So I uncovered maybe 60 or 70 comics, the vast majority of them from Marvel’s Bronze Age (mid-to-late 70s), and including some oddities like Star Wars comics, Human Fly, Black Panther…and also a LOT of Conan! No surprise there, given I also recently found all those 1970s Conan books.
Random browsing suggests most of them are worth < $15, but there are some higher value ones, but whatever. I realize I didn’t find a gold mine, but I’m curious about the best way to sell the ones I don’t want to keep. Just put them on eBay for bidding? Take them to a dealer? At a minimum I should probably put them in sleeves I guess.
I used to work in a comic shop years ago. The 90’s was the death knell for collectors and the value of back issues. Then flash forward to the past decade and the explosion of trade paperback collection. Most shops don’t really buy much anymore and eBay has flooded the market with back issues for cheap. You’ll have a hard time getting what they are supposedly worth if you are going by Overstreet prices. If you are going by what people are asking for on eBay you’ll find that most of those comic auctions don’t even meet reserve or go for a lot cheaper than the seller expected.
You should send them to me. I won’t pay you, but I’ll take good care of them.
What do you mean, piss off?
OK, prices for old comic are near a low point, theoretically, as monkeylucifer says, in large part because most attractive material is available in reprints. But collectors are still interested in collecting, not just reading, and so a non-trivial portion of the audience remains. And every day, material from the 1970’s and early '80’s gets older. So while the market is down, any individual issue tends to go up slightly (and sometimes more than slightly) over time as it ages and gets more rare.
The most profitable place to sell them is likely eBay because you cut out the middleman. The most profitable way to sell is likely by issue if you have some real gems. But if you have runs that include a key issue that is somewhat more valuable than the rest, but not 5x more, then you should consider selling it as a run. You can attract people who need many issues as well as buyers who just want that one and the competition between these two will drive up the price.
Furthermore, individual comics that are worth only a few bucks are undervalued on eBay, simply because shipping doubles (or more) the actual acquisition cost. So by consolidating that into a run your buyer can amortize shipping per issue. If you have particular keys that are much more valuable then you need to balance whether to include them or not – cherry-picked runs do not get much action.
As to how you figure pricing, you want to look on eBay for that in the first place. There are also websites of applications you can use that do all that for you. This is a non-trivial amount of research and planning, but with less than a hundred issues, it should be manageable.
All of that said, comic collectors aren’t immune to economic factors generally, so it might be a good idea to hold off for a while until the economy picks up.
Good thoughts, guys, thank you. I think for now I’ll sleeve them up and let the kids read them (carefully), at least until the economy picks up. I’d also forgotten how fun they are to read, so that’s not the worst outcome.
Well, there go my hopes for a cushy retirement! Not to mention all those now-worthless Beanie Babies…(goes back to searching for wheat pennies in the giant coffee can full of change…)
Exactly… don’t forget, they were made to be read, not collected.
I feel fortunate that I bought comics based on whether they were “a good read”.
And if I can never get rid of mine, well, I can spend a couple of years of my retirement reading Marshall Rogers’s Batman or Frank Miller’s Daredevil. And, as a bonus, I’ll have forgotten how they end by then!
Oh, by the way, I have sold a few to the local comic book shop.
And I put them out when our neighborhood has garage sales, and give some away to any neighbor kids who look through them.
Honest to God, if you have any Thor from that period, I’ll buy 'em. I don’t know why, but while I was overseas I started reading them. A couple of used bookstores in the nearby town sold them, and I started visiting the shops once a week or so, to dig around for more back issues. Of all places this was in a little town in South Korea. They had a ton of different American comics. Why I didn’t bring them home with me I’ll never know.
Is it possible that a library or school or children’s hospital might be willing to take the collection as a tax-deductible donation? Maybe you’d even be allowed to claim book value to the IRS, even though in practice you’d be unlikely to obtain that actual amount for them?
ETA: I am neither a tax lawyer nor an accountant, I am only putting forth a possibility for the OP to inquire about, not stating for a fact what the tax ramifications would be. By the same token, I am neither a librarian nor a principal nor the manager of a children’s hospital, so I cannot say for certain whether this is the sort of thing they’d find useful.
Not to mention all those now-worthless Beanie Babies…(goes back to searching for wheat pennies in the giant coffee can full of change…)