Hamlet

I failed on the selling side. I did buy some books though

It’s my neighbor’s not mine. I really don’t want to get involved in the actual transaction in any way, TBH.

You could say the same thing about 1st appearances, but the market has gone in the opposite direction for those.

I would add that the old comic book structure of producing a small piece of entertainment once a month just isn’t how many people want to consume content these days. I want content to adhere to my schedule of consumption, and more and more of it does. The idea of waiting to watch a TV show on a specific day and time once a week is dying. I’d rather just wait until the season is complete and then stream it whenever I want to watch it. I think the idea of going to the comic book store once a week for new releases is kind of in the same category. Trades seem so much better to me. I think the only reason floppies are still around is nostalgia from people that grew up collecting like that. I can’t imagine someone new who wanted to read comics preferring that experience to buying trades. I don’t know anything about Manga, but isn’t it mostly sold in a trade format?

Aren’t most of the listings on E-bay using that model?

Yeah, my favorite part of those ads was that he mostly charged NM prices but the condition was stated as “VG or better”. Even in the mid-80s that seemed like a pretty bad way to try and buy comics. I never ordered anything from him.

Someone cleaned out the MCS Fines today. So MCS is currently out of stock. The E-bay price seems to be edging up. One surprising thing is that I’ve seem a few lots of the whole series sell at decent amounts- the speculators usually stick to the 1st appearance. Maybe there is some actual interest in reading the series.

They still have auctions on EBay?

It’s the people who were buying because comics were going up now selling because comics are going down

That seems like a sensible number to me.

I think part of the problem is that most collectors have giant rose-colored glasses when evaluating the quality of comics that we read when we were young. New comics mostly have bad stories and art because the vast majority of comics have always had bad stories and art. Nostalgia just covers up the shortcomings of books from our childhood. This becomes readily apparent for me when I read an old comic that wasn’t something I read as a kid. They are mostly childish, with bad storytelling and ridiculous dialogue. Which makes sense, since they were mostly written for kids. The classic comics that are better than most get our attention ( and rightly so ), but go read a couple of Captain Americas or Thors from 1980 or so and tell me you would think those are great comics if you picked them up today.

This is a book I’ve made a point to grab out of the dollar box when I saw it. I don’t have a huge number, but I probably have 6-7 copies. My friends and I loved this book when it came out. The crazy thing was that it had a $2 cover price in 1984, when a regular comic was 60 cents. So I always got a kick buying it out of a dollar box after 35+ years of inflation.

We’re seeing it now. What was a dollar box book is now selling on E-bay for $10-15. Those buyers are almost all speculators, IMO.

It looks like the $6 VG copies at MCS have sold now. So the $12 VF copies sold first and quickly, and then people moved down to the VG copies, leaving the $9 Fine copies still there. Copies are selling on EBay and new copies are popping up to replace them. Top end seems to be $20 for NM looking copies, although it looks like there is a nice $10 copy sitting there now. Speculation has commenced.

So much of it for me was how bad ASM was for the years before McFarlane drew it. The first issue I got off of the stands was 260, which was a cool Hobgoblin book. From there until McFarlane took over at 298, they were pretty much all bad issues if wasn’t a Hobgoblin appearance or Kraven’s last hunt. I was so excited to see issues that weren’t Spider Kid or Frogman or Beyonder garbage that I was going to be extremely forgiving. Luckily my LCS had extensive back issues of ASM.