, but still, even an FF #1 was not too far out of reach if you had some budget. And here's the thing, you'd go to a convention and you'd handle real books. No slab grades, no pop culture attendees who saw an MCU movie and now want to go into credit card debt so they can post an uninformed purchase on social media. No, you picked up a raw book, you judged for yourself how the condition looked, haggled on price, and more times than not, you found a price point that works for you and the seller (though in other cases hopefully knowing when to walk away). Even with the advent of the Internet, a similar dynamic with images having to suffice for the lack of a book in hand (or finding which dealers you could trust more for accurate non-imaged grading).
I mention slabbing not to opine on whether I "personally like it" or not, but purely objectively speaking it HAS changed the fundamental dynamics of the back issue market, and in the last 12/13 years has only continued to grow in dominance. I witnessed it in the 90's in the coins market which I've been active in for 30 years. It changed everything there too, and I remember thinking, well at least that couldn't happen with comic books because who would want a comic book you couldn't read (yeah, kind of got that one wrong). People buy the number despite all the cautions on that. How many people really buy an 8.0 slab over a 9.4 because the eye appeal is actually nicer to them? Some for sure, but when you give the keys to someone else on the final grading of a higher end book, you are just playing a different game at that point. And because so many people want in on the game, we now have a glut of slabbed books that just sit in inventory on dealer sites. Ever notice a nice eye appeal raw book of a key tends to sell really fast if the price is reasonable? It's because so many modern buyers don't know what to do. They don't know how to really "grade", they're just sitting there with a steam iron ready to destroy natural paper wave yet again. Whereas a savvy buyer will spot a good book all on their own and swoop in when the real buying opportunities present themselves.
And then the MCU and all that. Yeah, that was a gamechanger. Iron Man became an A list book overnight, and so on. You can't have the exponential explosion of the potential buyer base not be considered transformative. As for the pandemic, a once in a hundred year event certainly compounds things, we have hardly been in a "normal" situation since then and again the buying frenzy of people stranded at home and purchasing well beyond normal disposable income levels (methinks the historic credit card debt is another bubble) drove stratospheric record breaking prices achieved certainly in every collectibles market I follow (comics, coins, paper money, guitars).
Now, do the basic "fundamentals" apply in some sense, basic supply and demand, buyers markets versus sellers markets, the inherent "collector" mentality that has existed for decades as mentioned? Sure, you can still deconstruct the last 12/13 years and make all the parallels, I think one can say both "the speculative collector market has always existed" and "recent years have been ground-breaking in terms of impact" and they are not irreconcilable statements. I've lived through enough booms and busts in those various hobbies I've mentioned to attest to that, but at the same time, I also feel that more recent years for the reasons cited above have made the comic book back issue market more unrecognizable to me than ever before.
I was introduced to the back issue market 40 years ago even though I started reading comics several years as a little kid before that. It all started with my first discovery of a comic book shop (versus the newsstand where I thought all comics were sold), and excitement that they might have Secret Wars #1 which kept getting advertised in my other books but my newsstand didn't carry it.
And they had Secret Wars...but they were already on issue #5. I sheepishly walked up to the counter and asked, "any chance you still have any earlier issues", sure in my mind that I probably had missed the boat forever. And then the reply, "oh yeah, they're in the back issue room". Back issue room?! What was this glorious place I had missed all my life, brimming with white boxes of sheer awesomeness. And what was that in a glass case away from the "commoner" books? A real life Golden Age Batman issue? Mind blown.
But I was quite happy to pick up Secret Wars #1-5 that day, they were still recent and priced modestly. I would lose myself quite a bit in that back issue room during many future visits. And for the most part, stuff was affordable even as a kid. And something that was quite out of reach like that Batman issue just added to the mystique, would I ever someday be able to afford a clearly special book like that? Stuff of dreams, it just added to the experience knowing it was out there.
Then I learned of "books taking off" like Alan Moore on Swamp Thing. All of a sudden #21 is on the display shelf at $20 because everyone was loving his run and how special that story was. It was a 75 cent book not too long ago! But there was an actual reason for the increase, something special had actually happened in terms of the content of the book itself. It still seemed fun for me that an early Miller Daredevil, some of the X-Men books from a few years back, etc., were cool enough to be highly sought after. You know it's funny, back on Swamp Thing #21, that book is relatively very affordable these days. And yet, if Disney announced a 5th tier character from back in the day is going to appear on a show that looks like it was filmed with an iPhone, everyone scrounges those dollar bin issues and slabs them and thinks they have something worth more than the "Anatomy Lesson". Now THAT has changed in the last 12/13 years.
But back to the mid-80's, fast forward a few years, now I'm a "sophisticated collector", I hang out at comic book shops, I know the cool books coming out that are "must haves". I'm bagging and boarding and looking for 1st printings of "the right books". And somehow in the midst of the B&W indy boom, I woke up one day and realized how much the books I've been buying flat out suck and I've been swept up in the collector community. Never again!! And I never went back to that mindset, but yeah, that part of today's mindset did exist back then.
However, that speaks more of the "instant collectibles" phenomenon versus older books that "become" collectible because, like Swamp Thing #21, the readers discovered quality versus it was "marketed" that way. And those are always bubbles that collapse, that's not new to the last 12/13 years, but I have no doubt the glut of that kind of material will fall out badly at some point.
Sticking with the more tried and true classic comics back issue markets up into the 2000's, it was fun, you could still get say Tales of Suspense #39 or Daredevil #1 all day long for relatively obtainable prices. Yeah, Action #1, AF #15, the REALLY big books were already up there, but still, even an FF #1 was not too far out of reach if you had some budget. And here's the thing, you'd go to a convention and you'd handle real books. No slab grades, no pop culture attendees who saw an MCU movie and now want to go into credit card debt so they can post an uninformed purchase on social media. No, you picked up a raw book, you judged for yourself how the condition looked, haggled on price, and more times than not, you found a price point that works for you and the seller (though in other cases hopefully knowing when to walk away). Even with the advent of the Internet, a similar dynamic with images having to suffice for the lack of a book in hand (or finding which dealers you could trust more for accurate non-imaged grading).
I mention slabbing not to opine on whether I "personally like it" or not, but purely objectively speaking it HAS changed the fundamental dynamics of the back issue market, and in the last 12/13 years has only continued to grow in dominance. I witnessed it in the 90's in the coins market which I've been active in for 30 years. It changed everything there too, and I remember thinking, well at least that couldn't happen with comic books because who would want a comic book you couldn't read (yeah, kind of got that one wrong). People buy the number despite all the cautions on that. How many people really buy an 8.0 slab over a 9.4 because the eye appeal is actually nicer to them? Some for sure, but when you give the keys to someone else on the final grading of a higher end book, you are just playing a different game at that point. And because so many people want in on the game, we now have a glut of slabbed books that just sit in inventory on dealer sites. Ever notice a nice eye appeal raw book of a key tends to sell really fast if the price is reasonable? It's because so many modern buyers don't know what to do. They don't know how to really "grade", they're just sitting there with a steam iron ready to destroy natural paper wave yet again. Whereas a savvy buyer will spot a good book all on their own and swoop in when the real buying opportunities present themselves.
And then the MCU and all that. Yeah, that was a gamechanger. Iron Man became an A list book overnight, and so on. You can't have the exponential explosion of the potential buyer base not be considered transformative. As for the pandemic, a once in a hundred year event certainly compounds things, we have hardly been in a "normal" situation since then and again the buying frenzy of people stranded at home and purchasing well beyond normal disposable income levels (methinks the historic credit card debt is another bubble) drove stratospheric record breaking prices achieved certainly in every collectibles market I follow (comics, coins, paper money, guitars).
Now, do the basic "fundamentals" apply in some sense, basic supply and demand, buyers markets versus sellers markets, the inherent "collector" mentality that has existed for decades as mentioned? Sure, you can still deconstruct the last 12/13 years and make all the parallels, I think one can say both "the speculative collector market has always existed" and "recent years have been ground-breaking in terms of impact" and they are not irreconcilable statements. I've lived through enough booms and busts in those various hobbies I've mentioned to attest to that, but at the same time, I also feel that more recent years for the reasons cited above have made the comic book back issue market more unrecognizable to me than ever before.
