Now that I think about it more, the one baxter paper DC series I did buy at the time was the earlier issues of The Outsiders until I stopped collecting comics shortly thereafter.

Previously I collected the "Batman and the Outsiders" series until it effectively ended. At the time, I didn't know these two Outsiders series followed the same publishing baxter + "non-baxter tales" pattern as New Teen Titans and Legion of Super Heroes.

(The final few issues of the non-baxter "Adventures of the Outsiders", were reprints of the first several baxter Outsiders issues).

This was something I would have been completely oblivious to when I was really young.

In practice for many folks including myself, one has to really see the supply/demand dynamics in action over several booms-n-busts in different markets, in order to really understand this in practice.

Penguin Random House sent multiple apologies last week about the damaged shipments and they said that things will immediately be changed and better boxes would be used. All lies. They sent everything for week 2 in the same shitty boxes to all retailers and everyone is reporting heavy damages. This is really pissing everyone off as LCS are now in a position where they can sell many of these books and the customers aren't getting the subs fulfilled. It's a big fucking mess.

Maybe they'll bring back Hero's World.

Are there any complaints about the current new Marvel issues, which went through the Diamond middle-middleman direct channel (ie. Marvel -> PRH -> Diamond -> comic shop) ?

No, but I believe is because 99.9% of the accounts switched to Penguin. The people overseas still get their Marvels directly from Diamond so there’s no complaints on their end

I never thought Baxter paper justified the higher pricing when I was collecting. The colors were a little too sharp, lol.

As a kid who didn't have a lot of money and only wanted to read comics, I felt much the same, that I was ok paying less, but IIRC it was a notable change, and now I wonder how the paper itself stands up compared to each other 40 years later.

(On a parallel tangent).

As mentioned in earlier threads on here, I stopped regularly collecting comics shortly after the Secret Wars II limited series ended. At the time what was really annoying, was getting every single "crossover" issue which tied in directly with the Secret Wars II series. Prior to this, this "crossover hell" also happened with the Crisis on inifinite earths limited series, where I was also getting every single crossover issue.

Around that the same time period, I also was starting to buy a lot of Atari 2600 cartridges when they were showing up for $5 to $10 a pop at places like kmart. At the time, I didn't know the "great home video game industry crash" had happened over 1983-85.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

At that age, I thought it was video game "cartridges from heaven" at $5 a pop.

Though in reality, I didn't know it was actually a mass liquidation of old atari inventory collecting dust that flooded the market in 1982-83. I had no idea how supply and demand functioned.

So with the limited cash I had at that age, something had to go which was comic books. Ironically a few years later I also largely lost interest in video games, both home consoles and arcade. This was when "fighting games" were starting to become popular, such as street fighter and later mortal kombat, etc ... which I never got into at all.

In hindsight, I think I would have been better off collecting comics than wasting all my time and cash buying other lousy stuff like video game cartridges, metal/punk rock records + cds, laserdiscs, etc .... where the latter stuff ended up collecting dust and rarely ever played/watched again after a few months (or years). Though my younger self would have never known this, without first hand experiences.

In alternate universe where I had continued collecting comic books, I think I would have continued getting The Uncanny X-Men and some of the spinoffs like X-Factor. Dunno about other titles. (Even today, every now and then I still read an omnibus of the early Claremont era of The Uncanny X-Men circa mid->late 1970s).



In more recent times, I came to the realization that most dvds/blurays were largely a waste even at very low prices. (I only started buying a lot of dvds/blurays in 2011, where previously I had very little to no interest over the entire 2000s decade).

Over the past few years, I've buying more books which I read again back and forth over a period of time to get a clearer understanding. So instead of buying over $60+ in dump bin blurays and/or tv season dvd sets every time I went to discount stores or wallyworld (which is what I use to do before the pandemic), I've been buying around that same amount in books which I've been reading on and off over a period time to have a clearer understanding. Though no graphic novels/omnibuses recently for various reasons, as mentioned earlier in other threads on here.

Honestly, you were probably better off (financially) getting out when you did.

First off, let me say Secret Wars 2 sucked as a crossover. Yes it did have some humorous moments but man.

But if you had stayed on you'd probably get caught up in the speculator frenzy of the 90s. Unless you were prescient by that time and could get rid of all your Valiants before the market collapsed or something, and avoid buying all the overprinted trash that still collects dust in collections, you would have been out a ton, even if you had held onto stuff like NM 98.

I would have to agree.

At the time, I was naively thinking Secret Wars II was going to be as good as Secret Wars 1. Other than having the same namesake title, they were completely different. The Secret Wars 1 was largely a self contained storyline on another world which didn't have much of any crossover tie-in issues, other than when the characters disappeared from earth and later reappeared back (such as amazing spiderman #252).

The mediocre storyline of Secret Wars II was my initial disenchantment with a "crossover hell", where I was thinking this might be the future of comic books. With limited cash and the first time I became self-aware of my ocd "compulsive completionist" mindset, this was the easiest place to exit the comic collecting hobby. At the time, I knew very well that I would have even less cash when I would be attending college in the then-near future.


Slightly later and being more self-aware, I also stopped buying tons of new metal/punk rock albums when the audio cd format became ubiquitous and record companies stopped releasing new titles on vinyl around 1990 or 1991. It was an easy decision to make when I was losing interest in then-current metal/punk rock music, and audio cds were easily $20 a pop for then-new titles. (In contrast, new titles released on vinyl in the mid-late 1980s were typical around $10 or slightly less).

In such an alternate universe where I continued to collect comics, I can't even speculate how I might have fared during and after the frenzy. Even if I had just restricted my monthly pull list to just only the X-Men and some spinoffs, I think I likely would have also fallen into the frenzy of buying "sucker boxes" full of only the relaunched X-Men #1 issue.

Even back then, I knew myself well enough that when I'm in the middle of a "frenzy" in the trenches, it is very hard to step back and see things from a more distant wide-angle "lens" perspective of objectivity.

In hindsight, I think the only reason I ever "saw the light" about how supply and demand functioned in practice by the early-1990s, was that I was observing the comic book and vinyl/cd markets from a semi-outsider perspective where I no longer had any personal "emotional / ego" stake in it.

I imagine the best mass market merchandise one could purchase during the 80s for investment purposes in retrospect would have been NES cartridges. Has anyone seen the crazy prices the past few years for unopened Nintendo software from the 80s and 90s? It exploded during the pandemic. We are talking thousands for fairly common Nintendo games.

I suspect that unopened NES games are probably quite rare, so when the thirty year nostalgia cycle rolled around, they became highly desirable, driving up the prices.

Don't forget the auction houses colluding with the grading companies to raise prices!

Before the grading companies were widely known and used, did this style of collusion ever happen with the folks behind the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guides ?

Didn't Wizard famously own a bunch of comic book stores?

Yes, and they still do. Most of the contributors of the Overstreet Price Guide own tons of Dell, Gold Key, Charlton, EC, Marvel and DC golden and silver age books. That's why from early on the priced golden age books at ridiculous prices, even though there are what could be called common books from that era that are easily available. After the 80's they did the same with silver age and currently they are doing the same with bronze age stuff. They also love to price newer stuff at lower prices so when owners of current books want to dump their collections, they sell for cents on the dollar. It's been 6 years and these crooks still price books like Edge of Spider-Verse #2 for cover price, a book that hasn't been cover price since it came out.

They've been doing this type of fraud since day 1. I recently got a reprint of the first overstreet and they price golden age books at sky high prices while most of the silver age was price extremely cheaply, if it was listed at all. The then current bronze age stuff wasn't even listed. Go and try to buy from any of these contributors to Overstreet and you'll see that the stuff in their booth is extremely expensive. Even haggling, you won't get real market prices. And these guys hate ebay with a passion when you bring it up as real sale value.

Yes and they were accused of doing stuff akin to insider trading, which doesn't surprise me about the Shamus brothers. I remember there were so big controversies on how they manipulated the market with the Captain America #25 (death of Steve Rogers) and the Sentry #1. They also had some type of weird deal with CGC in which they had their books exclusively graded as 9.5 and sold at Wizard World conventions. No one else could get CGC 9.5 or anything other than even numbers after 9.0 and up.

I think that Overstreet's excuse for under-pricing recent books is because they want to reflect the actual collectible market value of books, and not whatever the flavor of the month is. At least that's how one person "in the industry" who was defending Overstreet explained it when it was brought up in the early 90s. (It was either the lettercol of a magazine, or an editorial. Can't remember where.)

Which always sounded like bullshit to me back in the 90s when I would look at an Overstreet guide and see that books from the last few years that would command prices in the $50+ range being listed at cover price, or barely over.

And I also kind of remember the stink about Wizard and CGC. I remember back in the early days of CGC that Wizard was hyping the prices that CGC graded books like the Image #1s -- which were essentially quarter bin shovelware at the time -- were selling for. Always seemed like there was some quid-pro-quo going on there.

The problem with Overstreet is that it is outdated and pretty much irrelevant the moment it's released. I buy it every now and then as it is a guide and informative for a lot of old books that don't have transactions on ebay but like you said, their insistence to undervalue modern age books takes away their credibility. Like I mentioned before, I know a lot of the contributors that work in the book and they are the biggest pedantic gatekeeping assholes imaginable. They are the same ones that insist of over valuing "Pedigree" collections, a definition that constantly keeps changing according to the books they acquire. They look down on the younger crowd, always dismissing them. I already had my run in with one of these pedantic assholes as I was looking for an specific book, worth big money (TMNT #2 first print NYCC edition) and the guy told me I couldn't afford it. This was at Heroescon about 6 years ago and I basically told him to go fuck himself. Don't know how he came at the erroneous conclusion that I couldn't afford the book but I was wearing a comic book shirt, shorts, nike shoes, like everyone else at that show.

As for Wizard, I have 2 friends that work there about 20 years ago and they fucking hated it. They described it as a complete toxic environment created by the Shamus brothers. When people were starting to hate the mag due to them being partly blamed for the collapse of the market in the 90's, the Shamus bros went from bad to worse as bosses. Doubling down on the mentality to influence the market, they force writers and editors to promote shit over quality. Everyone believes there was some payola involved from Marvel at the time as they were doing everything in their power to jumpstart business after the bankruptcy.

I remember the day someone in my local group purchased an Overstreet guide back in the day.

Literally overnight comics for us abruptly changed from reading stuff for enjoyment, to collecting for monetary value appreciation. Folks were always bragging about how they got a particular "valuable" issue for a really low price, and/or tricking other collectors into trading a "valuable" issue for something that was worthless. It was basically our own "mini frenzy" as preteens (or teenagers), with horrible consequences.

When someone discovered they were ripped off in the trade, they would demand the trade to be reversed. Otherwise the perp had to be constantly watching their back, where the victim would be pulling off repeated "sucker punches" on the perp until the trade was reversed. It was easy to see who had a reputation for ripping off others (ie. many black eyes, face bruises, etc ....).

(On a more general rant).

Back in the day, I encountered folks like this all the time at conventions/conferences in many nerdy/geeky type niches which attract an extreme hardcore crowd.

This is the primary reason why I haven't been to such conventions/conferences in over 20 years.

At a local level, I generally avoid becoming acquaintances with hardcore nerdy/geeky pedantic types as much as possible. For example, I don't wear any tshirts with comic book stuff or metal/punk rock bands on the front (nor any sports teams). Basically this greatly minimizes any potential smalltalk from "strangers" approaching me via observing easily identifiable features of a nerdy/geeky niche or music/sports.

I don't even wear tshirts with a famous college/university logo on the front. I generally find it to be very unpleasant to be engaging in smalltalk with alumni from universities I attended, where we have very little to talk about other than the "good times" from back in the day.

(More general rambling).

I think my issue is that I never figured out how to do smalltalk with non-nerdy/non-geeky normal folks, or even figuring what to talk about. Even folks which I am friends/acquaintences with, most of the time it is either silence or a blank stare whenever I bring up something "trivial" to talk about.

The types of folks who I seem to be able to speak with easily, were frequently the hardcore pedantic types in various geeky/nerdy type niches. Ironically and paradoxically, these are the exact same types of extreme folks I find very unpleasant to deal with and actively try not to speak with in the first place.

In practice, the only thing I found ebay useful for was figuring out what the true market prices might be for something which attracts the hardcore crowd. For common items, it is less effective.

For example back in the 1980s and 1990s, I suspected something like Rolex watches were considerably "overpriced". They were easily available that even middle or middle-upper class folks (ie. yuppies, etc ...) were able to buy one. Some relatives in my family social circles were buying rolexes, just to show off as some type of "status symbol" (however fleeting).

By the time ebay was around in the late 1990s, I noticed the prices of used Rolex watches were considerably lower.



Back in the day before the internet was ubiquitous, I always suspected some niche specialized dealers (comics, sports cards, rare books, musical instruments, etc ...) were greatly overpricing their inventory. This is independent of whether it was overtly (ie. overstreet types guides, MSRP, etc ...) or semi-covertly in a market with considerable "price opacity" (ie. rare books, etc ...).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(market)

Some cases which I suspected the MSRP was greatly overpriced (whether official or implicit), was stuff like: Rolex watches, brand name guitars (ie. esp, jackson, etc ...), Dungeons & Dragons books/modules, etc ... (In the mid-late 1980s, D&D modules were typically around $10 a pop for a softcover 64 pages or less stapled together).

This was another big reason why I never really got into buying a lot of back issues from comic book shops back in the day. Even knowing some overstreet guide prices, I had no idea whether prices were reliable or not for older non-dumpbin stuff.