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When did Bags and Boards start
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I have been collecting comics for 30+ year and as long as I can remember the local comic shop has had books bagged and boarded for back issues.  I was wondering around when did bags and boards start being made specifically for archiving comic books?  What is some of this history of this trend?

I know in the 90s it was already standard.  When I was a young kid in the 80's I am not sure if I remember that being around.  I always like looking back at comic book history. 

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On 3/22/2020 at 5:09 PM, dzbad said:

I have been collecting comics for 30+ year and as long as I can remember the local comic shop has had books bagged and boarded for back issues.  I was wondering around when did bags and boards start being made specifically for archiving comic books?  What is some of this history of this trend?

I know in the 90s it was already standard.  When I was a young kid in the 80's I am not sure if I remember that being around.  I always like looking back at comic book history. 

back in the late 70's when I started, the LCS' I visited had all back issues in bags.  Only the stuff hanging on the walls or in the glass case had boards

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1980 - 81 was the first time I saw bags (no boards) at the Comicshop. As a 13-year old whose only income was a Vancouver Province paper route I knew there was no way I could afford to splurge on pristine, crystal-clear bags for my comic collection, so instead I'd buy the used comic bags (which were sticky and had a sickly greenish-yellow hue) they sold in bulk for 1/2 price at the back of the store. I figured any comic bag was better than no bag at all. Those poor comics. :p

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It wasn't until the mid-80's that boards started to become common and available. In the 70's, a few local hobbyists would make and even sell them, but they were often shirt cardboard and stuff like that. As stated earlier, the bags from Robert Bell are among the earliest and can still be found in boxes now and then!

 

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8 minutes ago, Black_Adam said:

1980 - 81 was the first time I saw bags (no boards) at the Comicshop. As a 13-year old whose only income was a Vancouver Province paper route I knew there was no way I could afford to splurge on pristine, crystal-clear bags for my comic collection, so instead I'd buy the used comic bags (which were sticky and had a sickly greenish-yellow hue) they sold in bulk for 1/2 price at the back of the store. I figured any comic bag was better than no bag at all. Those poor comics. :p

Those were the ones that bled onto the comic ? I remember those , I come across them still in old collections ... such a shame 

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13 minutes ago, Old_Man_Adam said:

Those were the ones that bled onto the comic ? I remember those , I come across them still in old collections ... such a shame 

Yep, they were nasty. One even had an old price sticker on it that eventually melted through the plastic and through the cover of my All-Star Comics # 58. :sorry:

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3 hours ago, PopKulture said:

It wasn't until the mid-80's that boards started to become common and available. In the 70's, a few local hobbyists would make and even sell them, but they were often shirt cardboard and stuff like that. As stated earlier, the bags from Robert Bell are among the earliest and can still be found in boxes now and then!

I just checked some old Overstreets and my recollections about boards in the 70's seem to be correct, as nobody was making mention of boards in the 1970's (beyond the homemade ones I mentioned). There are ads from both Bill Cole and Ernie Gerber starting in 1982 that advertise boards as well as snugs, mylites, time-loks, binder pages, etc. Both Cole and Gerber had multiple pages in the Overstreet annuals so comic protection was starting to become big business in the early to mid-80's.

Edited by PopKulture
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When I opened my shop around 82-83, I sold bags. Most of my back stock was bagged but none was boarded. By the time I sold my second shop, everything was bagged and boarded.

Bagging and boarding made the stock look nicer but it was very labor intensive. I'd take a box or two home at night and B&B them while watching tv.  I finally enlisted my then eight year old niece to do the bagging and boarding. 

When I opened the shop in San Juan, it was too expensive to ship boards from the states and I couldn't find a local manufacturer so it was bags only.  In NY, I could sell bags for $3 per hundred and make a nice profit, while they cost me over $5 per hundred after shipping in PR so I charged $7.50. At the time, I was the only real comic shop on the Island so  I didn't worry about competition. Most of my clients were readers, not collectors and balked at paying more than cover price for any book.

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Early 80's, when I landed in California and started collecting again, I was buying Mylar bags, acid free boards and acid-free comic boxes (about 11" deep) from Bill Cole (BCE). They weren't cheap so was only bagging my most worthy. It was around the mid 80's when my LCS was bagging all the new comics on the shelves.

Edited by jokiing
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On 3/24/2020 at 6:38 PM, Robot Man said:

I originally kept my comics un-bagged on shelves in the closet. Then I stacked them rotating the spines in cleaner's bags. Around 1971 I got some Robert Bell bags and used cut cardboard as a stiffiner. When backing boards came out I substituted them. I also remember using Fortress holders (similar to current slabs but removable) for my most important books. It has been a long road to where we are today...

robertbellbag.jpg

That is pretty wild.  I love old adds for comic related stuff. It shows a great history

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In the Midwest, bags were commonly used by the late 70s.  I don’t know anyone that had used or ever seen a backing board until the early 80s.  In fact, most comic shops didn’t use them on their back issues until the 90s.  It was just an extra expense that took away from the bottom line.  There were usually books in a glass case stored in Mylar sleeves that had backing boards in the late 80s but this was only for books $30 or more.  There were relatively few stores that had any golden age and very little silver age so this really applied to books 1969-present.  2c

As I think about it, even when I went to shops in California and Texas in the 80s, I don’t recall back issue stock with backing boards.  You have to keep in mind that a pack of 100 3mil bags was $3.  Depending on when you bought them, that was a choice between 5-8 new comics or a pack of bags.  Boards were like $5/100 so...  

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9 hours ago, Randall Dowling said:

In the Midwest, bags were commonly used by the late 70s.  I don’t know anyone that had used or ever seen a backing board until the early 80s.  In fact, most comic shops didn’t use them on their back issues until the 90s.  It was just an extra expense that took away from the bottom line.  There were usually books in a glass case stored in Mylar sleeves that had backing boards in the late 80s but this was only for books $30 or more.  There were relatively few stores that had any golden age and very little silver age so this really applied to books 1969-present.  2c

As I think about it, even when I went to shops in California and Texas in the 80s, I don’t recall back issue stock with backing boards.  You have to keep in mind that a pack of 100 3mil bags was $3.  Depending on when you bought them, that was a choice between 5-8 new comics or a pack of bags.  Boards were like $5/100 so...  

I remember my buddy selling his run of New Mutants to our LCS at some point in the mid to late 80s.  They reluctantly paid him some small amount of money, mostly to get him to leave I think, since the books really weren’t worth anything at that time.  He then proceeded to remove all of the bags because “he sold them the books, not the bags”.  The guy at the LCS was really unhappy because now he had a chore in addition to the mostly worthless books.  My buddy walked out with his stack of used bags that he did reuse on his other books, because bags were expensive compared to the books in those days.

The only books that had boards that I remember were wall books in mylars.

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I had struck a deal with a fellow comic store owner to sell me stock from his back room for ten cents each if I spent a thousand dollars. I made the deal with the understanding I'd take 4000 books today and he would store the rest for two months.  I drive over and go into his basement. The two of us go box by box, with him vetoing a good bit of what I select. There isnt enough stock that he is willing to let go for me to get 10,000 books so we renegotiate on 5,000 books for $550, all to be removed within a week. Hours go by and the books are assembled. We are done and relaxing when he lets me know he wants two cents per comic for the bags. It might not sound like much, but it adds twenty percent to the deal. When I object and say he should have said that in the first place, he goes off about how much money he is losing and how I'm wasting his time.  What had been a friendly atmosphere suddenly turned adversarial. He went on and on about it only being two cents more and I'd counter with it was $100 more and it was an extra twenty percent. I was pretty sure they would move pretty quick at fifty cents, and some of the books I knew I could get a dollar for, so I offered to split the difference and he refused.  I walked and it was the end of what had been a decent relationship.

A month or two later, he called and said the boxes I'd picked were still there and his offer was still good. I told him I'd pay his price, if he had them delivered and that was the end of the discussion. A few years later, I heard he sold his entire basement stock for ten cents each to an out of town dealer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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