Those Comics in Your Basement? Probably Worthless | Hacker News Reader

Those Comics in Your Basement? Probably Worthless

finance.yahoo.com

68 pointsrubikscube71 comments

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.

I will say that when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s and collecting baseball cards, I did it for a couple reasons. One was that they were going to be worth something later, but that was near the bottom of the reasons.

The major reason was that it was a way to be involved with MLB. It was fun trading with friends to try to get your favorite players and complete a team or a set. It's Pokemon without the game attached - gotta get 'em all!

Where the wheels fell off was were kids were priced out of the market. 50 cents would buy you a pack of Topps, Donruss, or Fleer - about 30 cards in a pack. But then the infamous 1988 Upper Deck set that introduced thick white card stock, foil wrappers, and holographic seals. $1.50 or more for a pack of 12 (I think). They were somewhat limited and successful, so everyone followed suit. Fleer Ultra. Donruss made the Leaf name premium. Skybox for the NBA. Eventually Topps came out with their Stadium Club cards that were just plain stupid - $5 for a pack of 12. At that point, I was out.

I know the feeling. I collected quite a few baseball cards in the late 80's and early 90's and spent lots of time sorting, categorizing, making sets and attending shows. I ended up losing most of the cards due to Hurricane Sandy last year, but most of them were worthless anyway. Looking back, I guess the fun of collecting and trading cards with friends was the true value.

What is also important to remember is that collections - comic books, baseball cards, stamp collections - whatever - were collected before the internet came along. Therefore, the price was assumed to be what the dealers in such collectibles said the price was. You never really found out what the true market value was unless you actually had a severe cash shortage and sold your 'collectibles'. Then you took what you got given and did not exactly tell everyone that it was a million times less than what you thought you would get.

Therefore, actually having market prices as sold (eBay) rather than having what 'Stanley Gibbons' (stamps) will sell you something for - is bringing an important reality check to things.

Funny you should mention this since Beckett back in the 90s was the authoritative price guide for baseball cards. Now most collectors understand that the true worth of a card is what it goes for on eBay, not what Beckett has it listed.

But to make it more shady, Beckett now offers grading services for the very cards it prices.

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.

That's a corollary of the Trough of No Value theory: http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...

Amen. The whole concept of collectibility is highly dubious, and most "collectibles" are declared such by marketing departments trying to push completionists' buttons. But the collection will never be complete while there is still a supplier making money from every sale!

This happened in the UK to stamp collectors who took pride in owning every first day cover. Royal Mail realised they could increase revenue by massively increasing the number of new stamp designs issued, and collectors railed against the escalating cost of keeping their collections complete.

See also Warhammer, Disney Inifinity, and a bunch of other pay-to-play endeavours.

Unwise indeed.

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.

> when we knew a good story or "episode" was coming out, we would buy several of those comics.

This has always been one of those things that seems ludicrous to me about the US comics market. In Europe, in many market it is common to assume 3-4 readers to each comic when selling advertising etc. Comics would get passed around the family, loaned to friends etc.

While in the US, it's the opposite: The number of comics sold is usually assumed to be higher than the number of readers.

Any "unknown" stocks out there you like now?

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.

MXWL.

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/...

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 weight in gold when I retire. Or maybe I should invest in tulips...

You may want to check the prices on some of those. The game is still quite popular, and has keep the market prices high as newer players become interested in some of the older stuff like Arabian Nights.

Due to some of the current decks like "dredge", for example, has sent the price of "Bazaar of Baghdad" into the $250-$450 range, and "Library of Alexandria" has always been in the >$200 range.

As for Antiquities... a "Mishra's Workshop" is likely more useful than the traditional power-9 right now, and is /easily/ worth >$400.

Given how little a single card weighs, some of those might just be worth their weight in gold. Even without those very-high-price cards, though, there's a lot of newer players that just want stuff from those older sets in general. It's pretty rare to see <$1 cards like you do with the newer sets, and /many/ are in the $15/25 range, so a couple boxes of cards could easily be worht a decent amount.

Re: this article - like any investment based on fads and nostalgia like comix, MTG cards, tulips... it's only the people that got in at the beginning that get much profit out of it. Jumping on the bandwagon later on when it's now known to a lot of people is never going to work - there's obviously a lot of others people doing the same thing, and saturating the market.

Those of you luck enough to have bought in before it was big, though... can get really lucky some times.

I think all the beta dual-lands a good friend of mine likes to play with make any deack their in >$20k O.O

/i only found out about the game during The Dark, which is just barely on th eline of "too recent", unfortunately.

Yup. Getting those at launch would be the rare collector's item in the future.

My guess for today's "rare nostalgia collector's item" of the far future?

Those Skylanders/Disney Infinity statues, if they don't need an auth server to run. Especially the original "Spyro's Adventure" ones.

Alternately, BeyBlades and the like, since those take terrible wear when the kids play with them. Then again, I can't think of many other brutalized collectible children's toy fads of my youth that are popular with collectors today - it's not like Pogs are a big item.

Go through the trouble of separating the rares and uncommons from the rest. I'm pretty sure you know they're already worth a ton of money.

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.

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.

I recall hearing someone mention "Those Dragon magazines will be worth a lot some day..."

If only...

Those could actually be worth something, although most cards' value is a function of metagame more than age, so "older" does not always mean "worth more". If you actually want to try to monetize them, watch prices and sell some cards when you think those cards are particularly valuable.

Those might actually be worth something some day. Not many people collected those, so the present supply is low, and will only decline further as time goes on. Magic was a game widely played by geeks, and I'm sure quite a few have fond memories of sitting around playing the game with friends, thus the game has sentimental value for them. Finally, geeks and former geeks will probably continue to gain more wealth over the next few decades, at least, which means that there will be a decreasing supply of something that an increasing number of people with money want. I'd definitely hang on to them.

Sorry, but this comment is hilarious because it is written from a perspective that Magic "was" popular.

Truth? It's more popular than ever [1], and the Power 9 cards are still worth hundreds, if not thousands.

[1]: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/dai...

It was popular among geeks, and apparently it still is. That just means there will be even more demand for the early cards in the future.

Yes/no.

Card value depends on a number of factors, notably usability in one of the game's "formats". A card printed today, that is both rare and very useable in many decks and/or formats, will cost anywhere from $5 to $60. A single card.

An entire deck? http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/deck.asp?deck_id=1167954

That's the deck that won one of the most recent tournaments. Average price of $630 for the entire set.

Point being, you can blow your savings on today's cards, let alone ancient ones.

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?

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

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?

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.

> 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.

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... 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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).

Actually, there is plenty of evidence that LPs are increasing in value. Some are slow but some are growing pretty fast (especially classic rock and punk rock). WSJ been running articles about LPs and their investment value:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732426340...

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020457370...

Unlike comic books and baseball cards, there was never a hype of LP as being a collector item. Furthermore, they are essentially not being manufactured any more. They are difficult to care for, and many of them been destroyed by improper use. And they deliver the authentic, and some say the best, audio experience.

How to care for LPs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_disc_records_preservation

> 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.

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 go about halfway down the page.

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.

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.

Vinyl has a few properties that allow it to persist as a format.

First, magnetic tape deteriorates over time, so 8tr and reels have a physically limited lifespan. Secondly, playback technology for vinyl continues to improve, and due to the nature of analog recording, the quality of the sound in playback improves as well.

Old records played on new equipment sound better than they did when they were new (given equal condition of the physical object). CDs and MP3s, because they're digital and locked to a sample rate and bit depth, will only ever sound as good as they did when they were manufactured, speaker improvements aside. You simply can't squeeze any more information out of 16bit/48kHz the way you can out of an analog recording.

This is not to argue CD vs. vinyl or sound coloration or any of those cans of worms.

As a guy with a comic book marketplace startup (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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A large part of the issue with this in the US is that you have a market where the number of issues sold is higher than the number of readers, because reading comics is a really niche thing in the US, while "everyone" has heard the stories of titles selling at ridiculous prices.

Meanwhile, for comparison, a market like Norway, with 5 million people, have at various times had multiple series selling more than 100k copies a month. Donald Duck & Co. for a many years sold 150k copies a week.

More importantly, readership here is usually estimated at 3-5 readers per copy, as opposed to more than one copy per reader in the US, as copies would pass around the family and get lent out to friends.

In France, some new issues of the top selling album titles, like Tintin, Asterix and Spirou et Fantasio, have sold in millions in France alone.

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.

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...

Perhaps you want to keep it forever ?: http://bookscanner.us

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

clearly their tween selves should have invested in baseball cards

That 7-figure stock portfolio? worthless.

Actually, it's worth 7 figures.

and those figures are worthless

Actually, they're worth about 7 figures.

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

Whatever you say, bub.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com