Buying Comic Books
Where should I buy comic books?
Where one buys comic books has changed over the years. It used to be that you'd go to the drugstore in the 1940s, for 10 cents a piece, and they'd be on these great racks that you could spin around, but that seems to have vanished by the early 1980s. Nowadays, most of the time, you have to go to specialized stores. You might find them in a Barnes & Noble, or a Borders, but you typically now have to go to a comic book store, or a comic book convection, or you can still get subscriptions from these comic book publishers and have them arrive in the mail. Or now, with the Internet, you can buy anything on the Internet, so there are just so many ways now where you can buy comic books. There's so many to name that there's just no difficulty now in finding a comic book title that you would want.
Are local comic book dealers more trustworthy than Internet dealers?
The trustworthiness of a dealer or any seller is something that's very important, of course. It varies, as within any community that one finds themselves in. You may have a local comic book dealer to shop owner that is extremely trustworthy and perhaps they may not be. There are obviously dangerous pitfalls with the Internet, where you're buying unseen from someone you don't know then you have to take adequate precautions in order to ensure that you are not taken advantage of, and indeed the Internet has been rife with fraud. The best thing to do is to try and establish a relationship with whomever your comic book seller might be. Whether it is your local shop or it is someone online, and just be careful whenever you're dealing with sending someone money and there are, if you look, on websites like eBay, sections that talk about security and fraud. If you've never done this before, or you're looking to purchase into a hobby, like comics, where you've never been before. There are fraudulent aspects of comics, as there are in any hobby and you need to educate yourself so that you understand those potential pitfalls before you end up unfortunately losing a large amount of money.
What are the pros and cons of buying a comic book collection?
There are different ways, obviously, in which one can develop into becoming an investor or collector. You can buy individual comic books, which is probably how most people start, as little kids going to the local store and buying a comic book. Or you can go and buy comic book collections, finding them in the newspapers and classified ads, at estate sales or online. It all depends on what your taste is and what your budget is at the time. I have found when I want to collect a certain title, it would be easy now in the days of the Internet. I could buy the entire comic book run, Number 1 through to 150, if I have the money to spend. In some ways I find that takes the fun out of it. A lot of this, especially with the older titles, is the search. That's what makes it so interesting. Trying to find this rare issue of which very few copies exist. Now you don't have to focus on trying to make this intensive effort to find it. If you want to get into it from a sales and investment standpoint, sure, it might make sense to buy a comic book collection, because obviously, the larger the collection you buy, more likely the less money you are spending per book that you can then generate in your sales. But again, this is something that will depend on your own taste and your own budget.
What are the pros and cons of buying comic books individually?
If you are a collector, certainly buying comic books individually is a great way to go. It keeps in the hold of things; in anticipation of what the next comic book issue might be, and this could be even if it's an older comic from fifty years ago. There are no such things necessarily as a pro and con, or a bad or a good, as to whether you want to do this. It all depends on what your style is, and what is your interest. Why are you buying this comic book title to begin with? Are you buying for investment purposes? Are you buying it for reading purposes? Are you buying the comic book for collectible Purposes? Or to Hand down to your children? So again this is another example of where it's what ever works best for you as the hobbyist; or the investor.
How do I find a comic book collection to purchase?
When you're looking for buying a comic book collection to purchase, whether it's again for collecting purposes or investment, now you have a variety of ways in which to go about it. We're in the modern day, so the internet is the best, as always. You can certainly look in classified ads, you can look on entities like Craig's List, on eBay, and you can go to shows and state sales. Indeed there are so many different ways now where you can find comic book collections today. You can also talk to local comic book dealers who are always being offered comic book collections, and you can take ads yourself. But certainly now, in the modern day, the internet is a great way in which to find comic book collections. But again, because of the fraud that is rife throughout, you have to be very careful as to what you're buying because the price or value of comics will vary significantly depending on the grade and whether a book is restored or not, so there are many pitfalls you need to educate yourself on as both a collector and an investor before you delve in and you spend your hard-earned cash on a comic book collection.
What makes a comic book valuable?
The value of a comic book is also one of these things that sometimes you cant tell from one day to the next. It may be that there was something special about that book, such as the debut issue of Superman, Action Comics, for the first time ever. That's a rare comic. Perhaps, there are not that many comics of that issue that still exist, or it might have been a character that all of a sudden became popular years later, because they were featured in a film, like The Punisher in Spiderman that everyone knows about. The Punisher, who became very popular in the 1980s was a character that was created in the 1970s, in Spiderman # 129, and it was never that popular or that expensive until it happened upon years later. Again this happened with the Silver Surfer which is now popular in the latest Fantastic Four film. Silver Surfer was created back in about 1966, but was it valuable and recognized at the time? Sure, but over the time, as it's popularity has grown, through different generations, that comic has seen it's value gone up and sometimes gone down as it's interest has waned. So, you have to be able to focus on certain types of books, and choose; sometimes roll the dice. Do you want to pick a comic book character that you know is valuable, such as Superman, or do you want to roll the dice on a particular character, on a new comic book character, that you're hoping will pick up in value as time goes on.
What is a 'rare' comic book?
The term rare in comic books is the same as it is in any other industry or hobby. It's when there's only a few known to exist of a particular comic book, say perhaps, one to twenty known copies of a rare comic book .So books such as this Flash Comics which is an ashcan comic, this is a specialized, legal prototype that was used or was attempted to be used to secure the trademark to the title, Flash. Now Fossett Comics in this case lost out to D.C. Comics and this familiar character became Captain Marvel, or Shazam to the modern day industry or person who collect comics. It could also be such as this prototype or promotional, 'If An A-Bomb Falls'. There was only about three or four known copies of this 1950s obvious Atomic Bomb type scare, or cold war type comic, that was produced primarily here in the Washington, D.C. region.
