
Those Comics in Your Basement? Probably Worthless - rubikscube
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/those-comics-basement-probably-worthless-095537403.html
======
swang
I just want to post this from the baseball card collecting perspective. Comic
books and baseball cards share a pretty similar correlation between their
values and their declines in the 80s to 2000s. The glut actually started in
the mid 80s and not the 90s. And due to waning interest from kids due to both
video games and the Internet their markets have slowly declined. The only
difference is baseball cards have escalated to being essentially a
lottery/gambling game while comics actually still have some value as
entertainment itself.

Basically card collecting now is a big gamble. You can buy $100 packs and they
either have some common value cards worth maybe $5 or you might pull a great
card that you can probably sell for $5K. Only a small percentage of people
come out of it as a "winner" but because of the rush people get from pulling
these special cards they continue to be bought. And even though $100 seems out
of reach for kids, I have seen tons of videos on YouTube of kids who buy these
packs.

And since there is only one company now that can produce baseball cards (out
of maybe 3-4 total card producing companies), they need to make their money
back from buying the license from MLBPA/MLB so they essentially glut the
market with tons and tons of different sets. Allen Ginter, Gypsy Queen, Bowman
(there was ~3 different sets of Bowman released the last time I collected, and
Bowman generally is for rookie/minor leaguers and since most of them will
probably not make it to the majors, the set is going to contain a lot of
useless cards/inserts), Topps, and some other sets they sell at like >$500 per
pack.

And the people on Craigslists who think their sealed 1992 Topps sets are worth
any more than ~$5 or people who are selling those huge boxes of 80s/90s cards
for $200 is laughable. You could literally burn half the world's supply of
80s/90s baseball cards and those cards would still probably be just as
worthless. Just a huge, huge, worthless glut of cardboard.

Edit: Took out roulette comment, made no sense.

~~~
notdrunkatall
Once some category of goods whose value depends solely on rarity are widely
perceived as collectibles, people rush out to buy them, and prices initially
increase. After a while, demand drops to near zero, supply is huge, and their
value goes in the toilet.

Once people think something is a collectible, it's no longer wise to collect
it.

~~~
wmf
That's a corollary of the Trough of No Value theory:
[http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...](http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/02/the-
trough-of-no-value.html)

------
mililani
Yeah, I've suspected this for a long time. I'm 40 years old now, and my
cousins and I used to collect comics when we were in elementary school all the
way to high school. We sometimes would buy collector's items off the top walls
in comic book stores (comic fans know what this is about) that were higher
priced and more valuable. But, mostly, we would find a comic series we really
like, follow it, and then when we knew a good story or "episode" was coming
out, we would buy several of those comics. Some that I can remember from
memory are:

1) Super Spiderman vs Hulk penned by Mcfarlane 2) Punisher vs Wolvering series
3) Xmen mutant massacre cross over series

These comics of my youth are still tucked away at my parent's house with acid
free backing and plastic for the past 20+ years. Anyways, sometimes I will go
into comic book stores to peruse, and I'm often happy to discover that many of
the comics my cousins and I thought would make the big time wall are now
there. However, the big shock is, the prices they command are far below what
we thought they would be. Some are $5-10. A few maybe $15. I mean, for the
price we paid, I think it was $1.25 or 1.50, that may sound pretty decent.
But, that's only half the story. Most comic book shops will only pay 50% of
the market value of any collectables. So, that $10 comic will only probably
net $5. After 20 years, it's not really worth it.

But, there is one happy outcome of all this. My love of finding good stories
that I think one day will become worth something has led me to stocks and
investing. I think my comic book collector mentality translated well to stock
picking and investing. I love finding a good business story and investing in
it. That's how I found Netflix, Google, and Tesla. These companies made me FAR
more money than any comic book has or probably ever will.

~~~
mistermann
Any "unknown" stocks out there you like now?

~~~
mililani
Not nearly as much as before. I think for the most part, most equities are
fairly valued and even over priced. Although, I still do like some BAC
warrants. Some of the insurers and reinsurers look undervalued (most are
trading at 75% of book value), but the insurance markets have been in a soft
market (pricing power) for a while now, and there is no idea when markets will
start to "harden". It will take a major catastrophe for that to happen. Some
of the better managed ones, like Fairfax Financial, are fairly priced.

So, to answer, no, not really. I'm actually mostly in cash now.

------
ideonexus
I was volunteering in a comic shop when the bubble burst. At the time we
blamed it completely on the sudden availability of reprints. Marvel realized
they were sitting on a wealth of intellectual property and started pumping out
graphic novels compiling the most valuable story arcs (this plus the movies
made their stock prices shoot to the Moon). Then they started producing DVDs
with entire collections of comics in PDF format. I bought a DVD from Marvel
with the entire history of Uncanny X-men comics for $40 (DVD's now worth
$200). A week later, I donated my entire X-men print collection to the shop
owner.

[http://www.amazon.com/40-Years-X-Men-Complete-
Collection/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/40-Years-X-Men-Complete-
Collection/dp/B000E28UT2/)

There are a lot of hard feelings about this in the comic-collector community.
I did lose years of what I expected to be an investment. At the same time, I
get to read the entire history of Hulk comics at a fraction of the cost.

------
loudmax
I have a couple of boxes of Magic: The Gathering cards going back to
Antiquities and Arabian Nights. I'm counting on them being worth their _weight
in gold_ when I retire. Or maybe I should invest in tulips...

~~~
debacle
Those are both worth something TODAY, but within the next 5-10 years, paper
Magic cards are going to be less and less valuable - the game is moving to
mostly online play, and so you're going to only have interest from collectors.

My advice would be to sell them now. They aren't going to be worth much more
than they are now in 10 years.

~~~
qdog
I took that advice about 10 years ago, unfortunately.

Currently Wizards of Coast has a no-reprint policy on most of the old high-
value cards. While I don't know that I would invest in them, until that policy
changes the value of those old cards is pretty steady. Paper is still the best
way to play Magic, so not sure when this will change.

Also, currently, Wizard's attempts at making software is like a model for the
federal healthcare rollout, ie: very bad.

One other difference in Magic, is that people actually use them to play games.
There were actually a lot of older cards I still have that were nearly
worthless for a while that shot up in value over the last few years as a
certain version of Magic (EDH) became popular.

Still, not something I would buy for investment purposes, but I buy a lot of
magic cards just because I enjoy playing the game. Cardboard Crack, as my
friends like to call it. Also, once a junky, always a junky, they all come
back after a while.

------
tzs
Let's let our inner villain run free for a bit, and see if we can find a way
to cheat.

Suppose we were to buy a good sized supply of paper of the same kind and from
the same manufacturer that Marvel prints its books on. And suppose we were
also do the same thing with the ink Marvel uses, and the staples Marvel uses.

Then we wait 40 or 50 years, and look back to identify the books that turned
out to be very valuable in hind site, but did not appear so when they were
new. For instance, books like Journey into Mystery #83. Journey into Mystery
was an anthology series. It had started out, I believe, as horror, and slowly
changed to science fiction. In #83, one of the stories was of a Norse god,
Thor, in our world.

Nothing about that stood out to alert people that this was the start of
something big, and so maybe they would want to buy extra copies to preserve.
Just another new character in a book with new characters all th time. But this
one WAS different...more Thor stories appeared, and he became a feature in
every issue, and gradually they stopped having non-Thor stories and the book
became The Mighty Thor.

Anyway, we look back and identify a book that we now see was another Journey
into Mystery #83 (which, BTW, is worth something like $50k now). Then we
reprint it, on our 50 year old paper, using our 50 year old ink, and stapled
with our 50 year old staples. Then we age it for a few years (I'm guessing
that ink diffuses some through the paper and so experts could easily tell if a
page has been freshly printed).

Is this a viable evil plan?

~~~
valleyer
So you've just described counterfeiting. What am I missing?

~~~
tzs
Yes, I've described counterfeiting. The question is whether or not it would
work.

Generally, physical items undergo somewhat predictable physical changes as
they age, allowing experts to determine the approximate age of an item. To
counterfeit with an acceptable level of risk, we need our counterfeit to
appear to be the right age. I'm asking if using authentic period paper, ink,
and staples would be sufficient, or are there aging effects that depend on how
long the ink has actually been applied to the paper?

------
mathattack
When the wife threatened to pitch them, I shipped them all to my nephews. I
hope they got more psychic value than the couple of dollars I could have
gotten locally. I expect my kids to get them back when they're a little older.

I think a couple things kill the prices:

\- A lot were produced.

\- It's much easier to find and sell them. (Thank you eBay)

\- Softcopy as a medium doesn't appeal to today's buyers.

I wonder if Comixology will go after older properties.

~~~
vidarh
> I wonder if Comixology will go after older properties.

They already are. They do have _some_ issues going back to the 30's. It's just
spotty, and generally seems to be driven by "special events", e.g. they seem
to have filled in bits and pieces related to Guardians of the Galaxy with the
newest series in the run-up to the movie.

Also, I expect they're also affected by poor archiving in early years - I know
some publishers outside the US used to just dump excess stock and sell off or
give away originals without ensuring they had proper archive copies.

Many of them have had to buy individual issues from collectors when wanting to
do reprints etc.

------
loso
If you want to see this same event happen in real time in the next few years
then look at the sneaker market. The same thing that happened with Comics and
Baseball Cards is going to happen in the sneaker market.

Nike and other sneaker companies are pumping out so called "collectable"
sneaker to sneaker heads. These people, tempted to say kids but I know too
many adults who do this as well, buy the sneakers at $200 and never wear them.
Or there are some like the kid in this story
[http://abcnews.go.com/Business/teenage-sneakerheads-bet-
thou...](http://abcnews.go.com/Business/teenage-sneakerheads-bet-thousands-
high-stakes-sneakers-trade/story?id=19393834) who camp out and buy them only
to resell them on eBay right away for double to triple the price.

There is definitely a bubble going on here and someone like me who is very
interested in economics and have many friends who are into the sneaker scene,
but not as hardcore as a lot of these people, it is going to be interesting to
watch it go pop.

~~~
redsparrow
That reminds me of this story of a family who "invested" $100,000 in Beanie
Babies:

[http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/how-one-family-
went-b...](http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/how-one-family-went-
bankrupt-spending-100000-beanie-babies)

------
Asparagirl
See also: buying a house to live in with your family versus buying a house as
an "investment".

My pay-off on my comics, collected during that crazy mid-1990's boom, is that
my kids are getting three long boxes of 1980's-1990's Chris Claremont and
Peter David awesomeness and fun.

~~~
jimhart3000
This. I have a 7k-ish collection in a storage unit near my family's homes. I
worked in comics retail in the late 90s and had no expectation these would
ever net me anything more than enjoyment. When my kids are a few years older
I'll actually shell out the money to transport them to where I live now and
hopefully the stories can be as magical for them as they were for me.

~~~
MartinCron
I knew a kid growing up who had one of those spinning comic book racks like
you find in a corner store _in his bedroom_ that was fully packed with great
comics. That totally made him _the coolest kid ever_.

Pay it forward.

------
tzs
I wonder if anyone has ever tried collection college textbooks as an
investment? Apostol's two volume "Calculus" was $20 per volume when I bought
them at Caltech in 1977. Each was in its second edition then (and had been for
about 10 years).

The second edition is still the current edition, and still in use at Caltech
and a few other top schools...and is around $220 for volume I and around $170
for volume II. (Apparently, Apostol never got the word that calculus books
need to be revised every year to keep up with the rapid pace of research in
freshman mathematics...)

That's 6.8% growth per year for volume I, which is not bad.

------
ashleycutler
These articles are always written from the same perspective: collectors who
invested in a particular item when the market for that item was at its peak
and now they are _shocked_ that it didn’t retain its value. It isn’t all that
different from buying Dell Stocks in 2000. You don’t realize it is a bubble
until it is over.

From running Zistle.com I can say that in sports cards at least, these
'bubbles' in price are often correlated to current events. I can guarantee
there is a spike in the prices for Ortiz cards right now and in 6-12 months
they will go back to normal.

These articles totally miss the fact that the savvy collectors in the market
are always the ones selling the cards during the peak and not buying. During
Linsanity, there were Jeremy Lin basketball cards selling for several thousand
dollars and now you can pick them up for a couple of bucks. Savvy collectors
knew that this was their moment to make money and they took advantage of it.
That was the peak of the market. If you want to know who is profiting in the
collectibles market, it is the people who pay close enough attention to what
is hot right now and not people who wrap items up in their closet for 20
years.

------
3pt14159
People pay for things they loved from thier childhood. Not things they
collected _during_ thier childhood.

Right now? Nintendos and stuff like that. Not comicbooks. In the future? I
don't know. Digital goods lack scarcity, but if I would have to guess I would
say a nice assembly of all the stuff they may have thought they lost (like the
blog I deleted after I entered university).

------
brk
On a similar note, my friend's toddler is currently enjoying her "retirement
account", a large tupperware container of Beanie Babies, several with the tags
still attached.

------
ilamont
This made me think about LPs. I bought my last in 1999 (Pavement's _Wowee
Zowee_ and a used copy of ZZ Top's _Tres Hombres_ ). It was an impulse buy and
they were cheap. At the time, I thought that LPs would go the way of 8-track
and reel-to-reel audio, another old format eclipsed by the new (CDs and mp3s,
which were just starting to become popular in the late 90s). I was wrong.
People still buy LPs, and even more interesting to me is they are not just
folks over 40.

That said, I noticed that most used LPs are still dirt cheap -- while there is
demand, it seems that it's just not large enough to put a dent in the supply.
It also seems very difficult to sell old collections unless you truly have
some rarities or good music that never made the digital transition).

~~~
teddyh
> People still buy LPs

Effectively, they don’t. It just _looks_ like they do, because compared to
CDs, LPs do sell. _But_ , nobody buys CDs or _any_ physical media with music
anymore.

~~~
diydsp
I'm not sure if your post is sarcasm or uncritical listening to the internet
telling you people only buy music on the internet, but a quick glance at
wikipedia [1] shows the ratio of physical to digital sales varies greatly by
country. Even in the United states, the ratio is about 1:2. In Japan, it's
4:1. In Germany it's almost 5:1.

Physical media are still a $1.5 Billion/year business in the U.S. alone.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry)
go about halfway down the page.

~~~
teddyh
Personally, I am just observing the complete vanishing of brick-and-mortar
stores for physical media of music, and extrapolating. I could certainly be
mistaken.

~~~
vidarh
I don't actually know where to find one any more. I live in Londons most
populous borough. I know there must be some in Central London still, probably
in one of the locations I used to go to a decade ago, but the largest chains I
used to go to have all gone bankrupt.

------
zxlk21e
As a guy with a comic book marketplace startup
([http://comicswap.com](http://comicswap.com)) - I'd have to disagree. Some of
the recent prices fetched for key golden age issues are absolutely insane and
many of the currently running series are fetching ridiculous prices (Image
comics in particular, like The Walking Dead).

However, the bronze age - yep. Very little there worth much.

------
withad
The article only touches on it briefly but I think the difference between most
issues and the few "gold-plated issues with megawatt cultural significance" is
key. People saw _Actions Comics_ #1 and _Amazing Fantasy_ #15 selling for huge
amounts and got the idea that #1 issues and first appearances were somehow
inherently worth a lot of money, when in fact it's the cultural importance of
Superman and Spider-Man that gave them their value.

Even if there weren't a million bagged-and-boarded copies of _Rob Liefeld 's
Bludd Gunn McShootDeath and the X-Murder Y-Bunch_ #0.5 sitting in people's
basements, it still wouldn't be worth anything because hardly anybody cares
about those characters. Even classic runs from the 80s and 90s (Walt
Simonson's _Thor_ , Morrison's _JLA_ , _Sandman_ , etc.) haven't had anything
like the cultural impact and recognition that major Golden and Silver Age
titles did outside of comic circles.

------
ericcholis
Probably is the key word here, but there might be some gems in that stash.
It's worth it to do your due diligence and check these things out for
yourself. I work in both the Sports Card and Comic Book industry, and I can
say that I've seen $100,000 worth of cards/comic being purchased moments after
turning down a collection that wouldn't be worth $5.

------
devNoise
As the article states the newer stuff does not have the scarecity that the
Golden Age and thus and not worth as much.

~~~
ZanderEarth32
Interestingly enough, there are a few books that are new but can command a
decent price for such a new book. For example, a first edition printing of
Saga #1 which is just a couple of years old can fetch $75 or so, with a $4
cover price. It really has a lot to do with the creators of the book, and the
number of issues printed during that first run.

The 90's killed much of the comic book collecting market. Marvel and DC fed
speculators hunger for variant covers, limited editions and multiple lines of
books with the same characters.

I can remember going to a comic book store in the early 90s when the Death of
Superman issue came out, hoping to snag one of the coveted issues sporting an
all black bag with a bloody S on the front. My 8 year old self was basically
laughed out the door, saying they'd all be bought up or were selling for
multiples of the cover price. That really killed a lot of my spirit for
collecting. I just recently got back into comics, but purely for the enjoyment
of reading them, so I buy digitally nearly 100% of the time.

Digital comics are interesting, they remove the speculating, collecting and
coveting of comics for some perceived monetary value and put the content front
and center, which is where it should be.

------
bane
I had a conversation a few years ago with the brother of a guy who owns a
small chain of comic book stores in my area. I told him I might look at
selling off my small collection of a few hundred comics. He waived me off of
it.

"My brother has a sizable warehouse full of old comics. It's just yet more
inventory he needs to move. You'll be lucky to get $1 a book."

It sounds like things are even more dire these days.

The collectible market comes and goes, I'll just wait till it comes back
around in 20 or 30 years I guess.

------
taude
I really think a lot of this has to do with the abundance of digital
availability.

When I was a kid, we were forced to buy the rare commodity to enjoy the story.
We'd even pool our money to do so. (I have a friend that had every IronMan up
until about 1998, for example). Now, you can find out about backstory by
reading Wikipedia. And you can either buy legitimate digital copies, or
download illegal versions...

------
infocollector
Perhaps you want to keep it forever ?:
[http://bookscanner.us](http://bookscanner.us)

------
segmondy
well, most collectibles are worthless, that's just the way it is. collecting
things is not a way to get rich.

~~~
_delirium
Particularly anything that people already see as collectible and carefully
preserve; leads to a large supply of good-condition items.

Pocket watches are one interesting example. The majority of nice old pieces
from the late 19th century are worth only $50-$80. It's something that seemed
obviously valuable to people so nobody threw them away, even once they went
out of fashion in actual use. So there are literally millions of pocket
watches out there still, since everyone has their grandfather's old watch. And
they regularly appear on eBay, keeping the market supplied. Even if a large
proportion are cannibalized for parts or lost, it's still enough supply that
collectors' demand doesn't push prices very high.

------
DanBC
What happens if someone aggressively buys the sort of rare (but not ultra
rare, significant) collections, and burns them?

Is that enough to drive up the price?

~~~
AJ007
There is no need to burn them, you just put them in a box and they are
effectively off the market.

If you examine the behavior of certain other thin markets, like art, this
happens. The action of paying a record high price for something is because you
own more of that item.

It may happen with financial markets as well, but it requires a whole lot more
money.

My suggestion for any collectibles is first see if you can even find the item
available on ebay, amazon, abebooks, etc. If its not, then that is a good
sign. If there are a lot available and they aren't selling (watch the listing
a week), then its worth a lot less than the asking prices.

------
MrZongle2
I can't say I'm terribly surprised. I bought into the hype back in the '90s
and have about five boxes worth of comics in my basement that I feared parting
with for years since they would "eventually be worth something".

Now I let my kids read them. Granted, I still say "ok, wash your hands before
you read them and put them back in the sleeves when you're done". I'd like to
think that even if they're almost worthless 20 years from now in a less-than-
pristine state, _somebody_ besides myself has enjoyed them.

~~~
MartinCron
Bravo. Whenever I think about all of those comics, many of them great reading
material, stored away to be forever unread based on some notion of "value"
makes me sad.

I taught my kids how to read the same way that I learned, reading Spidey Super
Stories comics from the 1970s. They were just a few bucks at my local comic
book shop, and worth every penny.

------
drpgq
Huh. I live in Hamilton and knew Big B was a decent comic book store, but
didn't know it was that big.

------
fishercs
my dad was a comic nut, collected everything... he sold literally a pool table
full of paper grocery bags stacked with comics for I believe 25-30k... so the
market collapsed i take it?

------
durkie
clearly their tween selves should have invested in baseball cards

------
AsymetricCom
That 7-figure stock portfolio? worthless.

~~~
notdrunkatall
Actually, it's worth 7 figures.

~~~
AsymetricCom
and those figures are worthless

~~~
notdrunkatall
Actually, they're worth about 7 figures.

~~~
AsymetricCom
Circular logic is what keeps this economy going (in circles, around the drain)

~~~
notdrunkatall
Whatever you say, bub.

