I've been arguing about this on another board, because one of the Dark Horse exclusives he complains about was brought by Stan Sakai to pay for his wife's medical costs.

Dark Horse, and many other publishers who brought exclusives to the con did so in direct benefit of the creators. Chuck rips people who don't know any better off with overgraded and overpriced drek. Who am I going to support? Without creators there are no comics, without Chuck there would be no measurable change to my enjoyment of comics.

Nothing is stopping him from being competitive in the marketplace. He's had a decades long headstart and two once-in-a-lifetime million dollar windfalls to prop him up. His pricing, his grading, his selection, his overhead, and his website are all sub par, and that's why he's losing money while newcomers have completely dominated him in online distribution (Amazon, Heavyink, DCBS, Newkadia, TFAW, ect.) as well as in scoring exclusive variants (Jetpack, among others whose names escape me at the moment.)

He could have creators signing at his booths. IN fact, he could have creators debuting their work at his booth. On top of that, he could have networked himself to be a big enough player that he not only had exclusive covers, but exclusive comics, with completely exclusive content, like the Wizard magazine specials. He didn't go for it. Instead he bought up as much cherry picked overstock bargain bin junk from other dealers as he could and filled a giant warehouse with it and hired a hundred employees to care for it in a temperatire controlled climate in the middle of the desert. This is why he's not making money. His website doesn't look like it's been updated since 1999. He uses a pricing algorithm that has no reflection of easily available recent sales, just a complicated mechanism that prices according to inventory. Basically, the fewer copies of somthing he has, the more rare it is, and the higher the price is. That's on his junk, which is all you'll find on his website. No keys, no hot moderns, he's perpetually out of stock of everything but filler. He does carry around some high grade GA that he does not advertise. One book that he had priced at half a million dollars sold at auction for fifteen thousand. That's how off he is on his valuables. That's why his valuables don't sell. That's why he's not the guy with the wall full of Action #1's. Instead he had a wall full of Adventure Time. Overpriced, overgraded, and easily found cheaper and in higher grade at other dealer booths Adventure Time.

Chuck's website looks like websites I used to make in 1995 writing HTML code in Windows Notepad. I'm surprised he doesn't have an intro page that asks if you want a frames/no-frames version of his site.

Doug Sulipa has a pretty terrible website as well but it is still fun scrolling through and reading all the editorial comments. A good way to lose a couple of hours...

eBay has definitely changed things, but in my opinion for the better. I remember when shops pretty much had the monopoly on back issues. They wrote the guide and dictated the prices. Unless you were selling. Then it was all junk, even the good stuff. Getting a fair price for a collection or even a handful of back issues or a single key would be very difficult in the pre-internet days. Taking out paid adverts and hope someone local responds. Or just take what the shop will give you, and they were doing customers the way Gamestop does theirs.

Now demand really does reflect price. I think you may be on to something about Chuck though. He's found two of the best collections ever, sold them off, and used the proceeds to corner the market on completely unsellable drek. Back in the 70's and 80's a shop owner could pretty much dictate the cost and let it sit and sooner or later a local was going to dig in there. This was a time when every single back issue was sold for more than cover unless it was severely damaged. Everything else sold at NM guide value, even if it was a FN.

Those days changed but Chuck is still counting on the bargain bin stuff. Nevermind that it's all listed at about 300% it's value, it's also the stuff every other comic dealer has. He had (and still has if he makes some major changes) the opportunity to focus on the hard to find, high grade, and high demand merchandise. The stuff he would have trouble keeping in stock. He'd still have to price it accordingly, but he lost six grand at Comicon and I've heard of comic flippers making a six figure profit on a comic in a week. A single buy and sell. That's the high end of the spectrum, but it happens. That Action #1 that Nick Cage bought for 100k sold at auction for a million. And then a year or so later it sold again for two million. There's no guarantees in speculation but if I were to gamble I'd gamble on that over thousands of beat up copies of Commando Koalas.

Yeah. I have a feeling the majority of his sales come from people who either aren't huge comic collectors or who are not experts at internet shopping. People buying gifts for the comic collector they know. I think he used to be the first Google result for "Comics for sale" but I just double checked and now he's the fourth. I know I found his site Googling something similar. So for the first time internet comic book shopper who doesn't immediately think "eBay" he's where you end up.