TheDude

Nope - not sending them to anyone. Those that aren't donated will be recycled - no way am I going to add to someone else's crap

Inhumans99

I love that this thread is active again, and even has a spin-off thread! Awesome. I continue to be super thrifty now when it comes to buying trades. Last purchase was the Shang Chi Omnibus V2 Variant, and IST sent me one of those loyalty 3% extra discount emails so I am going to grab a few more books sometime later today. I still love comics but it really has been sobering this past year to realize that if I had just cut back by half the past several years I would have had thousands (yes, with an s) available for a rainy day. Life is so expensive here in the Bay Area that I could have really used this cash.

As all of these posts of mine have shown though, it was never too late for me to pull back and start saving some money. Collecting and reading comics is a wonderful hobby, but one thing it is not is a cheap one.

I am rooting for my fellow dvd talkers who are struggling to pull back on their comic spending habits...I really am proof that you can do it!

TheDude

Great post. I actually created the other thread & bumped this thread because I had recently gone through some floppies & gotten rid of them. Doing so was like releasing a great weight from my shoulders - what a fantastic feeling!

Floppies take up an incredible amount of room - maybe not individually, but because of the bags & boards. I stopped collecting all floppies cold-turkey in late 2014, which was at the same time I stopped going to my LCS cold-turkey.

Now, I just get CE's - either HC's or Trades. Overall, they actually take up less room than floppies.

davidh777

I got that discount as well, after receiving a 2% discount the week before that I didn't use, so I may use it. My weakness now is large omniboo and digital purchases, and I purchase more than I read, but I don't spend so much that it kills my budget. Fortunately I didn't pick up the floppy habit when I got back into the hobby because space is a bigger problem for me than cost.

The Valeyard

Make sure you're not getting rid of anything worth $$.

TheDude

Nope - all of them were floppies that weren't worth anything.

Hadrian7

Oh man, I'm so gonna reach this stage in about a decade or so.... luckily I stopped collecting floppies a while ago, but unfortunately went towards the Absolutes Editions and Omnibuses route. Trying to find a place for everything is such a pain, but reading them in the larger format is so much better now.

DWilson

I'm an old, old man and I've to get rid of some of the ballast from my collection. I stopped buying Comics for the most part, getting my fix from the County Library or buying Trades and Omnibuses. What's the best method to determine whether I'm throwing out something worthwhile, -checking each issue against an online database? Where's the best and easiest place to check?

Trevor

Completed sales on Ebay is always a good option, as nothing is worth anything unless it actually sells.

PhantomStranger

Omnibuses are always worth money, especially when they go out of print.

DWilson

Yes, of course, but I'm buying (some of) them, - I'm trying to get rid of surplus "floppies" (and I once swore I'd never call them that).

slop101

Omnibuses are the only comics I've sold where I actually made money on.

Floppies, when selling in bulk, I'm lucky if I break even.

Trevor

If you make more than a quarter a comic you're lucky, or putting some hours and risk into the process.

PhantomStranger

Basically cherry-pick critical issues like New Mutants #98 and donate/sell everything else in lots.

The rise of the collector's market killed any chance that comics printed after the late 1970s would ever be worth serious money. It's happened in several collectible markets. The Baby Boomers for the most part were terrible at keeping their childhood items in pristine shape. Every following generation learned better, thus killing collectibles' value. Only the truly rare items have significantly increased in worth.

Entities like CGC have imposed an artificial scarcity on newer collectibles but those outside grading systems are little more than a ponzi scheme.

DWilson

I had a friend who owned a Comics store back in the '80s, then the '90s (different store) and then a last gasp in the early 2000s. All went out of business eventually. Even in the '80s it was hard to get him to buy boxes of Comics unless he knew he had a "winner" in there.

Now I'm at the point where I'd just as soon get rid of a lot of the non-essentials, but I just have that little thing in my head that hates to just throw stuff out, because I know that there might be a book or two that's worth something. It's not a question of "Donations", -a tax deduction won't help me, -and I've lost a lot of my sentimentality over Comics because of what I've seen over the years. I'm mostly trying to clear some space so that my death notice won't include the term "hoarder". But, of course, culling through a collection takes time.

I've also got the same problem with laserdiscs, since I have a lot of them, and no player (though I do have some sentimentality over them that I never found in DVDs). I have a few video tapes but I can't imagine anyone buying them. I also have a boatload of DVDs I can get rid of.

I'm sure these are not uncommon problems around here.

Mr. Flix

This thread is fascinating.

One of my 2017 goals is downsizing. I have a long box of comics that I haven't touched in years, and was planning to see if a local comic shop would buy them, but this thread (and reading some other posts online) have convinced me that comic shops aren't big on buying old issues.

I don't think what I have is worth much, except for the complete run of the Blackest Night storyline (including all tie-in issues). Looks like I might get around $100 or so for that if I want to go the eBay route. I'll probably donate the rest.

The Valeyard

Comic stores do not want older books. They'll usually ask if you have any key issues (Hulk #181, Walking Dead #1, Dark Knight Returns, etc) but generally, they'll turn you away. I've seen guys walk in with tons of 90s books trying to cash in and not understanding why these books are useless.

If you are looking to sell, know what you own. During the holidays, I was at a local show and a guy walked up with a small bin full of books. He asked the dealer if he'd give $50 for all the books. The dealer rummaged through the books and asked "How much did you want again?" The guy re-iterated $50. The dealer gave it to the guy and he walked off. The bin had about $800 worth of books in it including early, key Walking Dead issues. He sold two books within 20 minutes for $100.

mrhan

That's what gets me when people start to call books from the 90's "vintage" like their old. I've seen tons of ads on Craigslist saying "vintage comics". I guess 25+ year old comics are old to the average person but to people like us it's not even close to what we consider old. I don't even think BA books are old and that's the bulk of my collection. Only because that's what I grew up with. I don't really care much for SA or even GA books even though I own quite a few.

Josh-da-man

When I was reading comics in 1985, a comic from 1965 would have been "old." So would from 1975, for that matter.

Which is kind of weird because my Sandman, Preacher, and Grendel comics are all between 15 and 30 years old now and they certainly don't seem old or vintage.

slop101

I think it's because some time around the late '70s, comics became less and less disposable, so plenty of books were bagged and saved. As opposed to earlier than that, comics were pretty much tossed out like newspapers.

For example Action Comics #1 had a print-run of roughly 200K, which is roughly typical of current print-runs of modern books. Difference being that the great majority of those 200K were tossed in the trash, where as the newest issue of whatever is saved by a majority of those who bought it.

The Valeyard

My uncle told me the story of his comic collection. He was a child during the Golden Age and had all the key books. Read 'em and loved 'em. He went into the army during the Korean War and was shipped overseas. When he came back home, he found out that his mother (my grandmother) had taken all the comics and burned them in the incinerator, thinking they were just old magazines. He claimed to have early Action and Detective Comics including Action #1 and Detective #27 but he could have just been saying that.

He was always jealous that decades later, his parents were driving his nephew (me) around town looking for comic stores.

Spiderbite

I don't know if my Dad had any major key issues but he said that he a pretty large comic collection (for reading not collecting) and came home one day from high school and his mom threw them all out with the trash that day. He said that she was just cleaning up the house and thought there was no reason for him to have a bunch of funny books while in high school.

Every now and then I will bring it up and you can tell it still irks him 50 years later.

PhantomStranger

My father's childhood baseball card collection was tossed out by my grandmother when he went off to college. This was a collection mostly from the 1950s with key Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays cards. It would be nearing six digits in worth today.

No one back then had any idea that cheap, disposable entertainment items would be worth serious money in the coming years.

whotony

I have about 10,000 books.
Maybe 90% is "modern"

98% are in amazing condition.

I can't even get an offer on them.
Only offer I could get is $5k but only if my 3,000 Spider-man books are included.

I just cant do it.
It would feel as if I was giving them away.

I want to murder myself over this because I need dough for closing on a house plus I
don't want to move over 45 long boxes again.

DWilson

Just out of curiosity, what's the vintage on your Spider-Man issues? I ask since apparently that's the key item(s) of value.