ATTN: GILDA: Is this worth anything?
 

I was rummaging through some old comics of mine, and found an old copy of Justice League in my stash in pretty good condition. Its from July 1988, and it was only .75 c american! haha, cheap cheap in our time. Theres a '15' in the top right, not sure if thats an issue number of what.

But anyways, wondering if I'm sitting on a treasure here, something that may soon be a treasure, or a piece of junk. :P

http://www.dcuguide.com/JL/jli15.gif
http://www.dcuguide.com/JL/JLI_015.php

Thanks!

If you bid now you can get another copy on eBay for 24 cents. w00t!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...Name=WD1V&rd=1

ebay has killed comic book values.

Comic value has gone down. If you have comics from the '30s than it is worth something. In the eighties comics were so mass produced. It might be worth $7.

Thats not intirely true. In my local comic book store, they have an Issue #1 of the Transformers comic for £55. Thats $96!

What a comic store is selling for and what they or a private party is buying is definitely somewhere in between the £3.5 - £55... I believe this is a thread for Gilda....

:Paging Gilda to the Entertainment Forum, please.:
:Paging Gilda to the Entertainment Forum, please.:

'88 isn't that old. Hold onto it for another decade or two, then see how much it's worth. Every asshole on the planet is a collector now, so it's best to try and out-wait the instant gratification crowd.

Yeah, I just want to clarify that I don't intend on selling this. I just came across it the other day and thought it interesting. :)

Thanks for the responses so far.

As an individual issue, if it's in VF or better condition, that one's worth about a dollar, maybe two. I bought the full run of 1-113 about two years ago for less than $100. Ignore comics buyers guides; they're greatly inflated, and tend to give the price you might have to pay a comic shop. It's like high blue book; you'll never get that selling it as an individual issue.

eBay is the biggest marketplace for comics nowdays, so whatever it's worth on eBay is what it's worth. The BIN for .24 is the equivilent of a penny sale. Mainstream books from the big two post 1980 are usually dumped on eBay for anywhere from a penny to a dollar in VF condition. The seller makes his money on shipping costs. Notice that the seller is charging $3 for shipping and handling. Sending that in a plain manila envelope media mail will cost about a dollar. Subtract out the shipping and you're actually paying $2.25 for the book and $1 for shipping.

As a general rule, books from the 80's on tend to sell for about $1 each individually or in full runs. Random collections go for less than that.

Saving it for a decade or more very likely won't increase it's value any. That only happens if there is something significant that happens in that particular issue, such as a character that later becomes popular is introduced.

Take for example, Incredible Hulk #181. Hulk wasn't a top selling book at the time, so the order for 181 was standard. The story wasn't the least bit important, featuring a routine battle between the Hulk and a foe of the month, intended as a one shot.

This character likely would have disappeared into obscurity, a trivia item for geeks, if not for what happened a few months later. In the summer of 1975, Len Wein took on the task of revamping a book that was selling so badly it had been in reprints for a couple of years. He took this little known character and made him part of a new international team. After the first three stories, he left the book and after a one issue fill in, Chris Claremont started writing the book, which he would write for the next 17 years, turning it into a phenomenon that now dominates Marvel Comics, and the character would become one of the most popular, and lately, overused, characters in comics.

The character I'm talking about is of course, Wolverine, and the nearly dead book revived by Len Wein and developed by Chris Claremont was the Uncanny X-Men. Those issues, Hulk 180-181, X-Men Giant Size #1, and Uncanny X-Men #1, are all now worth several hundred dollars each, solely because they represent the beginning of something big.

And don't be fooled by #1's. Any new #1 from the big 2 hasn't been a big deal in decades. Before the 70's, when comic collecting first starting becoming poplar, comics were oftne considerd to be consumables, like newspaper comics. You read it once or twice, and gave it away or tossed it. This is what makes Silver and Golden age comics valuable. They were produced in enormous numbers, the best selling golden and silver age books having a circulation of a half million each month. But they weren't cared for, carefully handled, or preserved, and were printed on cheap, high acid newsprint, making them fragile.

Today, this is rare, and the time to sell is when a low run book suddenly becomes hot. Marvel didn't anticipate that it's new NYX book would be a big hit, so it got a low print run. It was just one of about 15 X-Books at the time, and didn't feature a hot new artist or writer, so it wasn't given a big push or a big run. Then a new character was introduced in #3, a teenage girl with claws that popped from the back of her hands, X-23. Soon, rumors that this girl might be related to Wolverine popped up, and suddenly, the book was hot, and everyone wanted a first print run of NYX 1-3. #3 goes for about $30-40 currently. It will undooubtedly go down.

This is the hot comic phenomenon. When I first started reading comics in the mid 80's my first favorite, New Teen Titans was a "hot" book. A #1 went for $13, a lot more than my parents were going to spend. Now it's a side note, going for maybe a few dollars.

Comics, like everything else, tend to depreciate over time relative to inflation unless they are Silver Age or earlier, or early work from someone who later becomes big. Robert Kirkman's early Invincible and Walking Dead issues are now worth a many times cover price.

Most comics, however, depreciate like a new car. The moment you get that $2.99 or $2.25 comic in your hot little hands, it's suddenly worth about half what you paid for it.

Basic rule of thumb: Most modern comics are worth about a dollar an issue in VF or better condition unless they're hot for some reason.

I'll have to disagree with Suave. A collector's market is the best time to sell; the higher the demand, the more your collection is worth. A year ago a collection of Young Justice was worth maybe $50 for a full run of 1-55. Today it's three times that. Why? Mainly because of the popular Teen Titans cartoon. About two years ago, DC wanted to capitalize on the popularity of its Justice League cartoon by using the Teen Titans, a team of mostly sidekicks. The problem was that the original Titans were all grown up, and their book, The Titans, wasn't very good.

The cartoon was to feature the original New Teen Titans Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Cyborg, Raven, and Changeling. This was the team from the comics heyday, in the 80's. All those characters were still around, but some of them were grown up with new identities, and there was a new Robin and Wonder Girl, and no Kid Flash. DC was hoping that the cartoon would draw fans to the comic, but was afraid they'd find unfamiliar characters.

There was a sidekick book out, called Young Justice, fearturing new versions of Robin, Wonder Girl, and Superboy, and a junior version of the Flash, Impulse. This was fairly close to the sidekick version that would be in the cartoon, but it had the wrong title, and the character names didn't all match up well.

So it was decided to end Young Justice and The Titans, neither of which was selling well, and scramble the teams up a bit, and relaunch them as The Outsiders for the grown up sidekicks, and to start a new Titans book called Teen Titans, featuring the characters with the same names as the cartoon. The newest Robin and Wonder Girl, were made Teen Titans, Impulse quickly renamed Kid Flash and given a new costume, and Cyborg, Raven, Starfire, and Changeling brought back. With the exception of Superboy, they now had a comic with a team that had the same names as the cartoon.

Comic readers came to recognize that Young Justice was the real precursor to Teen Titans, so it became a relatively hot property. And all this because of the cartoon.

There are rumors of a LOSH cartoon for next year. If it comes out, and is the same quality as JLU, you better believe the early issues of the current Legion run will become a hot property. But that's a big if.

Bottom line: That version of the Justice League, though quite good, will never get a cartoon or a movie, and the creators never became hot writers (though again, they are quite good), so that book will likely not keep up with inflation, no matter how long you keep it.

Re: the #1 stuff above, that is true. Pubs tend to churn out a lot of #1s so they are rarely worth much. Go for the #2-5s when they drop the pub# by more than half sometimes. If the book is hot those are hard to come by.

*bows down to Gilda*

o_O <- Mirrors my facial expression while reading Gilda's post. Sorry, when I said "everyone is collecting", I meant collecting to sell, not to buy. In other words, hugely inflated supply. Anyway, thanks to your post I may end up just liquidating (or recycling) all my old comics then, at least the new-ish ones.

Suave: Good point. Speculation does drive up supply, with the long term effect of making important issues oversold.

The big speculators market right now is in variant and incentive covers. Normal variant covers sometimes are released, with two or more different normally priced covers on the same book released at the same time. There are people who get those, and a lot of internet speculators who buy in bulk to jack up prices. However, for big issues, they will often offer a second printing.

This second printing used to be just a new run of the same book with a new print run number. Hard core collectors always wanted the first edition, driving up competition for that one.

Nowadays, the big companies have hit on a new variation. The second printing with a variant cover. Those who didn't get in on, say, Green Lantern: Rebirth right away can still get the individual issues. But instead of reprinting the same cover, the second printing, becomes a slight variation, often without the coloring, which is called a sketch variant. Some completists want to have all basic variants, and so will buy the second cover, or the second printing sketch cover. Much of the market for second and third printings is the same guys who bought the first print.

Then there is the deluxe version. Street Fighter is released with two regular variations and a "power foil" cover. Same book inside, but a little nice cover that has some foil on it. For about $20. There are others who do this, usually on the top books to capitalize on popularity.

There are other more mercenary ways of doing it. Dealers are offered dealer incentives, where they get a free variant cover--one with a different picture on the cover, but otherwise the same--for every 20 or 30 or 50 copies of the regular cover they buy. These can go for $100 on eBay brand new, with regular copies available for, oh, say $3. This also artificially drives up orders.

By the way, know what the best selling comic book of all time was?

X-Men #1 (1991), released with 5 different covers to promote sales. It worked. Everyone and his brother bought all five covers, sometimes two sets, thinking it would be worth a small fortune in ten years. It sold some 8 million copies chiefly due to collectors buying the variants. Those can be found in quarter bins today. Today, a comic that sell 1/100 of that is a success.

The second biggest selling comic of all time? Spider-Man #1 (1990), by Todd McFarlane. Also with variant covers, but these all had the same picture with slightly variant coloring, gold or silver or green webs. It sold 2.5 million copies, primarily due to variant cover collecting.

Oh, and those Death of Superman issues that everyone bought ten of thinking they'd make a fortune in 10 years? Dollar bins. Even unopened black bagged editions aren't worth more than cover. The time to sell those was the week after it hit the stands, for some $20 or $30. I wasn't immune. I got my two copies, one to read and one so that I could store it in its bag, and I still have that and it's essentially worthless for anything other than the story.

Comics is a wonderful hobby, because you get to enjoy what you're collecting as art and as literature, but it's not much for investing, unless you go very big, or get lucky a lot.

I for one, am glad the investing fad is over. I stopped collecting back in the early 90's because of it. Now should I feel like it, I can finally go out and complete my 'Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters' series without breaking the bank.

Wow, Gilda. Thanks for letting me know my comics are almost worthless. :lol: I swear I thought they'd appreciate given the right amount of time. I have a bunch that were "special editions" or whatever. Punisher War Journal #1 with bullet holes in the cover, some Wolverine with slash marks in the cover, a Ghost Rider that glows in the dark, and of course all 5 X-Men #1s.

DAMN!

They're still good reading material though.

Oh I have all 5 X-Men #1's. I'm one of those collector's who had to have them all. Heck, I have all of the variants of Spider-Man #1, and those all have the same art, just colored differently. That I recognize that variant covers are a cynical marketing ploy doesn't make me immune to them.

One of the most important aspects of collecting...

it's not about "investing" it's about collecting. My collection is my collection. I love the stories that are within them, but the books themselves I have learned I don't need to collect them anymore. Once my habit got up to $100 for new books and $75 for filling in old books I decided a drug habit was much more interesting and social, (smoking, drinking, partying.)

my art collection is an art collection. while I sometimes think of the value the pieces have on purchase, I know that the real value of them is value to me. Getting someone else to pay me what I think the value is, well that's just not realistic IMO.

Cash wise? It's not really worth much of anything. Storywise, well its from Giffen and DeMatteis' Justice League run so its worth its weight in comedy gold. Enjoy the Bwa ha ha's.

You mean I invested all that time and money in Power Pack for naught?! ;)


Btw Gilda, would you by any chance know when the PP series ended, and how?

Power Pack ended in 1990, I think. It was pretty obviosuly wrapped up very quickly, in the space of a few pages. Alex takes on the horse form of the alien who gave the powers their powers, they look for a cure and can't find it, and then end up taking off in the alien ship heading for the alien's planet, where Alex will be more accepted.

Alex subsequently showed up with all of the powers and joined the New Warriors. I don't read that one so I don't know how.

There was a mini-series earlier this year, but it wasn't in regular continuity, instead being a Marvel Age type of thing.

Julie, (Lightspeed) has recently shown up in Runaways as part of a group of reformed teen superheroes who run an intervention group whose purpose is to keep teens with superpowers from becoming superheroes.

Ohhhh, so that's what happened.

Okay, thanks for the info, Gilda. Much appreciated. :)
Such a sad way to end what started out as a cool series.

I remember thinking Alex's power of being able to control gravity was a pretty neat concept, especially when he used aerosol cans to maneuver around with.

Anyway, it sounds like I might've gotten out while the gittin' was good. ;)

Thanks for your help.

Well, i just looked up your comic in last months Wizard. Thats the main comic book pricing guide if you didnt know. They dont even start listing until issue #40 which is worth $3.50. So im guessing the book value of your comic is close to or less than that.

no shit. i'm right there with you.

Gilda, you should teach a class on this.
i'd take it.

your superhuman knowledge
of the subject is a superpower in itself.
at the very least, you should be the star of your own comic.

I do teach a class on comics. The school where I teach has a general elective system where students can take what are called "quarter classes." Students choose two general electives from about a dozen offered each quarter, with different classes offered with each new quarter. One of my quarter classes is History of American Comics, and a second is Comics as Literature.

The others, by the way have been in the past, The Holocaust, American prison camps, The Great Depression, Immigration and Annexation, Archetypes in American Literature, Science Fiction, and Women in Literature.

Gilda, I have a friend who is thinking about auctioning his massive comic collection in order to raise some funds.

Based on what I've just read, I don't think he's going to get as much money as he thinks he is.

Do you mind if I print your posts and pass them on?

Sure feel free.

How much he'll get will depend upon exactly what he has, and how he groups it for sale, and how he presents it.

There are tricks to getting better prices when auctioning on eBay or other auction sites, simple stuff that makes your auctions sell for quite a bit more.

I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to discourage anyone from trying to make a little money on their comic book collection. I just wanted people to understand that making money on comics as an investment is very difficult. It is a good way of getting some quick cash in an emergency, but you're very seldom going to get anything anwhere near guide.

A lot of people will look at their run of, say JLI 1-113, see them priced in the guide at $2-4 each and think they've got a run worth $500. That run would actually go for about $100 most of the time, not bad, but nowhere close to Overstreet or Wizard value.

Good luck to your friend, and if he's going to use eBay, tell him to check the comics message board FAQ.

Thankyou.

I agree. I'm trying to convince him that he'd be better off with a comic collection than he would with [however much] cash he'd get in return.

It could be the case that American comics are worth more to collectors in England but I'm just guessing. I don't know.

Just got my comic shipment today, which included Red Sonja #1 five, yes five, count them five (5) different glorious covers. The curious thing about knowing that variant covers are a scam is that it doesn't prevent me from actually buying them.

It's a pretty good story, BTW.

that's awesome. i wish i could have sat in on some of those classes.

if you have any sort of class notes or anything already on computer, i'd love to see them. i'd say email them to me, but i bet others would want to see them too. somewhere in tilted academy a thread is waiting to be born.

comics as literature is an intriguing subject. i'd love to know more about it.
(omitting the peerless maus) are you as in interested in the chris ware / jimmy corrigan or craig thompson / blankets type stuff? or strictly super hero stories?

Ditto. Or taped sessions that could be put on public broadcast, like those learning annex shows on KTEH? :D

It's middle school so I generally can't use anything that would be rated R if it were a movie, so Blankets and Maus are no-no's. I'd be happy to post lecture notes, but they're stored on my school computer, which I don't have access to right now, and they're in outline form anyway--it'd be about as interesting as reading a table of contents without the actual book. The class tends to be mostly discussion--I introduce a topic, then run a discussion based on that topic, introducing relevant facts as they come up.

The Comics as Literature class starts with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, and we spend about three weeks really digging into the nuts and bolts of how comics actually work, how they're processed in the mind, then we spend the last nine weeks (we have three twelve week "quarters" in the regular year and an eight week makeup session called summer quarter) reading comics themselves and applying what we've learned from McCloud's book. Part of that is spent on newspaper comics, about a week, and the rest is split between mainstream superheroes and "other", other being foreign Western comics like Tintin and Asterix, Horror, War, Romance, Teen Humor, and Funny Animal.

Nobody ever sees the genius of Carl Barks' Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge; my students seem to equate it with bland Richie Rich style stuff. Sigh.

Hee hee. I have on order for this coming year's class a class set of Essential Iron First, which will be our "textbook" for the superhero segment. This is such a great job.

If I ever convince the University to let my try comics as a 298 course again, this might actually be feasible. The last time, two years ago, I got the course approved and didn't get enough students to sign up for it. It seems that if it was going to be taught as an actual class, with homework and research and term papers, and we weren't going to be spending much time on manga, most students weren't interested. Public school classes can't be taped for rebroadcast without the permission of the parents of every child involved.

As it is, I have to do some campaigning in a middle school to get the minimum number of students for the middle school class. Immigration and Annexation fills up faster than my comics classes.

Sigh. Where did our society go wrong? What kind of world do we live in where ten to twelve year olds spend so little time reading comic books. It's a crying shame, I tell you.

By the way, guys, you'd probably enjoy Scott Tipton's collums at Movie Poop Shoot, called comics 101.

Okay do you know the #1 selling graphic novel of all time? It was the comic version of the Left Behind novels. Sad.

Isn't marvel still doing their one run and done thing?

I know about 2 years ago this little policy caused a little blip in pricing as there where some decent books around that time coming out and a single printing and no more caused the prices at least briefly to go up.

I haven't bought a comic book in nearly fifteen years. I haven't even pulled one of my boxes out of the closet in 3 years(and that was just to move them from 1 house to another). I still found this thread very interesting.

I had been collecting comics from the time I was about 6 years old when my cousin gave me a milk crate filled with about 100 ratty books. Inside where a bunch of X-men from the 70's. Just as I got hooked on the stories, I reached the bottom of the box. I needed to finish the stories which led to my first venture into a comic book shop.

I remember not eating lunch 1 day a week at school, just so I could buy an X-Men back issue. It was FUN. After about 15 years(early 90's), I got burned out and packed them away.

Kinda weird, reading this thread makes me remember when comics were fun and not an investment. I almost have an urge to hunt down a local comic shop and try to catch up on what I missed the past 15 years or so.

Question for the almighty Gilda:
I stopped collecting comics when I was in high school, but I still have my collection. I have a lot of what I would call "cool" comics like almost the complete Age of Apocalypse collection, I think I still have Shadowhawk #1, Wildcats #1, I have this thick one I think it's called X-Men Alpha or something like that (it was a one-shot). I even have those Resident Evil comics, all issues signed by the artists and writers. Would it be worth my time trying to sell these? And other than eBay, is there a good online source that can give me a general idea of how much my books cost? I'm not expecting to make millions, but they do hold some sort of sentimental value as I was really big on collecting, and the only real reason I don't pick back up on collecting is because I now collect basketball cards, which consumes a ton of my money and time.

Oh yeah, I still have that Uncanny X-Men w/ the first appearance of Onslaught. Is that in demand anymore?

They'll come back and do special editions sometimes. NYX got a "Marvel Must Haves" a few months back that reprinted the first three issues because those had been under printed and became a hot issue. Daredevil: Father, which had the first issue come out last year and hasn't gotten to #2 is getting a special reprint, and there are one or two others, but generally it's a single printing and they're done.

Gilda

You can go to Mile High Comics, and check out what they're charging for your books, but that's really only a vague guideline, and you'd only get a fraction of the price you see there.

A better way would be to do a search of completed auctions on eBay for the issues you want to sell and check to see what they cost.

The particular issues you list aren't worth a lot, and having the artist and/or writer sign is nice for nostalgia value, but seldom adds anything to the value of the book, unless it's an issue that is otherwise valuable and you can authenticate the signature. A Jack Kirby signed Fantastic Four #1 would be a treasure, a Scott Lobdell signed FF #1 from volume 2 is worth maybe cover.

The Onslaught issues aren't really valuable, because they led into the Heroes Reborn fiasco that pretty much everyone sees as the darkest time in Marvel History.

If they mean anything to you, I'd keep them for nostalgia value, as you're unlikely to get much for them by selling them.

When I'm paring back my collection to make room, I tend to sell off the books I don't longer feel any affection for, rather than looking to make a buck. The one big profit I've made is on Amazing Spider-Man #36, which I bought 200 copies of for about $1.25 each, then resold for $40 to $50 each. It's the last big book that I think will have any lasting value.

Nope. Onslaught is generally considered a blot on Marvel history.

Gilda

Even though it's months later, THANK YOU! I was always confused as to why the Heroes Reborn story was so looked down upon. I thoroughly enjoyed the new versions of Captain America and the Avengers. Iron Man and Fantastic Four were eh, but I remember being enthralled by the Captain America story. I was in middle school, though, so maybe I was just naive.

Heroes reborn:

In the mid-1990's, Marvel was floundering. They had been very, very big in the boom of the early 90's, riding on the backs of a bunch of hot young artists like Jim Lee and Rob Leifeld. Marvel promoted them superstar style, marketing the artist rather than the character or writer. This worked, but had an unexpected effect. The hot artists left Marvel to start their own company, Image, which was to focus on high quality art over everything else.

Marvel hit financial difficulties soon after, when the comics boom went bust. They were taken over by a corporate raider who knew nothing about comics, stories were driven by marketing rather than art and story concerns, and the successful X-Men crossover led to a massive, badly failed Spider-Man Crossover in which they attempted to claim Peter Parker was actually a clone, retire him, an replace him with a newer, younger Spider-Man named Ben Reilly, who was originally thought to be the clone but turned out to be the original. Fans hated it, and they reset to the status quo with a truly awful John Byrne run. Byrne was fantastic on Uncanny X-Men in the 70's, equally good at revamping Fantastic Four in the early 80's, and did a very nice job rebooting Superman in the mid 80's. As his reputation grew, so did his ego, and his version of Spider-Man was a travesty. Marvel's icon continued to flounder.

The X-franchises were still selling well, but that was it. Former core books Fantastic Four, Avengers, and Iron Man were selling poorly. Captain America was doing ok on the back of its best run in a decade with Mark Waid, one of the best in the biz, writing.

Marvel, desperate, decided to try outsourcing their lesser books. Keeping the X-books in house along with Spider-Man, they decided to reboot the others. A massive crossover was put into play. A supervillain named Onslaught, a merged being made of Prof X and Magneto, threatened to destroy the universe. In a last second effort to protect his parents, Franklin Richards created a brand new universe from nowhere, and sent the FF, Avengers, Iron Man, and Captain America into it.

Captain America and Avengers were given to Rob Leifeld, while Fantastic Four and Iron man were given to Jim Lee. Leifeld couldn't hold up producing his issues, and they were shipped over to Lee after six issues, to be finished out there.

Iron Man, Avengers, and Fantastic Four were in bad shape before, and they all recovered nicely afterwards with Heroes Return, particularly the Avengers under Kurt Busiek, one the best writers in the biz and an incredibly nice guy, who also wrote some of the best Iron Man stories in a great while.

Captain America already had two strikes against it because the Waid/Garney run that had been going before Heroes Reborn was a critical darling and a favorite among the hard core fans and comic geeks (like me). It was being drawn by Rob Leifeld, who seems to be a polarizing artist. Casual fans seem to like him, while the hard core geeks (like me) hate the hyper-muscular drawings, poor anatomy, and hard to process action. Captain America #1 in particular suffered from a big problem with the art. Among other problems, Cap's shield would change size relative to Cap from panel to panel. The book was rife with visual continuity errors. Add to this the hostility already in place as a result of Waid being dumped, and the built in dislike among the hard core fans, and it was a complete failure.

Fantastic Four was generally ok, Iron Man the same, Avengers and Captain America a dismal failure for the first 6 issues, but recovered in Leifeld's absense, and came back strong after Heroes Return.

All that said, enjoy what you like. If the super-muscular look and frenetic action style Leifeld uses work for you, that just means we have different taste.

Hope that helps a bit.

Gilda

Rob Liefeld gives me nightmares.

Amen. When I read Youngblood #1 and saw that all the women looked alike, I rolled my eyes.