Are we at a peak of back issue worth/sales? 6 6

[1Cool]

I knew quite a few kids in my class that collected comics in the mid 80s.  It wasn't cool by any means but I even knew some adults that collected back then.  Does anyone know of a person under 20 who collects comics?  My teen daughter says no one in her school collects comics and she knows quite a few of the geeky kids.  I know quite a few people with teens and young kids and none of them even read comics let alone collect comics.  Are there a small number of young comic collectors out there - sure.  But the numbers would probably be shocking if a accurate survey could ever done.

[kav]

4 minutes ago, 1Cool said:

I knew quite a few kids in my class that collected comics in the mid 80s.  It wasn't cool by any means but I even knew some adults that collected back then.  Does anyone know of a person under 20 who collects comics?  My teen daughter says no one in her school collects comics and she knows quite a few of the geeky kids.  I know quite a few people with teens and young kids and none of them even read comics let alone collect comics.  Are there a small number of young comic collectors out there - sure.  But the numbers would probably be shocking if a accurate survey could ever done.

modern comics are written for adults.  I dont see kids getting into them.  Perhaps comics will die off as a collectible because-no nostalgia factor.

[lizards2]

20 minutes ago, kav said:

Just because kids dont seem interested in comics doesnt mean anything-when I was 10 years old in 1968 until the age of 18 I never met another kid that read comics.  I thought maybe I was the only one.  It has always been rare to be interested in comics.

I didn't meet another kid that collected comics until about 1977/1978, when I moved to a large high school, and he was walking by me in the halls one day with a "Howard the Duck for President" t-shirt.

We ended up going to quite a few conventions together, and we each influenced what the other collected.  He actually internet stalked me down when Stan Lee died, and now we call and text each other occasionally.

[NoMan]

i'm sort of the doom-and-gloom school in all of this. I wrote a very detailed post describing my feelings but I'm not really sure anybody around here gave a s****, including myself.

THE MCU movies will stop and disappear as quickly as the westerns. Now is the time to sell. I'm not currently buying comics and instead I'm selling them and buying old issues of Swank and Club, especially those with Christy Canyon in them.

 

Edited August 8, 2019 by NoMan

[bc]

47 minutes ago, lizards2 said:

I didn't meet another kid that collected comics until about 1977/1978, when I moved to a large high school, and he was walking by me in the halls one day with a "Howard the Duck for President" t-shirt.

We ended up going to quite a few conventions together, and we each influenced what the other collected.  He actually internet stalked me down when Stan Lee died, and now we call and text each other occasionally.

Pretty much the exact same here except he had one of those iron-on Thor graphics on his t-shirt. Out of almost 1,000 people in my high school, I only knew a total of 4 who collected comics (including me & Dave).

And somehow this hobby survives....

[Ken Aldred]

5 hours ago, Broke as a Joke said:

Somebody told me to collect old Apple iPhones because that's the only memories this current generation will have of their childhood

They have a point.

An unopened sealed original iPhone is a pricey collectors item  now.  

Very surprised when I read about it.

Hulk 181 level. 

Edited August 8, 2019 by Ken Aldred

[MGsimba77]

When I started getting into comics in early 90's the only person I knew besides my older cousin that was actually into/knowledgeable was a classmate that got me into comics to begin with. Guy was obsessed with Mcfarlane, venom...the Mcfarlane "spider-man" run in 1990 etc.

Everyone else was into sports, or making sure they were wearing the right clothes (mc hammer pants), the nba dunk contest,  etc etc....

[Marty Mann]

Just very happy I saved my books!

Marty

[october]

1 hour ago, NoMan said:

 

THE MCU movies will stop and disappear as quickly as the westerns. 

 

It will burn out at some point, but it's going to take much longer than you expect.

Nobody paid tens of billions for the intellectual property rights to Western characters. Disney is going to produce this stuff until we are LONG gone.

[XxSpideyxX]

3 hours ago, thunsicker said:

As someone said before the last 20 years have been a boon for comics with four factors vastly increasing their value.  

1. The rule of 25 with people who grew up in the 70's and 80's becoming higher paid.
2. The auction houses allowing people to sell to each other rather than to sell back to stores at a very low percentage of value
3. CGC allowing people to sell over the internet with some standards on grade
4. Disney/Marvel putting out the wildly popular films that got those people for whom factor 1 was relevant focused on comics from their youth.

This led to a huge increase in prices over the last 20 years that I'm not sure we'll see again.  We may see some increases over the next 5 to 15 years but I'm bearish on much longer than that.  If I was a gambler I would guess Video Games or Trading Card Games (Pokemon, MTG, etc.) would outperform comics in the medium term.  Though even those I don't think will see the same increases that we've seen in comics over the last 20 years.

Yes, I am in agreement with all of this.  An apt comparison might be to what generations before us collected that failed to pass down to us.  Stamps?  🤓 Baseball cards?  😎 Playboy magazines? 😳

Edited August 8, 2019 by XxSpideyxX

[WolverineX]

3 hours ago, thunsicker said:

As someone said before the last 20 years have been a boon for comics with four factors vastly increasing their value.  

1. The rule of 25 with people who grew up in the 70's and 80's becoming higher paid.
2. The auction houses allowing people to sell to each other rather than to sell back to stores at a very low percentage of value
3. CGC allowing people to sell over the internet with some standards on grade
4. Disney/Marvel putting out the wildly popular films that got those people for whom factor 1 was relevant focused on comics from their youth.

This led to a huge increase in prices over the last 20 years that I'm not sure we'll see again.  We may see some increases over the next 5 to 15 years but I'm bearish on much longer than that.  If I was a gambler I would guess Video Games or Trading Card Games (Pokemon, MTG, etc.) would outperform comics in the medium term.  Though even those I don't think will see the same increases that we've seen in comics over the last 20 years.

Yes. YugiOh Cards.  Get the best card.  dark Magician girl.  That thing will explode in 10 years. 

[WolverineX]

7 hours ago, XxSpideyxX said:

We have seen older comics skyrocket in value over the past 10-20 years.  We've seen it with historic auction prices for key issues and with the added value that comes with universal grading services that are offered by the likes of CGC.  Moreover, up until this point, we have seen the (back issue) comic book market stand relatively impervious to economic trends.  However, I am concerned with something I am noticing with today's millennial generation and younger.  While Hollywood superhero movies are doing better than ever at the box office, new sales within the comic book industry itself are steadily declining:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/22/business/media/comic-book-publishers-streaming.html

A simple personal anecdote exemplifies some of this:  While I grew up in the 80s and 90s buying every new Spider-Man issue and reading them cover to cover every month, my 11 year old son is hardly interested in picking up and reading a comic.  This is despite my obvious passion.  He loves superheroes.  He watches the movies, plays the video games, draws the pictures, but he has no interest in buying and reading the comics like I was at his age.  And, as the referenced NYT article points out, he isn't alone.

Comics (for him) are an intermediary way to fill in entertainment gaps, not create them.  Brick and mortar comic book stores are becoming more and more like Blockbuster in their scarcity.  Even digital comic sales or "streaming" books aren't proving to be the solution that successfully offered in the movie industry in order to address consumers' ever-growing instant gravitation needs and low-attention span thresholds.  What does/will this trend mean?

I'm now 40.  And while I still love comics, I'm more focused on that which I enjoyed in my youth.  Not the newer stuff.  I have the financial resources to buy older issues I enjoyed or wanted to enjoy as a kid.  So while I am still supporting and thus inflating the value of back issues, I see it as a dying market.  As we get older, and the younger generations replace us in terms of discretionary spending, what value or reason will they have in buying into a medium they never enjoyed as a youth?  I'm not saying that comics like AF 15 or Super-Man 1 will drastically fall in value, but I expect we certainly won't see the economic trajectory that we have seen.  Sure, there are limited numbers of these older issues.  That will help.  But if there is no inherent interest in those issues, what will that matter?  Just like stamps, or baseball cards, will comics become a reminder of a bygone time in cultural history?  

In other words, when my 11 year old and others of his generation are my age, will they care (and thus value) as much as we do about older comics?  I'm definitely not saying we should all dump our collections and run for the hills.  But just pondering something that has been bothering me for a little while.  

I hope my intuition is wrong.  Or at least someone can argue it is and help me feel better

 

 

 

Likely true.  Only the mega keys will remain afloat 40 years from now. 

[BuscemasAvengers]

26 minutes ago, october said:

It will burn out at some point, but it's going to take much longer than you expect.

Nobody paid tens of billions for the intellectual property rights to Western characters. Disney is going to produce this stuff until we are LONG gone.

 

[lou_fine]

5 hours ago, Lazyboy said:

6 hours ago, marvelmaniac said:

right now the books that are in demand are Gold/Silver/Early Bronze

So, are you implying that you are in agreement with this statement to the point since it's so obvious that it's ridiculous and not even necessary for it to be mentioned?

Or are you implying that it's ridiculous since it's just so obvious that this statement is not true and almost to the point of a big joke?  

[lou_fine]

7 hours ago, XxSpideyxX said:

In other words, when my 11 year old and others of his generation are my age, will they care (and thus value) as much as we do about older comics?

Like the old saying goes on the boards here...................Buy what you love and enjoy, and if it happens to go up in value, then that's just an extra bonus.  

Looking backwards, I thought we were approaching a peak back in the mid-90's when the GA books went through their huge astronomical run up back then.  Yet, look at where we are now after the most recent red hot run up over the past few years.  

As for the future, who really knows what's going to happen longer term.  

[lou_fine]

58 minutes ago, Marty Mann said:

Just very happy I saved my books!

Marty

I would also be very happy if I've been saving my books from as far back as the early 40's or is it possibly even earlier? 

[lizards2]

8 minutes ago, lou_fine said:

As for the future, who really knows what's going to happen longer term.  

greggy.

[porcupine48]

1 hour ago, Marty Mann said:

Just very happy I saved my books!

Marty

Me too Marty,I'm sure we all are!

[NoMan]

2 hours ago, october said:

It will burn out at some point, but it's going to take much longer than you expect.

Nobody paid tens of billions for the intellectual property rights to Western characters. Disney is going to produce this stuff until we are LONG gone.

Agreed, they will. Will the films be any good? Will everyone get sick of these IPs they spent tens of billions of dollars on so they gotta keep making them, if people see them or not (and they will). Will those that see whatever the latest movie is go buy a 9.0 of the comic from the 60s or 70s spending 500 to a grand to more? Yeah, not so much.

Edited August 9, 2019 by NoMan

[dupont2005]

I don’t know. I think you’re going to see super hero movie burn out pretty soon, 5-6 years. The cinematic universe is a bad idea. It needlessly punishes those who don’t follow every movie. Right now the MCU is 10 years old, but the annoying continuity porn isn’t quite that old. What happens when the continuity is older than the target audience, and encompasses over 100 movies of varying quality? How many times can they honestly reboot Spider-Man back to back before people just aren’t interested? How many super hero movies per year could a regular person possibly watch, year after year? Not saying they’re going to stop making them, but they’re definitely trying to milk this fad for all they can before the trend falls out of favor for a while. Of course it will come back again in 10 years or so, but super hero movies right now are reminding me of super hero comics in the 90’s. All it’s going to take is one billion dollar Avengers movie bombing and the cancellations will roll out. How many hits can they consistently create? As movie budgets swell the stakes get higher and higher.