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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Edit: Took out roulette comment, made no sense.
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:<p>1) Super Spiderman vs Hulk penned by Mcfarlane
2) Punisher vs Wolvering series
3) Xmen mutant massacre cross over series<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/40-Years-X-Men-Complete-Collection/dp/B000E28UT2/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/40-Years-X-Men-Complete-Collection/dp/...</a><p>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.
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 <i>weight in gold</i> when I retire. Or maybe I should invest in tulips...
Let's let our inner villain run free for a bit, and see if we can find a way to cheat.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Is this a viable evil plan?
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.<p>I think a couple things kill the prices:<p>- A lot were produced.<p>- It's much easier to find and sell them. (Thank you eBay)<p>- Softcopy as a medium doesn't appeal to today's buyers.<p>I wonder if Comixology will go after older properties.
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.<p>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 <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Business/teenage-sneakerheads-bet-thousands-high-stakes-sneakers-trade/story?id=19393834" rel="nofollow">http://abcnews.go.com/Business/teenage-sneakerheads-bet-thou...</a> who camp out and buy them only to resell them on eBay right away for double to triple the price.<p>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.
See also: buying a house to live in with your family versus buying a house as an "investment".<p>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.
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).<p>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...)<p>That's 6.8% growth per year for volume I, which is not bad.
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 <i>shocked</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
People pay for things they loved from thier childhood. Not things they collected <i>during</i> thier childhood.<p>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).
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.
This made me think about LPs. I bought my last in 1999 (Pavement's <i>Wowee Zowee</i> and a used copy of ZZ Top's <i>Tres Hombres</i>). 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.<p>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).
As a guy with a comic book marketplace startup (<a href="http://comicswap.com" rel="nofollow">http://comicswap.com</a>) - 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).<p>However, the bronze age - yep. Very little there worth much.
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 <i>Actions Comics</i> #1 and <i>Amazing Fantasy</i> #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.<p>Even if there weren't a million bagged-and-boarded copies of <i>Rob Liefeld's Bludd Gunn McShootDeath and the X-Murder Y-Bunch</i> #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 <i>Thor</i>, Morrison's <i>JLA</i>, <i>Sandman</i>, etc.) haven't had anything like the cultural impact and recognition that major Golden and Silver Age titles did outside of comic circles.
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.
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.<p>"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."<p>It sounds like things are even more dire these days.<p>The collectible market comes and goes, I'll just wait till it comes back around in 20 or 30 years I guess.
I really think a lot of this has to do with the abundance of digital availability.<p>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...
What happens if someone aggressively buys the sort of rare (but not ultra rare, significant) collections, and burns them?<p>Is that enough to drive up the price?
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".<p>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, <i>somebody</i> besides myself has enjoyed them.
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?