You can make money from your comic book collection. However, it’s not as easy as you think. Too many casual comic collectors have charged gung ho into investing in comics without thinking about the risks involved. From my experience, here are the 10 brutal truths you need to know if your goal is to make money by investing in your comic collection.
1. If you want to make money from your comics, you first have to find a buyer. Comics are not currency. You cannot spend or eat a comic. A particular comic is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it, not what you think or what the price guide says.
2. For some comic books, it may take months or even years to find a buyer who will give you the price you want. Obviously, you don’t want to tie cash you to live on to buy comic books.
3. You must take care of your comics in order to make money from them. Collectible comics require careful handling and careful storage. That $500 Batman comic you have can become worthless if damaged by heat, humidity, pests, or your own carelessness.
4. Make sure you are buying the real thing. Unscrupulous comic dealers of all kinds have taken advantage of the huge demand for comic collectibles to hawk their own illegal fakes and cleverly restored items.
5. If no one wants it, the comic book is valueless. Demand is far more important than supply in determining price increases and decreases. Of course, high demand or low supply books will make prices increase even more rapidly.
6. Comic prices and demand are tied to the whims of collectors. No one has a crystal ball to predict how the tastes of comic collectors may change. When a new movie comes out (X-Men, Spidey, Iron Man for example) prices can skyrocket for key issues of that comic character, but in some cases the prices can drop just as fast after the movie ages.
7. Although prices for comics in general have risen steadily, individual items may still decrease in value from year and year. Know the history of your particular comic before your buy it to resell. Don’t assume that every item will go along with the general trend of increases for comics.
8. Be patient when buying old comics. If you buy an comic for $100 from a dealer. If you take the same book back in the very next day, he’ll give you only $50 for it. You’re going to have to wait until the book is worth at least $200 retail before you can sell it for $l00 wholesale and recoup your initial investment.
9. Be realistic when buying new comics. Today’s comics are published in enormous quantities. A typical issue of The Amazing Spider Man will have a print run between 300,000 and 500,000 copies. With that many copies of an issue available in the marketplace, for most of these comics, you’ll have to wait a long time before the price increases…if ever.
10. Watch the hype. Comic book stores often stockpile crates of ‘collectible’ issues in their store rooms, flooding the market with their overstock the second that the book rises in value. X-Men #1, the first issue of a new X-Men spin-off series published in the late 80′s, had a print run of 5,000,000 copies. Today, despite speculator hopes, that same X-Men #1 book is often sold for less than its cover price.
