So,
Here I sit, looking at my 30 longboxes of comics, collected over the last almost 30 years. While I still read comics, the last month or two I've performed an experiment...I've stopped visiting the store. I still get a box of books every month or two from an online dealer, but I've stopped supplimenting my collection with weekly trips to the store. So far, I've not really missed it.
Then there is the huge pile of boxes, that while looking neat, you cant quite get over the fact that your looking at a huge pile of comic books.
I love to read...novels, comics, etc. The main reason i got into heavy comic collecting is so i could find characters i loved and have a constant source of material. Batmans not going anywhere anytime soon for example.
I have not lost interest in the hobby, but I do find it hard to justify at this point. Its not really a financial decision either, I just wonder if its time to at least sell what i have and cut back so i dont feel like my computer room is also a storage vault. I say its a collection but probably half of the books are unbagged or borded...I've always been more interested in the comic as a story media then as a collection with any kind of financial return in mind.
So, what made you decide to stop, or sell, and how did you go about finding a buyer? What kinds of prices did you get? when is it time to say 'id rather use this space for something else' etc.
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Knights of the Dinner Table
Walking Dead
Everything else I'm just going to trade wait.
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Floppies take up too much room, become a pain to read (pull out of the bag, read twenty pages, put back in and grab the next one...) and hardly ever increase in value anyway.
One day I'll try and ditch a good chunk of the floppies I do have. Probably whenever I need the space.
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I've only got 3 short boxes of comics really, and those are my cream of the crop comics (2k Superman, Cap stuff, Thunderbolts, Simone's Deadpool)
Ditto on this. I'm going to jump off a lot of books in September and October as storylines wrap. I plan on dropping almost all of my Marvel books as soon as the respective storylines finish off (going to give DeadpoolMax a shot and probably keep an Avengers of some sort).
DC is a lot harder for me because I love the characters, and I love the Green Lantern stuff that's essentially fueling that whole Universe right now. Plus it takes them two years to put out their trades, which is difficult.
Still, I'm hoping to start cutting back a lot (dropping pretty much every Superbook but Action as storylines wrap up; dropping JMS's Supes all together).
It's hard to drop the books now, but I know after a month or so I'll forget I was even reading them. Ideally, I'd like to be spending $15 a week (sometimes I spend up to twice that).
A lot of the problem is coming in here and seeing books on the MotW thread and going "shit, that looks awesome!" before adding another to my pull-list. I did that most recently with the new Thunderbolts, which is a good book but I have no attachment to it and can't really afford it, even though I love Jeff Parker.
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That's a really good idea.
I got the prime for students membership and I really haven't used it much yet because all my cash has been going to singles instead
I want to drop all of Marvel's Ultimate Line, but I want to follow Ultimate Spidey and Bendis's stuff until Ultimate Mystery/Ultimate Doom wraps, which won't be for months.
I really need to re prioritize. If I can't do it now, I will definitely be dumping handfuls of DC books once Brightest Day ends.
eBay or trade some stuff in to mycomicshop.com.
Yeah, once I'm no longer working at the comics shop, I'm doing this. Though, it's more a matter of my preferred reading format than a matter of finances for me.
Now I'm all grown up and can afford stuff, I'm back into them and now buy trades exclusively. I did look into selling my old floppies, but found no stores were interested in buying them. I've been told eBay is the only real option, bundling up stacks into runs where possible.
If you actually have 30+ year runs of comics though... I'd probably investigate that more carefully because those would have to be some pretty significant and expensive collections.
I guess maybe it's because I was a trade kid for so long, there's just a novelty to picking up the week's big books and then coming here and discussing them right away.
Although since I don't live near a shop and get my books day-and-date anymore, that's faded a bit as well.
You'd be the favorite uncle/dad/etc forever with a 30yr + collection.
Cool, does it have to be from an "official" source like Ebay? Actually it might as well be since I have a perfect Ebay rating so anyone here can see I'm trustworthy.
i've been thinking a lot about my life lately, and i decided that i'm going to sell them. not all of them, of course. i still love comic books, but i feel like i've gotten to a point where i have so many, and so many that i never read or reread that the best thing for my own mental health will be a thorough house-cleaning of my collection.
like i said, there's plenty of stuff i'll want to keep, but there's also stuff that in my heart i know i'll never reread- preacher, y the last man, a billion of the random superhero books i picked up out of curiosity.
the funny thing about comics as a story-delivering medium versus, say, books or movies, is that frequently it's a much bigger time and money investment to experience the entire story. as a result, despite the fact that i hadn't read it in years, my initial impulse was to keep preacher, for instance. what if i want to read it again some time down the line? each trade cost me $20! the result of the cost of each "chapter" of story for a long-running comic series generates this crazed impulse in me to hang onto it.
once i sat down and really considered it, though, i decided i felt like in some way i'd gotten my $20 worth of entertainment out of each trade. i've read it several times and i'll remember it fondly as i do with many movies and books that i've enjoyed but not engaged with in years.
i don't know. this is all coming in the midst of and as the result of some unexpected upheavals and changes in my life, so maybe i'm not even entirely sure myself yet why i want to sell the bulk of my collection, but i do know it feels like now is the time to do so.
This is kind of what happened to me a year or so back (minus upheavals). I sold my Y trades, as well as some Batman ones and JLA, JSA trades. I've thought about trimming it down even more, because while I love USM, those hardcovers are really taking up space, almost a whole row on the shelf.
What is most annoying is that, like MastaP mentioned, money isn't really the problem. It's more a combination of increased prices and bad stories. I like comics in that, unlike videogames, I can pick them up and stop reading immediately if I need to get a project done or deal with some work.
There's often that conundrum of being a kid and wanting to play every video game but not having the money, and then when you get older you have the money but you don't have the time (this is where college was juuuust right). Here I have the money to buy more comics, and because of their format time isn't a problem, but the stories and content just aren't there anymore. Although I think most of this is being just dumbstruck at how bad JMS has been two issues in on Superman.
This is why I stick mainly to Superhero books, and rarely delve into creator-owned or re-interpretive series like Sandman.
Reading the Super books that go on forever feels very non-committal as opposed to reading these sprawling serial 10-trade epics that cost hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours to read.
This is actually one of the reasons I normally avoid indie books, unless they're OGNs or limited series.
And yet it's backfired, because I'm pretty much addicted to the superbooks now.
there's exitement and escapism to be had in them for sure, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. i enjoyed it greatly for years. i've just come to a place personally where i'd rather have a smaller selection of genuinely worthwhile books, books i wouldn't have to shamefacedly explain about why this chick's tits are bigger than this dude's already-enormous gun when someone flips through it idly.
i dunno, now i feel as though i'm coming of sort of curmudgeonly and that's not really how i mean any of this. i love superhero comics. i think they're a really wonderful and unique form of storytelling. i just feel like right now, i've already read all the good ones.
Anyway, I feel you on the superhero book thing. I keep meaning to buy trades of newer material, but I keep gravitating toward non-superhero books. Only a few mainstream titles make it to my shelf nowadays.
I can probably drop all X-men stuff after Second Coming, maybe keep Daniel Way's Deadpool since it's really funny.
See, Deadpool is a book I am torn on. It sort of stopped being funny after the X-Men arc, although the Hit Monkey one-shot was fantastic (have the first of the mini, but haven't read it yet).
It feels sort of stuck these last couple arcs, and I have forgotten why I read it. With Deadpool max on the corner, I may either tradewait the vanilla deadpool series or skip it entirely.
Pretty much anything written by Bendis, Brubaker, Gillen, Remender, Diggle, Hickman, Parker, Van Lente, and Pak I'll read. I'll also give Fraction's Thor a shot and keep reading IIM but probably drop Uncanny. As for DC, I'll probably keep reading GL and GLC but those trades come out like once a year and are pretty cheap. And I'll check out the Earth 1 OGNs.
If i didnt have video games to distract me I might have time to sort my books. But honestly I keep thinking about how much it would cost to bag and board all the ones that arent and damn the numbers are pretty high.
Hmm...I've got a bunch of floppies from the past 5 years that I should probably get rid of. I don't know what to do with them, as the good stuff I usually have in trades.
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See, this would be a comment that shadow gets yelled at for reading comprehension. People are saying they have a lot of stuff and are thinking of selling. So in attempt to help, the best idea is to gather up or figure out what you have as to easily present it to people willing to buy it. The site can help you quickly build a list and check off quality and prices, so maybe you see OCD but I can only imagine you being a messy person.
I appriciate you offering a tool to help. I just think more people are closer to the above then they are 'I have xmen 23-438 and batman 23-544,546-800." Thus my comment.
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If anyone's interested, you can check out what I've got at http://www.stashmycomics.com/html/publicview.asp?username=frogstaff&viewswl=mystash
I'll have a sig link up once I've compiled everything else I'm trying to move.
I've already made the decision to tradewait Fraction's Thor run and Cornell's Knight and Squire mini. I'm going to try to do the one trade a week thing in the fall as I cut back on books.