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Plan of attack for collecting it all?
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Started by poorcollector,

97 posts in this topic

KCOComics

KCOComics

Posted
Posted (edited)

I would echo the advice of others. 

Take your favorite comic / character and make it a goal to collect every issue. Or expand it to collect every issue they've been in. 

If you take superman or spidey or batman, that's a massive massive goal that will take you decades and require a huge sum of money. Millions. 

So my other piece of advice is,  have a plan for $$ and have a plan for space.

I've got a closet full now and my wife would argue that's too much space. 

Edited by KCOComics
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THE_BEYONDER

THE_BEYONDER

Posted
Posted
27 minutes ago, KCOComics said:

I would echo the advice of others. 

Take your favorite comic / character and make it a goal to collect every issue. Or expand it to collect every issue they've been in. 

If you take superman or spidey or batman, that's a massive massive goal that will take you decades and require a huge some of money. Millions. 

So my other piece of advice is,  have a plan for $$ and have a plan for space.

I've got a closet full now and my wife would argue that's too much space. 

This seems much more fun than simply accumulating every single issue a publisher put out.  (thumbsu
 

 

 

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Qalyar

Qalyar

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Posted

It's a little off-topic, but as an intellectual exercise, I was considering how difficult it would be to do this for some of the other publishers.

  • Dark Horse has its early books do better than most at staying out of the dollar bins, but I don't think there's much in the way of great rarities to be had. The Star Wars: the Clone Wars #1 Dark Horse 100 edition certainly isn't cheap, but there's a lot more of them out there than comparable rarities for other publishers. Same goes for the Conan #24 nude. Unless I've overlooked something, Hellboy: Fury #3's (pretty awesome, imo) variant cover is maybe the physically rarest DH book because of the ridiculously stupid retailer ordering restrictions, but even that comes up for sale with some regularity. As with any publisher who produced them, chasing DH's late newsstand prints would be an experience, of course.
  • Image would be a terrible investment, but you could probably get the bulk of the runs out of dollar boxes. There are no $10,000 books here, and very little that will be $1000 books, but it's still harder to hit full completion than expected. As a property, The Walking Dead is cooling off, price-wise, but several of the variants are still going to be really hard to physically locate (Hyundai, Last Wine, #116 3rd print). There are also Walking Dead books (especially the Here's Negan Preview sketch) in the 1992 blind boxes; all the blind box books would be annoying to hunt down. Several Spawn books run in the low hundreds of dollars, but most aren't particularly rare (#185 sketch cover, I guess), although if you go chasing newsstand variants, there's an unusually deep hole to fall into here even for newsstand collectors. Otherwise, supplies are tight for the 8house Image Expo cover, and the error issue of Wytches #4. But of course, the real challenge for a complete Image collection would be The Maxx. You've got a set of 12 colored ashcans (blue/red/yellow/black for each of #1/2/3) and then the famous blue and red foil prototypes (which, unlike most test prints, actually were sold to the public by Wizard). All told, the entire collection is probably worth less than a Tec 27, but good luck finding all the fiddly bits.
  • Valiant is effectively impossible to collect for completeness with all printed variants, because the Bloodshot Salvation #12 Vin Diesel variant and Quantum & Woody (2017) #1 2nd print are both physically unique books (in that exactly one copy exists). And of course, there were the five #UNITYGOLDENTICKET comics, each of which had a print run of 1, but only three of which have ever been located (the Bryan Hitch and Paolo Rivera variants were either never found or never publicly acknowledged). The Solar gold proofs are also unique, although those weren't really every actually released, so you might or might not count them against completeness. As far as actually-obtainable material goes, the Nintendo Comics System sneak preview is generally recognized as a Valiant key. If you decided to include it, I'd consider another one of the crux pieces to be the Valiant Sneak Peak [sic]; this wasn't actually produced by the real Valiant, but by a competing Valiant (Valiant Intellectual Properties, which was actually Dynamite Entertainment/Dynamic Forces under a different name) as part of a 2007 copyright dispute over Acclaim's assets, and so it's definitely an important part of the Valiant story (had they lost the case, Valiant could not have resumed publishing its existing titles, or even use the name Valiant!).
  • Counterpoint. :troll:

Stuff like Comico, Eclipse, and Mirage have a smattering of well-regarding issues, and even valuable ones, but wouldn't make for particularly impressive collections. Grendel, Miracleman, and TMNT might all be cool,desirable, and at times even expensive books, but I don't think many of us want to dedicate collection space to Justice Machine, Zot, and Xenotech. Antarctic Press, even more so; sure, Strangers in Paradise is a good book, and #1 is rarer than you'd expect (as is Gold Digger #1, for that matter), but a publisher-complete collection would include boxes of specialist furry titles like Genus and Hepcats.

A challenging but potentially plausible publisher subset would be all the Whitman distributed issues. All of the 1980-81 books are at least fairly difficult to locate. The 1981 books (and Flash Gordon #30) also have 40 and 50 cent price variants (the former are much rarer). At times, books also exist with white label and yellow label variants (which is essentially direct market / newsstand). Gold Key Whitmans also come with a large selection of price variants and reprints, and it is very likely that not all printings have been widely recognized at this point. None of this is extremely expensive (there might be a couple $1,000 books) unless you chase high-grade exemplars, but it would probably take years or longer to assemble them all.

 

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Qalyar

Qalyar

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, themagicrobot said:

Dark Horse? Image? Easy. I'd bet all the money in the world and even Ian Levine would fail to amass every Len Miller comic ever published.

 

Yeah, I was actually surprised how few chase books there are from DH and Image. Playing the waiting game to pick up all the Maxx junk would be annoying but isn't even that bad. You're 100% right on Len Miller, though. Is there even a comprehensive list of those books? To say nothing of physically tracking them down. And many of the ones I've seen are pretty beat, so aiming for even mid grades would be an obstacle into itself 

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THE_BEYONDER

THE_BEYONDER

Posted
Posted
4 hours ago, Qalyar said:

It's a little off-topic, but as an intellectual exercise, I was considering how difficult it would be to do this for some of the other publishers.

  • Dark Horse has its early books do better than most at staying out of the dollar bins, but I don't think there's much in the way of great rarities to be had. The Star Wars: the Clone Wars #1 Dark Horse 100 edition certainly isn't cheap, but there's a lot more of them out there than comparable rarities for other publishers. Same goes for the Conan #24 nude. Unless I've overlooked something, Hellboy: Fury #3's (pretty awesome, imo) variant cover is maybe the physically rarest DH book because of the ridiculously stupid retailer ordering restrictions, but even that comes up for sale with some regularity. As with any publisher who produced them, chasing DH's late newsstand prints would be an experience, of course.
  • Image would be a terrible investment, but you could probably get the bulk of the runs out of dollar boxes. There are no $10,000 books here, and very little that will be $1000 books, but it's still harder to hit full completion than expected. As a property, The Walking Dead is cooling off, price-wise, but several of the variants are still going to be really hard to physically locate (Hyundai, Last Wine, #116 3rd print). There are also Walking Dead books (especially the Here's Negan Preview sketch) in the 1992 blind boxes; all the blind box books would be annoying to hunt down. Several Spawn books run in the low hundreds of dollars, but most aren't particularly rare (#185 sketch cover, I guess), although if you go chasing newsstand variants, there's an unusually deep hole to fall into here even for newsstand collectors. Otherwise, supplies are tight for the 8house Image Expo cover, and the error issue of Wytches #4. But of course, the real challenge for a complete Image collection would be The Maxx. You've got a set of 12 colored ashcans (blue/red/yellow/black for each of #1/2/3) and then the famous blue and red foil prototypes (which, unlike most test prints, actually were sold to the public by Wizard). All told, the entire collection is probably worth less than a Tec 27, but good luck finding all the fiddly bits.
  • Valiant is effectively impossible to collect for completeness with all printed variants, because the Bloodshot Salvation #12 Vin Diesel variant and Quantum & Woody (2017) #1 2nd print are both physically unique books (in that exactly one copy exists). And of course, there were the five #UNITYGOLDENTICKET comics, each of which had a print run of 1, but only three of which have ever been located (the Bryan Hitch and Paolo Rivera variants were either never found or never publicly acknowledged). The Solar gold proofs are also unique, although those weren't really every actually released, so you might or might not count them against completeness. As far as actually-obtainable material goes, the Nintendo Comics System sneak preview is generally recognized as a Valiant key. If you decided to include it, I'd consider another one of the crux pieces to be the Valiant Sneak Peak [sic]; this wasn't actually produced by the real Valiant, but by a competing Valiant (Valiant Intellectual Properties, which was actually Dynamite Entertainment/Dynamic Forces under a different name) as part of a 2007 copyright dispute over Acclaim's assets, and so it's definitely an important part of the Valiant story (had they lost the case, Valiant could not have resumed publishing its existing titles, or even use the name Valiant!).
  • Counterpoint. :troll:

Stuff like Comico, Eclipse, and Mirage have a smattering of well-regarding issues, and even valuable ones, but wouldn't make for particularly impressive collections. Grendel, Miracleman, and TMNT might all be cool,desirable, and at times even expensive books, but I don't think many of us want to dedicate collection space to Justice Machine, Zot, and Xenotech. Antarctic Press, even more so; sure, Strangers in Paradise is a good book, and #1 is rarer than you'd expect (as is Gold Digger #1, for that matter), but a publisher-complete collection would include boxes of specialist furry titles like Genus and Hepcats.

A challenging but potentially plausible publisher subset would be all the Whitman distributed issues. All of the 1980-81 books are at least fairly difficult to locate. The 1981 books (and Flash Gordon #30) also have 40 and 50 cent price variants (the former are much rarer). At times, books also exist with white label and yellow label variants (which is essentially direct market / newsstand). Gold Key Whitmans also come with a large selection of price variants and reprints, and it is very likely that not all printings have been widely recognized at this point. None of this is extremely expensive (there might be a couple $1,000 books) unless you chase high-grade exemplars, but it would probably take years or longer to assemble them all.

 

Usually I’d drop a wall of text meme on you, but this was the most informative single post I’ve read on these forums. :golfclap:

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1950's war comics

1950's war comics

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@poorcollector

i have been a collector most of my life ... it's fun ! but comic books take up a ton of space.. you better have a spare bedroom with a really good lock on the door if you have kids

baseball cards take up a ton of space too ...

the best thing to collect is coins ... a really nice coin collection can fit in three or four shoe boxes or an average size suitcase,... coins are also much more liquid when it comes time to sell your collection..

when selling a coin collection to a dealer will usually pay a fair price and he will buy every single coin down to the individual wheat penny , when selling comics and baseball cards dealers will often not buy drek at any price , you will have to pay them to take it away from you ....

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THE_BEYONDER

THE_BEYONDER

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Posted
2 minutes ago, 1950's war comics said:

 

the best thing to collect is coins ... a really nice coin collection can fit in three or four shoe boxes or an average size suitcase,... coins are also much more liquid when it comes time to sell your collection..

 

Wrong forums coinee:baiting:

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kav

kav

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, ADAMANTIUM said:

you better just watch yourself!!!

Cant I do what I want?  I thought I could-

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kav

kav

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Posted
Just now, ADAMANTIUM said:

dodowhatchawantwhilekeepingoakmanawayfromthebeesforsureheneedsthecaps!

hear hear!

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