Are the Boomers cashing out? 6 6

[Buzzetta]

52 minutes ago, RockMyAmadeus said:

For hard core collectors, space is never an issue. They just buy more of it. The Eliasberg collection held several thousand coins, many of which are the finest known. 

LaVere Redfield had over 400,000 silver dollars in his basement.

For comparison's sake, you can fit approximately 300 long boxes in a 10x10 space, stacked 7 high. That's about 75.000 bagged and boarded comics. 

Oh no, for the living collector I get that.  I am talking about the caretakers of said collection after someone passes.  The surviving members of collector, collectors grown children, would not have designed their lives around accommodating such a collection.  If I drop dead tomorrow, someone will claim my home.  They will sell it.  No one in my family is going to want to take and preserve 20 short boxes of books into their home to keep for twenty years.  Maybe it's a regional thing as space is much more of a commodity up here in New York.  As I sit here at 4:30 in the morning about to go to work, I guess I can compare some comic collections of what I have seen to my personal plastic brick collection.   With comics I have gone (in my eyes) quality over quantity.  When it comes to Lego, more is better. 

I have 18 x 25gallon rubbermaid containers full of sorted Lego.  One of my cousins love Lego.  Again, if I drop dead tomorrow, despite the fact that one of my cousins has the same passion about plastic bricks that I do, he just does not have the space in his house that I do.   If they took it in it would be a nuisance.   That's why I compared it to coins, because from my experience the coin collections can be consolidated much easier than long boxes.

Perhaps I am wrong though because every now and then I do think about selling off everything - lifting two middle fingers to New York and heading west to be @lizards2next door neighbor so I can host BBQ's and play my music loud enough for him to hear for half of what I am paying now. 

 

 

[Aweandlorder]

4 hours ago, Buzzetta said:

Oh no, for the living collector I get that.  I am talking about the caretakers of said collection after someone passes.  The surviving members of collector, collectors grown children, would not have designed their lives around accommodating such a collection.  If I drop dead tomorrow, someone will claim my home.  They will sell it.  No one in my family is going to want to take and preserve 20 short boxes of books into their home to keep for twenty years.  Maybe it's a regional thing as space is much more of a commodity up here in New York.  As I sit here at 4:30 in the morning about to go to work, I guess I can compare some comic collections of what I have seen to my personal plastic brick collection.   With comics I have gone (in my eyes) quality over quantity.  When it comes to Lego, more is better. 

I have 18 x 25gallon rubbermaid containers full of sorted Lego.  One of my cousins love Lego.  Again, if I drop dead tomorrow, despite the fact that one of my cousins has the same passion about plastic bricks that I do, he just does not have the space in his house that I do.   If they took it in it would be a nuisance.   That's why I compared it to coins, because from my experience the coin collections can be consolidated much easier than long boxes.

Perhaps I am wrong though because every now and then I do think about selling off everything - lifting two middle fingers to New York and heading west to be @lizards2next door neighbor so I can host BBQ's and play my music loud enough for him to hear for half of what I am paying now. 

 

 

Yup NY is a beast. I have my collection spread in 3 places now. Home, work and at a storage facility. I have a Ukrainian friend who buys antiques and sell them the day he gets them bcs of limited space (has a warehouse space in Jamaica queens). When he doesn't get a buyer soon enough, those gorgeous furnitures get put out. Hundreds sometimes thousands of dollars worth of goods he gets to throw bcs of lack of space. This wouldn't be a problem in rural America. But getting the goods and buyers probably would as he can't ship them

[namisgr]

Most baby boomers are either nearing retirement or already there.  I can assure you that, at that life stage, few want the burden of a large, extremely heavy group of collectibles spread among multiple places.

[1Cool]

6 minutes ago, namisgr said:

Most baby boomers are either nearing retirement or already there.  I can assure you that, at that life stage, few want the burden of a large, extremely heavy group of collectibles spread among multiple places.

I think the saving grace is a lot of the Baby Boomer's are collectors of books and really have a hard time letting go of books in their collection.  Huge dollars are I'm sure a temptation but for a lot of the guys in the age group always were about the love of the books and money was secondary.  Now the guys in my age group (late 30s and 40s) were raised on buying books for the price increase and Wizard Magazine told us the next book would make us a million.  I see the Baby Boomers selling off slowly or their beneficiaries but when the Gen-X crowd gets old enough to retire there will be a huge glut of books hitting the market all at once.  Should be another 20 years or so - no need to worry now.  Gen-Xs are just starting to hit peak money making ages so things should be gravy for awhile.

[Martin Sinescu]

21 hours ago, ComicConnoisseur said:

Comic books are actually one of the few hobbies left that is thriving.

Most old antiques and collectibles markets are down 20 to 50 percent.

The superhero movies gave the comics industry a second life that many other hobbies never get.

To have Disney marketing Marvel added years more to comic book collecting as a top desired hobby.

 

 

 

Kinda makes you wonder what would happen if Disney made a "Hummel Figurines" movie 

[Mr. Zipper]

12 hours ago, Mercury Man said:

The one thing that comics has going for it right now is the movies, but again, it's not the kids coming in.  It's more speculators buying up variants, first appearances and hot Silver/Bronze Age books, only to flip.  Look at the price of Black Panther comics right now.  

 

This is spot on. To kids today, the Marvel characters are all about movies and video games. There is ZERO connection to the books. My children love the movies; they couldn't care less about the comics.

Without that foundation of nostalgia from childhood, I can't envision them spontaneously wanting to pay big bucks for Silver Age books 20 years from now.

[batman_fan]

My son has 100% grown up around comics. He started going to cons before he could walk. He has been to the comic store hundreds of times. We use to pull out my original artwork probably once o week from when he was very young. He loved playing “which one do you like best”.

He is 15 now and has zero interest in comics or the artwork. We still hit cons but he looks for light sabers mostly and stuff associated with video games. None of his friends buy or read comics but one does manga. All of the kids go to see all the super hero movies and love them but zero have made the transition to buying new much less old comics.

I have a customer at the distillery that use to spend close to $100 on new comics each week and he has stopped because he actually buys to read and decided buying trades was much better path. He explore much fewer titles now. 

[CKinTO]

Really interesting discussion here. As someone in my mid-30s, I am 100% reliving my childhood (as I grew up buying / reading / collecting comics in the late 80s / 90s), and have been picking up slabbed keys of characters that I grew up with. I am the epitome of the "rule of 20/25" as I recapture the joys of my childhood now that I have more disposable income.

While there will be a steady stream of people like me in my age group picking up books, agree that this will likely be lost in the next generation as current kids don't seem to have the same interest in comics as my generation did. That being said, who knows what else might happen 20-30 years from now?

[1Cool]

38 minutes ago, CKinTO said:

Really interesting discussion here. As someone in my mid-30s, I am 100% reliving my childhood (as I grew up buying / reading / collecting comics in the late 80s / 90s), and have been picking up slabbed keys of characters that I grew up with. I am the epitome of the "rule of 20/25" as I recapture the joys of my childhood now that I have more disposable income.

While there will be a steady stream of people like me in my age group picking up books, agree that this will likely be lost in the next generation as current kids don't seem to have the same interest in comics as my generation did. That being said, who knows what else might happen 20-30 years from now?

Yep - no way to be certain of anything when looking out 20-30 years.  But we do know collectibles tend to follow a pattern that has been pretty much adhered to across the board.  There is no reason to suspect adults of the future who never read a comic book as a child would want to seek out and find a copy of a book since the stories will be dated.  Some cool covers will be of interest same way EC horror mags are cool to me but have you ever gone back and read a ton of the Golden Age or early Silver-Age comic books - definetely not stories that resonate today.  The marvel movies may make people seek out comics to reconnect with their past since movies just don't cut it but I highly doubt it.

[F For Fake]

I feel like the true blue chip keys will always retain a relatively high value, though the prices will likely come down quite a bit from the lofty heights they're currently enjoying (the mega super duper keys notwithstanding. Action 1 and Tec 27 and Bat 1 will likely never get cheaper in my lifetime).

We've already seen the shift away from run collecting and reading, while key collecting continues to pop. I don't expect these trends to reverse, as there is no new group of readers coming up. But there are a lot of people who couldn't be bothered to read a comic book, that would still think it was cool to own the first appearance of Spider-Man or Iron Man. For instance, around my group of friends, the only comic I ever owned that actually generated any sort of interest was my AF15, because it was the first Spider-Man. They had no interest in reading a Spider-Man comic, or in collecting comics, but there was always palpable envy and desire for that book, because it represented something valuable and cool. I think there will always be some of those folks around, though I don't know that there will be enough to absorb ALL of the material floating around out there. Right now low grade keys are blowing up because people just want to own these books, in any condition. Will that continue? I think it's more likely that as the current collectors quit, retire, or die off, the low grade stuff will come back down to earth, while the highest grades will maintain, or at least won't bottom out disastrously.

And to be clear, I'm not talking about in the next 5 to 10 years. I'm talking quite a bit further out, maybe 20, maybe more.

Therefore, while in 10-20 years the bottom may completely drop out of mid-grade readers and common books, I think the big keys will retain some value, for sure.  But I wouldn't invest in the books today, at these prices, with the expectation that they'll continue to appreciate at these rates. It just doesn't seem sustainable in the very long view.

[Martin Sinescu]

The booming market for TPB's has also had a big impact on older collectors who may have been keeping collections intact for reading purposes. Compared to 20-30 years ago, there is sooooo much more material available from the old days in reprinted/collected form which makes keeping those old collections redundant. It cuts down on storage space and minimizes the liability of handling a Silver Age Spidey run versus cracking open the Omni reprint.

I'll add to that, the booming TPB market also means the older material is far more accessible to new generations and could actually spark interest in those older eras whereas, for folks like me who were reading in the late 80's, there weren't the funds to buy the older comics or there was limited access based on what the LCS had in stock.

Edited March 15, 2018 by Martin Sinescu

[ComicConnoisseur]

4 hours ago, Martin Sinescu said:

Kinda makes you wonder what would happen if Disney made a "Hummel Figurines" movie 

Nah, Hummels and most of their fanbase are dead. It would be like trying to make Sheet Music a popular hobby again.

Plus I don't think Hummels ever had holy grails like Action #1 or AF#15.

Beanie Babies would have a better chance at a comeback than Hummels because at least a good majority of people who collected them in the 1990s are still around.

So if Disney ever could make a Beanie Babies movie we might have something. 

 

[ComicConnoisseur]

2 hours ago, F For Fake said:

I feel like the true blue chip keys will always retain a relatively high value, though the prices will likely come down quite a bit from the lofty heights they're currently enjoying (the mega super duper keys notwithstanding. Action 1 and Tec 27 and Bat 1 will likely never get cheaper in my lifetime).

We've already seen the shift away from run collecting and reading, while key collecting continues to pop. I don't expect these trends to reverse, as there is no new group of readers coming up. But there are a lot of people who couldn't be bothered to read a comic book, that would still think it was cool to own the first appearance of Spider-Man or Iron Man. For instance, around my group of friends, the only comic I ever owned that actually generated any sort of interest was my AF15, because it was the first Spider-Man. They had no interest in reading a Spider-Man comic, or in collecting comics, but there was always palpable envy and desire for that book, because it represented something valuable and cool. I think there will always be some of those folks around, though I don't know that there will be enough to absorb ALL of the material floating around out there. Right now low grade keys are blowing up because people just want to own these books, in any condition. Will that continue? I think it's more likely that as the current collectors quit, retire, or die off, the low grade stuff will come back down to earth, while the highest grades will maintain, or at least won't bottom out disastrously.

And to be clear, I'm not talking about in the next 5 to 10 years. I'm talking quite a bit further out, maybe 20, maybe more.

Therefore, while in 10-20 years the bottom may completely drop out of mid-grade readers and common books, I think the big keys will retain some value, for sure.  But I wouldn't invest in the books today, at these prices, with the expectation that they'll continue to appreciate at these rates. It just doesn't seem sustainable in the very long view.

This post sums it up best.

Edited March 15, 2018 by ComicConnoisseur

[F For Fake]

1 minute ago, ComicConnoisseur said:

This post sums it up best.

Huzzah!

[Lazyboy]

24 minutes ago, Von Cichlid said:

I believe that 1991, just before the X-Men 1 / X- Force-1 / Death of Superman era was the last time that actual readers outnumbered the speculators and flippers. 

What do you think was being speculated on in the late 90s... other than how many (or, more accurately, few) years the industry had left before it died?

The speculators left with the crash and came back recently when the money and attention returned to the hobby. When the market shows signs of weakness, they'll once again abandon ship and hasten the downfall.

[Bronty]

4 hours ago, batman_fan said:

My son has 100% grown up around comics. He started going to cons before he could walk. He has been to the comic store hundreds of times. We use to pull out my original artwork probably once o week from when he was very young. He loved playing “which one do you like best”.

He is 15 now and has zero interest in comics or the artwork. We still hit cons but he looks for light sabers mostly and stuff associated with video games. 

Sounds like the only way to bridge that gap is with video game box art  

 

 

Edited March 15, 2018 by Bronty

[reddwarf666222]

On ‎11‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 5:39 AM, postersandstuff said:

Some items Ive that are good bets :

Presley+ sgd 50s photo

Jaws novel sgd by all 3 (Shaw+ , Scheider+ & Dreyfuss)

Cazale+  

Ledger+ sig

Bruce Lee's nunchucks

Andress sgd Dr No Italian 4sh

Connery vintage sgd Bond stills

Roger Moore+/Keen+/Brown+ sgd AVTAK book

Megator MIB (Europe only)

OHMSS Italy 2sh sgd Lazenby/Rigg/Mountain/Schell/Hanley/Henriques/Leech+

/Sims+

Avengers newspaper sgd poster (Rigg only did 1 con and will prolly not do another)

Avengers Rigg sgd french 2sh (she hates signing Avengers)

Mego 007 Drax sgd MIB (so far Lonsdale has only done 1 con ever)

 

Yeah a lot of NSS posters, interesting posters from other countries, and autographs from certain people earlier in their career is worth more.

My Dad has a signed photo and letter from Elvis when my Grandpa was in Germany stationed with him framed hanging on the wall. I have never seen an Elvis autograph look that nice, that big, and such a creative look to it before.

As far as posters I just had one go up from being 2,500 a few years back to over 6,000 this year.

Rocky 1Sheet signed by Stallone

Star Wars 3 Sheet signed by FIsher, Hamill, Prowse, Mayhew, Daniels, and Baker

Rocky Horror 1 sheet Boswick, Campbell, Quinn, Curry, and Meatloaf

Santa Sangre Japanese B2 signed by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Flash Gordon Japanese B1 signed by Jones and Anderson

Dracula 1972 AD Quad previously owned by Tom Chantrell  

 

[the blob]

But who do you think has been bringing vintage books in volume into comic shops, auction houses, dealers, etc. to sell for the last 30+ years??? It is boomers getting rid of their collections for the most part. Those guys who were 30 bringing stuff in when I was a kid and needed some cash are now 65-70!

I'm not talking about high end stuff bought by people with real money like the dentist over the years. I just don't see that as a "flood", some really nice books are going to hit the market for sure when one of those collections gets liquidated. Not to mention, if your estate is under the very large cap, the estate tax creates a big incentive to allow your heirs to get this stuff and sell it after you're dead. If you sell it now you are getting hit with humungous taxes. So, unless you need the money to cryongenically freeze your brain or knock that bucket list trip to the moon off your list....

It's the 45-46 year olds like me and RMA who are the problem!

 

 

[the blob]

21 hours ago, VintageComics said:

 

All it would take for a massive 50%+ downward price correction for 98 percent of the material out there is for every book on eBay to go to true auction.

That is true for nearly every collectible unless the quantity in question is tiny. If every Picasso hit the market at once the same would happen. Heck, if every Action 1 was up for auction at once it would still happen.

[RockMyAmadeus]

3 minutes ago, Lazyboy said:

What do you think was being speculated on in the late 90s... other than how many (or, more accurately, few) years the industry had left before it died?

The speculators left with the crash and came back recently when the money and attention returned to the hobby. When the market shows signs of weakness, they'll once again abandon ship and hasten the downfall.

I can't wait. Lotsa smug "dealers" who know nothing of the history of the market, and think everything, from Fantasy #15 to She-Hulk #38, is worth $$$$ and you have to ask 5 times FMV for it.

They should enjoy the ride while it lasts. I amassed the vast bulk of my collection between 1997-2003, when you couldn't give comics away.