Prices on the older, key comics are getting crazy!
Blame it on the movies... Amazing Fantasy #15 sure wasn't that expensive before the Spider-Man live action series debuted!
I remember guides from the early 1980s putting the value of that comic at around $1500 mint.
Now, the better condition copies have pushed it to at least $60,000 mint!
Crazy...
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I really don't collect for values' sake. Not affordable for me, and frankly comic storylines and most creators are fairly inconsistent.
I don't need every issue of Spider-Man or Superman because most of them suck, IMHO.
I'm not a completist!
I collect storylines and characters that I appreciate/like.
I probably borrow and read more trade reprints from the library now than I've bought in years...
I'm basically fed up with today's comics -- there's been no consistent quality since the early 1990s IMHO and the last 10 years have been a nihilistic joke; I just get a lot more pleasure from reading pre-1970s comics. Love Marvel in the 1960s, DC as far as I'm concerned rules the 1940s and early 1950s, late 1950s.
It's a fool's quest to buy this stuff to turn around and resell it online unless you're willing to invest in the much older stock. Say anything before the mid-1980s. Safe bet that 1960s Marvel and Golden Age DC/Timely will continue to grow in value. Everything else? Probably not so much... at least until the films based on those other comics hit theaters!
Frankly, you can't predict which current comics will be relevant or valuable in the future.
It's almost a safe bet, though, that most of the comics (well over 90% -- I'm hedging closer to 95-98%) published after 1985 won't be worth a damn in the next 20 years considering how sick collecting has gotten! Quality of paper's gotten too good and we have too many manic collectors bagging every damn thing under the sun. Too many quality copies of present-day series floating around!
P.S. -- Action #1 SHOULD be the most valuable superhero comic out there.
The whole US industry is based on that issue, like it or not...
This shouldn't be a popularity contest between that issue and Detective Comics #27.
Sorry -- no Superman, no Batman.
P.S. P.S. -- Much as I like superheroes, it's a tragedy that they're the most successful genre in the US comics industry.
They just overwhelm everything else to the point that Marvel and DC won't do anything else.
It's not like the 1980s when there were more chances being taken and actual non-superhero comics were published by DC and Marvel on a regular basis. Sales of the indies have mostly been so insignificant that it's not funny.
The locking-in of the industry onto one genre -- as well as the stupidity in discarding newsstand distribution and depriving the historically greatest source of new readers(!) -- is what's killing the current industry as well as the incestuous recycling of old storylines.
Old comics and heroes will always be around. The current industry? I dunno. I think the current distribution and lock that the Big Two have on things has to be cracked for much better conditions and new characters and concepts to follow.
So far, nobody has any solid ideas on how that's going to happen... The digital revolution sure hasn't changed the way business is done much.