Comic Collecting (1 Viewer)

[Scott Merryfield]

Guys,

I don't want to get this thread way off target.

But let's say someone had all their comic books from when they were a kid. This would be several hundred from the late '60s to mid '70s. Nearly all DC. They have been fairly well cared-for. But aren't bagged or graded or anything. As you might suspect, some of the older ones are in worse shape than the later ones.

But these comics don't have much sentimental value and are basically collecting dust (although have been actually well-kept in a big wooden box for the last forty years.

What would be the best way for me to sell them off in terms of payout (but combined with minimal effort)? Any ideas?

And is there a place online at which I could determine some sort of value of what's in my collection? Some sort of pricing guide, maybe?

Thanks in advance.

Mike,

My wife has been selling my comics from the '70's and '80's for the past year for me. She uses eBay and Facebook Marketplace (mostly the latter) to sell the items, after coming up with pricing using recent sales on eBay. I had a collection of about 3,000 comics (mostly Marvel), and most were bagged and boarded. She has made me over $4,600 so far and has sold less than 10% of the collection.

It's a lot of work, but she enjoys doing it (she also is selling other stuff, too). We do have a local comic book store owner that is interested in buying books in bulk, but of course he will only give us partial value, as he needs to make a profit, too. So for now, my wife is still doing it one by one, although sales have slowed down recently. Eventually, we will probably see what we can get for the remaining collection from the store owner.

 

[TravisR]

It's a lot of work, but she enjoys doing it (she also is selling other stuff, too). We do have a local comic book store owner that is interested in buying books in bulk, but of course he will only give us partial value, as he needs to make a profit, too. So for now, my wife is still doing it one by one, although sales have slowed down recently. Eventually, we will probably see what we can get for the remaining collection from the store owner.

Yeah, I culled my collection maybe a decade ago and sold off things that were mostly worthless as fairly large lots on eBay and even that was pretty time consuming.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Yeah, I culled my collection maybe a decade ago and sold off things that were mostly worthless as fairly large lots on eBay and even that was pretty time consuming.

My wife had been bugging me for a few years to try and sell my collection. I had no problem with the idea of letting the collection go for money, as it had sat untouched in our basement since we moved into our current home (and we've lived here 25 years now). However, the thought of all the work it would be to establish value to each book and sell the items piece by piece was more effort than I wanted to put into it. Then she found a person on Facebook who was interested in a signicant number of certain titles, so I spent quite a few hours rating and pricing those. After sending him the results, we had a few back and forth conversations, and then he stopped responding.

After that, my wife took over and had some quick success with a couple of local collectors who were interested in my Uncanny X-Men books. Those were the most valuable items in the collection, so selling those got her off and running. So now she does all the work, and I get to spend the proceeds on fun stuff.

 

[jcroy]

After that, my wife took over and had some quick success with a couple of local collectors who were interested in my Uncanny X-Men books. Those were the most valuable items in the collection, so selling those got her off and running.

I looked into this years ago, just to find out collectors were only interested in Uncanny X-Men issues #94 to around #141 or #142 in MINT condition.

Those exact same issues were borderline dump bin fodder if the condition was not mint. Mine were not in mint condition, with all kinds of defects such as: price tags still on the covers, water, coffee, writing defacing, paper chunks missing, pages missing, etc ...

 

[TravisR]

My wife had been bugging me for a few years to try and sell my collection. I had no problem with the idea of letting the collection go for money, as it had sat untouched in our basement since we moved into our current home (and we've lived here 25 years now). However, the thought of all the work it would be to establish value to each book and sell the items piece by piece was more effort than I wanted to put into it. Then she found a person on Facebook who was interested in a signicant number of certain titles, so I spent quite a few hours rating and pricing those. After sending him the results, we had a few back and forth conversations, and then he stopped responding.

After that, my wife took over and had some quick success with a couple of local collectors who were interested in my Uncanny X-Men books. Those were the most valuable items in the collection, so selling those got her off and running. So now she does all the work, and I get to spend the proceeds on fun stuff.

I'm too lazy and don't have the patience to find out the pricing for all of the books so I just start all my auctions at $1 and let the market dictate the price. Granted, it's easy to do that when it's early to mid 90's stuff that you know isn't worth a dime and the only way to get rid of it all is to sell it as a cheap lot.

 

[jcroy]

After sending him the results, we had a few back and forth conversations, and then he stopped responding.

This type of behavior shouldn't be too surprising.

In practice I've found that if buyer and seller can't come to a final price agreement, there is no point in talking any further.

 

[jcroy]

I'm too lazy and don't have the patience to find out the pricing for all of the books so I just start all my auctions at $1 and let the market dictate the price. Granted, it's easy to do that when it's early to mid 90's stuff that you know isn't worth a dime and the only way to get rid of it all is to sell it as a cheap lot.

Nowadays I end up just giving away most of my old stuff to local friends/family, including comic books. Especially a lot stuff from the 1980s which are 50 cents dump bin fodder.

As I get older, I've come to the realization that my own personal free time is more "valuable" to me. I don't get any satisfaction with selling old stuff, where it seems like it is a huge chore for very little to nothing.

These days If I'm going to be selling something, it has to bring in at least several $10k such as a house. (I don't even bother selling my old cars anymore. They end up being a trade-in or straight to the garbage/scrap dump).

 

[jcroy]

These days, I'm not a continuity whore, so I don't really care that his Batman run is being taken out of continuity. Especially, as you say, DC seems to keep rebooting their continuity. Since Crisis on Infinite Earths, the reboots started around every 10 years or so, and seem to be down to every five.

For the most part, I'd been out of comics (at least DC-wise) since just around Infinite Crisis, so from my perspective, continuity is so f'd up it's not worth trying to make any sense out of it. With Marvel, it's in a sense worse, as I hadn't been reading any mainstream Marvel since the late 80s/early 90s. I'd read titles from the Marvel Knights and Marvel MAX lines, but that's about it until the last couple of years.

(More generally).

Besides being futile attempts at slamming down on the "reset button", are there are other reasons for Crisis type events ?

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I looked into this years ago, just to find out collectors were only interested in Uncanny X-Men issues #94 to around #141 or #142 in MINT condition.

Those exact same issues were borderline dump bin fodder if the condition was not mint. Mine were not in mint condition, with all kinds of defects such as: price tags still on the covers, water, coffee, writing defacing, paper chunks missing, pages missing, etc ...

None of my Uncanny X-Men were in true mint condition, as I bought them on the news stand when they first came out, read them as a kid, put them in a box, and didn't bag and board them until the late '80's or early '90's. They were still in very good condition despite this (no stains, tears, or marks of any kind), and we got $1,250 for Giant Sized X-Men #1, $140 for #94, $100 for #101 and between $40 and $60 each for #95 through #100, plus #102 & #103. Uncanny X-Men #136 - #138 netted a total of $70, while most everything else I had from that title went for $8 to $9 each.

We sold just about all of the above locally through Facebook Marketplace for cash, so there were no transaction fees. Since some of the books were selling for quite a bit of money, we met the buyers at the Starbucks in our local Kroger grocery store. For the much less expenive stuff, my wife has either been shipping (at the buyer's cost) or doing porch pick up for some of the regular buyers. She has connected with a few people nearby who are trying to rebuild their collections that were lost for various reasons.

 

[jcroy]

We sold just about all of the above locally through Facebook Marketplace for cash, so there were no transaction fees. Since some of the books were selling for quite a bit of money, we met the buyers at the Starbucks in our local Kroger grocery store. For the much less expenive stuff, my wife has either been shipping (at the buyer's cost) or doing porch pick up for some of the regular buyers. She has connected with a few people nearby who are trying to rebuild their collections that were lost for various reasons.

There may very well be something to selling/buying locally.

For some stuff which is not very common (such as out-of-print cds/dvds, books, etc ...), I'm willing to pay slightly more if I can see an actual item locally myself.

For over a decade, I didn't trust listings of out-of-print stuff at online places like ebay, amazon, etc .... You never knew what you were getting, where I came across one too many illegal bootlegs.

 

[jayembee]

(More generally).

Besides being futile attempts at slamming down on the "reset button", are there are other reasons for Crisis type events ?

Money.

For reasons I can't quite fathom other than a simple impulse buy, this week I picked up Empyre: Avengers #0. Well, actually, back in the Before (Covid) Times, I grabbed up a freebie Empyre promo, and it seemed like it could be OK. So I guess I figured I'd give it a try. It was OK. Not great, but not awful. Then I got to the the back of the book and saw the two-page spread "Empyre Checklist". Over the course of four months plus (the schedule is obviously off, but presumably the extent still holds), there will at the end have been 52 comics! An expenditure of $200-250. Yeah. No thank you.

And, with respect to me, they're going to make less money. Most of the titles involved seem to be separate books titled "Empyre: <fill in the blank>". The only regular titles appear to be 3 issues each of Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Captain Marvel. I haven't been getting the first two, but the third I have been. And it's one I haven't enjoyed as much as I'd thought I would, and have been contemplating dropping. This has convinced me to drop it.

Now this isn't quite the Crisis/reset-button type of story, but it's all a part of the larger Epic Company-Wide Mega-Crossover Event Story that both DC and Marvel hope will get people interested into the habit of buying every title due to FOMO. Back in the day, when I bought most of the titles from both companies, I was kind of a sucker for this kind of thing. But today, just seeing this type of cross-title story exhausts me.

So far, I've managed to avoid these. With DC's "Year of the Villain" or the Batman Who Laughs virus thing, I've just sort of skimmed over the relevant issues of the titles I get and not worry about making sense of the over-arcing story. Other stories that seem like Crisis type events (like apparently what's going on in Justice League) I avoid.

 

[BobO'Link]

Those every couple of years "Epic Company Wide Mega Crossover Event" stories are exactly what drove me away from DC. In addition, the last few years I purchased DC titles I found them lacking. I'll never say never but I don't see myself purchasing anything but the occasional one-off type DC book in the future.

I've never been much of a Marvel reader. That's solely due to the single store in my town that carried the Marvel books put the price on the cover in grease pencil. I hated that as, to me, it ruined the book so I wouldn't purchase anything from them in spite of thinking some of it looked interesting (I *did* read a few in the store so...). The other store that carried comics didn't carry Marvel, just DC and the Scrooge McDuck/Donald Duck/Richie Rich stuff. That pretty much made me a life-long DC only reader. Based on what I hear in the LCS, Marvel is even worse than DC about doing these wide mega crossovers, going so far as to have them anually.

I stopped buying all of them in the mid 60s and only got back into reading them in the 90s when DC "killed" Superman. After building up my file to include all Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Justice League, and a few other titles I dropped them all when DC launched "The New 52." They made that "event" an easy jumping off point. I now get 4 titles per month. That used to be a "5th week" count with a normal week seeing 10-12 titles.

 

[jayembee]

Regarding selling one's collection...

I really started building a collection back circa 1970. Comics prices hadn't skyrocketed at that point, and I was able to assemble complete-to-then sets of several major DC and Marvel titles: X-Men, Fantastic Four (mostly), The Avengers, Justice League of America, and others. My biggest score was Amazing Fantasy #15 in very good condition for $12. Over the course of the next 10-15 years, I largely focused on DC titles, with a more specific focus on the science fiction titles like Strange Adventures, Mystery in Space, Challengers of the Unknown, Sea Devils, etc.

Then at some point in the 80s, for whatever reason, I decided to sell to a couple of comic stores in the Boston area. Made quite a bit of money. I was still buying, and accumulating newer titles, and eventually I reached a point where I decided to sell what I'd accumulated. Didn't make as much money this time, as they were more recent comics, but it was more a case of just having a larger collection than I wanted to deal with.

And then, after a few years away from comics, I started again. I have about three dozen long-boxes of comics that I now want to unload. They are stacked up in the basement, waiting for me to go through to pick out what I want to hold onto (I don't expect that will amount to more than one long-box, maybe two). For the rest, there's a local business that buys comics in bulk. I don't expect to make much, but again, it's more an issue of wanting to clear space. These days, I'm happier getting HC/TPB collections than having the originals.

 

[Bryan^H]

I'm selling a copy of The Amazing Spider-Man 300 (first appearance of Venom) and it is at $340. I just want to say the the condition for the issue is awful, and I said so in the description w/ a lot of pictures to point it out. Why are people bidding this up? I guess I should be happy, but I 'm honestly more confused about this. I thought maaaybe $50 at the very highest.

 

[Thomas Newton]

I'm selling a copy of The Amazing Spider-Man 300 (first appearance of Venom) and it is at $340. I just want to say the the condition for the issue is awful, and I said so in the description w/ a lot of pictures to point it out. Why are people bidding this up? I guess I should be happy, but I 'm honestly more confused about this. I thought maaaybe $50 at the very highest.

Google "the amazing spider-man 300 price". This issue apparently goes for $100 to $1,850 or more – and I think two eBay sellers were trying to get $13,000 and $25,000, respectively.

 

[TravisR]

Alot of comics are ridiculously high-priced right now. Any first appearance of pretty much any Marvel character is through the roof. I was talking to the dude who works at my comic shop and he said that the first appearance of Carnage in Amazing Spider-man is going for $1800 in a high-grade CGC form and there's probably a million copies of that book in existence (albeit only a fraction are in high-grade condition but still).

Even some old Dark Horse Star Wars comics, which basically used to be worth cover price (if you were lucky), now command high prices if there's an appearance of a character that is going to be in a movie or TV show. The first comic book appearance of Ahsoka Tano in SW: The Clone Wars #1 is $800. The character's first appearance is in The Clone Wars movie so why anyone would pay $800 for her first appearance in a comic when it was a month later is beyond me. Mini-series focused on Boba Fett and the X-Wing comics have shot up too and the X-Wing books will likely bear zero resemblance to what that movie does.

 

[TonyD]

I’m confused how you don’t see why that comic is valuable.
First appearances in a comic of a big character are huge. I think you understand this.

Harley Quinn first appeared in the Batman cartoon but that’s didn’t stop her first comic appearance from going through the roof in value.

 

[The Obsolete Man]

I’m confused how you don’t see why that comic is valuable.
First appearances in a comic of a big character are huge. I think you understand this.

Harley Quinn first appeared in the Batman cartoon but that’s didn’t stop her first comic appearance from going through the roof in value.

Yeah, f'n speculators.

They nearly destroyed comics in the 90s, now they're using those crappy movies to do it again.

At least there are TPBs and hardcover reprints, and digital now, so the people who actually want to read the books instead of treat them as a commodity to lock in lucite and trade like big baseball cards can still have access to the stories to read for an affordable price.

 

[TravisR]

I’m confused how you don’t see why that comic is valuable.
First appearances in a comic of a big character are huge. I think you understand this.

Harley Quinn first appeared in the Batman cartoon but that’s didn’t stop her first comic appearance from going through the roof in value.

Why it makes no sense to me is that people care about that but no one pays a fortune for the original Star Wars #1 or 2 which contain the real first visual appearances of all the main characters because those books both pre-date the release of the movie. The first appearances of Rey, Finn, and Kylo Ren are in The Force Awakens adaptation and no one cares. I see little difference between the first Rey or Kylo Ren in a comic and the first time Ahsoka appeared in a comic.

I basically get it with Harley Quinn though since she quickly became a popular comic book character so I see the logic of her first comic book appearance meaning something to a collector.

 

[Bryan^H]

Ok, just to clear things up, I'm completely aware of the value of the comics I am selling. The thing that I don't understand is a poor condition book (probably 1.5 CGC which is usually less than $100 from what I've seen). selling over $350 just seems outrageous to me. More power to the collector that doesn't care about condition, and just wants the first appearance of Venom. But being a comic collector my whole life this sort of thing just doesn't make sense to me.