why are comics from the 90's not with more money? got a

>>83679175
Because the print runs were huge. 90's is when all the speculators were buying, so they printed millions of copies of garbage. If there are millions of copies out there, they aren't worth anything now. The top selling books only sell 100k, and most books sell 40k or less. There is no market for those comics.

>>83679252
what are some top selling books?

>>83679286
http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2016/2016-04.html

Take a look. You can also look through the historical archives, etc. if you want.

Also, there is very little demand for back issues/old comics. Not many people want to read them or buy them. So only a few key books have value due to scarcity or whatever.

>>83679331
I was hoping the list would tell me what they are worth today, so comics are not a good investment anymore?

>>83679470
They never were a good investment.

The 90's was a special time. Speculator bubble where tons of people were buying them for investment purposes and speculating they'd be valuable "someday". A few hot books that values inflated on. That kind of thing. The bubble burst, as they always do. (Think of Beanie Babies for instance).

Even recent stuff has little-to-no value later. Most books you buy today you can't even sell for cover price. It just never was a good way to make money. Sure, the odd book goes up in value because it's in demand, or there was a low print run, or maybe a movie coming out has driven up the price. But 99% of comics that come out aren't worth shit.

Retailers pay 50% (on average) of cover price to buy the comics in the first place. They aren't going to pay you more than that for most things.

Buy comics because you like reading them or collecting them or whatever. But as an investment? No. Unless you get lucky, or do a ton of research.

>>83679470
They were never a good investment. The only ones that are worth anything are incredibly rare ones from nearly 100 years ago that feature things like THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF SUPERMAN.

Your copy of Bloodshot #1 ain't worth dick.

I got a venom enemy within signed by the artist, anyone think it's worth anything?

>>83679552
>The 90's was a special time. Speculator bubble where tons of people were buying them for investment purposes and speculating they'd be valuable "someday"
sucks all those people were suckers I guess, including me

>>83679331

>Also, there is very little demand for back issues/old comics.

And what little demand there is can now be filled with digital services like Comixology (as well as piracy, but you didn't hear me say that).

>>83679641
According to ebay it's worth about 7 bucks for the whole miniseries.

>>83679641
It might be worth a few bucks to the right buyer. It wouldn't be worth a significant amount though.

>>83679642
To be fair, they hyped up the market a lot to make it seem that way. You were buying hot comics that would skyrocket in value! Wizard magazine didn't help things with their price guides and shit. It made sense for publishers to do. They want people buying comics. They don't give a shit WHY people buy them, so long as they sell the fucking things. So if they can convince people to buy their "Hot #1 Collector's Item!" they will. People STILL fall for it.

>>83679651
True. There are some people (like me) that prefer having print copies too. But overall, nobody reads old comics. People want to keep up with what's happening NOW.

>>83679718
mabye I should take them to a comic book shop or pawn shop then and maybe get $100

>>83679816
How many comics do you have? What do you have?

Also, call the comic shop before you go, and know exactly what you have, and what kind of money you'd like. I know my LCS doesn't buy from random people in general, and if they do, the guy has to say "I have a bunch of comics, some X-Men, some Avengers, I'd like $50 for the lot" or whatever for the owner to even bother looking. If you just walk in "Hey, do you buy comics?" he'd just say no, as it's not worth his time to go through a huge amount of comics when most are worthless.

You could also sell them on eBay as a lot or whatever. Take a look for what you have and see what other people have gotten for it.

>>83679816
You're not going to get $100.

The dream is dead.

>>83679866
>How many comics do you have? What do you have?
I would have to count but a lot of spider man

>>83679921
It's hard to say if it's worth ANY amount without knowing how many comics you are trying to sell, and what you have. Even a ballpark figure (50 comics? 100? 500?).

Also, what Spider-Man? Spider-Man 2099 is worthless. Some Amazing Spider-Man is worth a few bucks from the 90's (Clone Saga). It all depends on what you have. Also the condition they are in.

I tell people now to buy comics they like to read, and not expect them to be "worth something" in the future. Why would they be? Do you buy movies or video games thinking you'll make a fortune on them later in life? No. Comic books are the same. You're paying for the entertainment they provide.

>>83679718
>>83679690

Not even signed? Damn.

>>83679989
Signatures depend on WHO signed it, and if people care about that creator. It looks like Bob McLeod was the artist. While he's a solid artist, nobody gives a shit about him. He was never a hot artist or top-tier guy. Signatures are more for sentimental value, in that you met the person who signed something for you. A keepsake.

>>83679975
>Do you buy movies or video games thinking you'll make a fortune on them later in life?

There's actually been a huge increase of people doing that with video games. /vr/ bitches about resellers on an hourly basis because it's gotten so bad.

>>83679470
>anymore

They never have been.

>>83680064
Yeah, for older stuff mostly people had as kids and are looking to replace right? NES to PS1. PS2/Xbox games are worth shit.

I know NES/SNES has gotten really bad. Most of that shit got thrown away eventually. Much like old comic books. People just threw them away, that's why that Action Comics #1 is worth a fortune. Nobody kept theirs at the time.

>>83680071
>They never have been.
first issue of spider man

>>83680108
>PS2/Xbox games are worth shit.

Xbox yeah but Gamecube and PS2 games have actually been going up in price. Hell Yakuza 2 costs nearly $100 now.

>>83680146
Yeah, like comic books, there are certain games that wind up becoming in demand, because they weren't many produced, or other factors making them become valuable.

I have Yakuza 2 for PS2 myself, wasn't aware of the value as I haven't priced my video game collection in a long time. But again, most people didn't keep their PS2/Gamecube/whatever games, they traded them into Gamestop when they were done with it. I know I was looking for PS1 games a few years ago and finding them in "like new" condition is a real pain as most listings are for people's beat-up copies.

Even some old board games are valuable. The key thing is that most of this stuff is unpredictable. I didn't buy Yakuza 2 years ago thinking "Boy, I can sell this for $100 in 8 years!".

>>83679175
Wait another 20 years, it's not like they'll diminish in price or anything.

>>83680046
Ah well. I got it for like 5 bucks at am antique shop. I got a few issues for x-men #1, the claremont/Lee one that I'm hoping to get signed by Jim someday. Plus it's my favorite cover so it'll be great if it happens.

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>>83680229
You may have not but there are tons of people right now doing exactly that. Hell Devil's Third was notorious for the scalping people did on ebay to make a ton of easy money. Video games right now are going through a similar thing comics went through in the 90s but I don't think it will last as long since around seventh gen is when most games started selling assloads of copies which will mean aside from the rare oddity like you mentioned there will be a high circulation on the second hand market for an extremely long time.

>>83680278
X-Men #1 there were 8 million copies printed I think or some ridiculous number. So in general they are worthless, but the gatefold one is worth a few dollars (under $10). Getting it signed because you like Jim Lee and your favorite cover is the best idea. Don't worry about it's value.

>>83680296
I'm in my 40's, so I've seen the entire video game market. I saw computer games (Commodore 64, Amiga) go up in value, and PS1 as well. I used to sell copies of Rez for PS2 on eBay for $100 as I could get them locally for $20. I see it's not worth $100 anymore, but for awhile it was rare, until they reprinted it I think.

It does make sense, that anything in demand later and hard to find will be worth something to somebody. It's just impossible to predict. One trend I've noticed is that when people hit 30 (or so) and have a stable income, they want to buy all the stuff they had as a kid, or stuff they never were able to get as a kid. So that's why video games are doing that, the 90's were the biggest growth in video games, so lots of those kids are adults now.

What today's kids will want in 20 years? I don't know but that's something to keep in mind.

I should probably go through my PS2 collection (300 games) and see what I have I could part with, but for the most part, I got games I wanted at the time and wanted to keep. I lost interest in Yakuza though, never played the PS3 ones even though I have them.

Lastly, video games are WAY more popular than comic books. Maybe 100x more popular. So those rare NES games worth a shitload will just keep being valuable.

i'd add that some collectibles (like video games) have some unique rarity/quality to them, like the complete package + cartridge art, etc. Therefore the old items still have some level of "value" to them compared to a rerelease on steam or a greatest hits type thing

compare that to a comic book where basically every aspect is reproduced, except maybe the old ads. In a digital version or trade you are basically getting exactly the same thing you got in the original issue

>>83679331
>Also, there is very little demand for back issues/old comics.

This.

Here's an article on how much the demand for old comics (even comics from the Silver Age) have fallen over the years:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-30/those-comics-in-your-basement-probably-worthless

An excerpt from the article:

>Barry T. Smith, 44, spent most of his life collecting comic books. And he always considered them an investment. “These books would someday be college tuition, or a house down payment,” Smith remembers thinking. “I would lay them all out in my parents’ living room, sorting them, cataloging them, writing down entries on graph paper while cross-referencing them against the Overstreet Price Guide.”

>After college he landed a tech job in Silicon Valley but held on to all 1,200 of his comics, including several hundred early issues of Marvel’s X-Men, which his research suggested had grown in value every year. The comics sat in a storage unit, boarded and bagged, for close to two decades. When Smith found himself unemployed and in need of money to support his wife and two daughters, he decided the time was right to cash in on his investment.

>The entire collection sold for about $500. “I’m not too proud to admit, I cried a bit,” Smith says.

>>83681243
More excerpts from the Bloomberg article:

>Outlandish claims and tales of amazing windfalls elicit only groans from Rob Salkowitz, a business analyst and author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture. He also happens to be, in his own words, “a guy in his 40s with a basement full of old comics.” He warns that too many people have been deluded into thinking they are sitting on a comic book gold mine.

>“There are two markets for comic books,” Salkowitz says. “There’s the market for gold-plated issues with megawatt cultural significance, which sell for hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars. But that’s a very, very, very limited market. If a Saudi sheik decides he needs Action Comics No. 1, there are only a few people out there who have a copy.” And then there’s the other market, where most comics change hands for pennies and nobody is getting rich or even breaking even. “The entire back-issues market is essentially a Ponzi scheme,” Salkowitz says. “It’s been managed and run that way for 35 years.”

>>83680404
>tfw found Brubaker's Catwoman #1 at a flea market and wanted to get Darwyn Cooke to sign it.
>he died a few weeks later

>>83681243
Barry probably unloaded his comics as one lot. You don't get as much for them that way. It's a lot of work pricing and listing each individual issue, and of course there are tons that are worthless.

Also, it sounds like his "early issues of Marvel's X-Men" would be from the 90's, going by the article's date and his waiting "close to two decades."

I have 12,000+ comics. I bought them because I read them, and enjoy collecting them, and have been doing it for 30 years. I have no delusions they are worth anything other than being valuable to me. I've had many people tell me I should sell them and "make a ton of money", but I know most are worthless. I have a few gems of course.

I also have people tell me to get rid of them because "it's too many". Fuck them. I didn't say they drank too many drinks at the bar, or smoked too many cigarettes, or whatever they wasted their money on. I waste mine on comic books and get entertainment out of it. That's all I expect. I might as well hold on to them, because they have little-to-no other worth anyway.

>>83681380
>I bought them because I read them, and enjoy collecting them

Those are really the only reasons to keep collecting comics in this day and age. Thinking of them as an investment is just a fantasy, although there is the saying that "there's a sucker born every minute"—a comic is worth as much as what some sap out there is willing to pay for it (which is basically the business model that the whole CGC thing is built on). The owner at a comics shop I used to go to would do this all the time, convince some unsuspecting lapsed casual comics fan (usually someone who last read comics back when shit like foil covers and hologram covers were a thing) that such-and-such back-issue from 1993 is worth five or even ten times what it's actually worth.

>>83681543
I always viewed it that way. Buy them to read. The end. I heard all the shit in the 90's with the LCS owner trying to push whatever Valiant crap had come out that week, or Spawn #1, or whatever other shit. I just bought what I wanted to read. Which was She-Hulk and Alpha Flight at the time I think, both near the bottom of sales figures at the time.

My current LCS doesn't shill anything, but doesn't talk anyone out of anything either. If some moron comes in saying he wants 5 copies to put in his safe, fine. We keep our mouth shut and let him spend his money, then laugh about it when they're out the door. We aren't being cruel, there is no talking sense to these people. We've tried, and they've already made up their mind.

Same goes for when someone comes in wanting to sell their comics from the 90's or whatever and we tell them they're worthless. Their brain can't accept it, because for 20+ years they've been told comics are an investment! They CAN'T be wrong after all this time!

>>83681593
>I heard all the shit in the 90's with the LCS owner trying to push whatever Valiant crap had come out that week, or Spawn #1, or whatever other shit.

Heh. It was sort of funny seeing it happen back then. You'd read about how so-and-so comic sold a million copies or something, and then you'd visit your LCS and there'd be stacks of that same issue in the aisles: Yeah, the comic technically "sold" a million copies because LCS owners over-ordered them on the back of all the Wizard and Hero Illustrated hype, but there was actually very little sell-through to the customer (since the LCS owners already paid for their orders and the stock is non-returnable, the comics are considered "sold" regardless of whether or not customers actually buy them). This happened with a lot of Valiant and early Image Comics titles back in the 1990s, as well as whatever comic that had a foil/embossed/hologram cover Marvel was pushing that week.

>>83681720
It's tough as an LCS owner to anticipate what people want to buy. Very few customers actually bother asking for things in advance, or setting up a pull-list, or whatever. All the DC Rebirth stuff is a good example.

My LCS ordered a decent amount of everything. Like if he sold 40 copies of Detective normally, he ordered 60 copies of Batman #1. They all sold out and people have been requesting copies. None of them asked in advance though, because none of them were interested it in beforehand, not until the hype hit.

He's happy because he sold out of what he ordered. Getting stuck with unsold stock is worse, because that is just money that is gone forever. He's been in business almost 20 years, so he has tons of overstock from that type. A whole basement full of it, probably 100,000 comics at least. Just part of doing business.

Yes, he has a dollar bin, etc., but all that old stock is just dead stock that nobody wants except the odd person. You could price it at a nickle a book and it'd still sit there.

>>83681814
>None of them asked in advance though, because none of them were interested it in beforehand, not until the hype hit.

Diamond Comics Distributors should really extend the FOC (final order cut-off) dates for retailers so they don't bear all the risk in the ordering process. Fat chance of that happening, though, since Diamond has all the leverage in that relationship. I seriously have no idea how my LCS has remained in business to this point, as every week it seems like the owner is complaining about how he got hosed on orders yet again.

>>83679175
>why are comics from the 90's not with more money?
Because there's landfills full of them. Supply and demand.

>>83681895
Part of the problem is the publishers too. They don't overprint by much. You always hear about Marvel or DC stuff going to second print (or third, etc.). If the publishers took the risk, the retailers would be able to order from Diamond if they needed more copies. Publishers don't want to take the risk, they want retailers to take the brunt of it. So a retailer will order cautiously, because they can't afford to lose the money.

It annoys me, because the retailers can't afford to take the risk. Publishers can, because they are the ones producing it and it's cheaper per copy for them to take that risk.

My LCS stays in business because he lives at home and owns the building they are in, and is the only employee. So overhead is low. Otherwise I'm certain my town wouldn't have an LCS at all, nobody could afford to open one if they had to pay realistic overhead.

>>83681954
>Otherwise I'm certain my town wouldn't have an LCS at all, nobody could afford to open one if they had to pay realistic overhead.

The strange thing is my modestly-sized town has two local comics shops, and both have been struggling for what feels like several years now, but they keep trucking. I don't know how they manage it with comics sales seemingly down across the board. I suspect they make more money selling Magic the Gathering cards and selling snacks during the weekly MtG games they host than they do selling floppies.

>>83682116
Snacks is a good way to make some money. Hell, you could sell cans of pop for $1 and a case costs say $8 (max) for 24 cans, so that's $16 profit.

My LCS sells Magic too, but same problem there with comics. It's difficult to get more Magic later after the initial day it goes on sale as the distributor runs out. (Not Diamond for Magic here.) But all the demand is the day it's released anyway for the most part. So the trick is knowing how many cases to order, and it's mostly based on previous trends. Same goes for Heroclix. A few customers that always buy the same amount of bricks every release.

I must have had 20 or 25 copies of Spawn #1. All stolen from my local supermarket.

I loved growing up in the 90s. Steal from the supermarket. Go to the local card or comic shop and sell them for money to buy pot. Rinse and repeat.

Kept myself and my friends stoned our entire youth...

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>>83681185
>In a digital version or trade you are basically getting exactly the same thing you got in the original issue
There are plenty of older comics where the originals or paper scans look far better than a recolored trade or digital copy.