My ex-husband recently passed away. He had a very large comic book collection. Most of them are in 3 foot long white comic boxes and all are in plastic sleeves that are holding one to several comics each. There are also some in banker boxes and those are in plastic sleeves as well.
I am going to estimate that there are at least 20 of the long boxes and another 20 of the banker boxes and another 10 of what looks like entire series wrapped in brown paper bags and these also are in the plastic sleeves. There may even be more. It was hard to keep count while moving them. There are also some books that are I assume reprints of entire comic series.
He did not have a catalog of these that we know of. He may have one on his computer but we have not had a chance to hook it up yet. Some boxes are marked “Iron Man”, “Batman”, “Green Lantern” ect. but that is about it. Some are not marked at all.
I assume the first thing to do is go through each box one by one and create a spread sheet of each comic by the name, year, publisher etc.
Is there something else we should include in this sheet?
How can we find out the value of these? I know we can look on ebay to compare possible prices but is there another good site we can look at? We assume some are very old.
The kids are not even sure yet if they want to sell them all. His son has expressed wanting to keep some of them but that is for him and his sister to decide but I think the first step for them is to determine exactly what they have and what it is worth.
First off, I’m sorry to hear about your ex-husband–my sympathies for you and all his family.
Secondly, hie thee to your local comic book store. Many of them out there will have access to comic book appraisers (or even have one on the premises), and they can set up sales and trades and so forth.
I know baseball cards have “price guides” that are published in a magazine format, and updated regularly. Maybe there’s something similar for comics?
A quick google turned up: http://www.comicspriceguide.com/. I have no idea how accurate it is, but may be a place to start, anyway…
If the collection includes comics in good shape that may have collector interest, I would STRONGLY advise getting the collection profesionally appraised. The named grades (mint, very fine, fine, etc.) have precise meanings and without a certified grade you aren’t going to get any serious collectors. What you or I might call very fine, may only be a very good-minus a very significant difference. And so the serious collectors aren’t going to bite without that appraisal. And you want the serious collectors. Even for the poorer quality comics they will be the ones driving up your prices. CGC is only widely recognized appraiser. You can check out their website at http://www.cgccomics.com.
To help you decide if you should be going through someone like CGC I would recommend talking to your local comic book store. The spreadsheet list is a good idea and I would bring in several copies that are representative of the collection quality as a whole. They will be able to help you identify what comics are likely to have real value and may be worth getting appraised. They are also likely to be your best bet to buy many of the less valuable comics. While they may only offer you 50 cents on the dollar, they are likely to pick up a good portion of the collection as a whole. And selling a few hundred individual comics one at a time at a buck a piece may be more work than you think it is worth.
As a final though if you decide you want to sell the collection, but have no immediate need for the money, you may want to wait to sell. Comics like a lot of other collectables can lose significant value during economic down times. It is a lot easier to talk people into buying that Spiderman #37 when they are flush with money than when they’ve just lost 50+% of their total net worth. I would expect the value of the collection may be less than half of what it was a couple of years ago… or what it may be in a few years from now.
Good advice. This, along with comicspriceguide.com, will tell you what the comics are optimally worth. Ebay tells you what someone will pay for them now (typically on speculative condition).
He worked off and on at a comic store before he passed so I think I will suggest that once they realize what they have and what they may want to keep that they should contact the owner of that store and see if he would be interested in buying anything or maybe all that remains. They are all in a safe dry place so there is really no rush to sell them at this point.
Does anyone have any experience of this site? Comic Collector Live
It might make creating a database easier, or even selling your comics (albeit not as a collection), although I see that it only offers a 30 day free trial before they would want money.
CGC’s grading service is overrated - both in terms of quality, and in terms of value added.
To sell a large number of books at once, you’ll probably want to talk to a comic book store. If you want to get the most money out of them, selling sets or runs of books to individual interested collectors would be the way to go.
As to value, price guides are good - eBay may be better, if you can find the exact same books. After all, they’re only worth what someone will pay for them.
The Overstreet pricing guide is the industry standard. Expect that you might be able to get about half of what it says, give or take. As noted above, prices are likely depressed right now. EBay is likely your best bet for accurate ideas. I wouldn’t spend the time to get a really accurate speadsheet of inventory until you do a little more research, because most likely a lot of the stuff won’t give you a return enough to justify it. Comics is not a good collectible for speculation, because most comics are pretty much worthless a couple years after release. But if by “very old” you’re talking about the '60’s or earlier, you might have a lot of valuable material there. (More recently than that it’s extremely variable – if you have runs of the X-Men from the mid-'70’s, some of those comics in nice condition could be worth hundreds, but those are among the most valuable comics of the time.)
There are various comic pricing guides, as others have suggested. If you are just selling them on ebay, there’s no reason to get them certified as a certain quality unless it’s a particular rare and valuable issue. I would say you should sell most of them off as runs of a particular title (one auction for Iron Man, one auction for Hulk, etc), except for rare and valuable single issues. If you still have a bunch of random not very valuable comics left over that aren’t of a set (consecutive numbered issues of the same title), those can be sold as as a “catch as can” set on ebay, or to your local comic store by weight, or at a yard sale for cheap.