So reader Egmont commented on this site over the weekend, in which he asks if there still any demand for St. George #2.

For folks who don’t remember, and to be fair, I barely remember and I 1) sold these things when they were new, and 2) still have them all in stock (tragic details on that momentarily), St. George was one of the titles in the Shadowline Saga imprint, published under Marvel’s Epic line, that was intended to be a new “mature” line of superheroes, because sure, why not. Anyway, St. George #2 introduced a character named Shreck (no relation; also no relation; totally a relation) who would later be apparently retooled and introduced into the Marvel Universe under the name Terror, in the series Terror Inc.

I am totally working on 20-year-old memories here, but I do recall some referencing to, or some minor contention over, whether or not Shreck from the Epic/Shadowline Saga comics was in fact the same character as Terror in the Marvel Universe. According to Wikipedia, which is right and true in all things and whose authority should never be questioned, that despite early editorial insistence that they were not the same being, one of the Marvel Universe handbooks later established that they were. And don’t get me started on the MAX version.

I don’t think anyone really cared all that much, “he said just prior to the influx of hate e-mails from the Terror Inc. fan club.” A glance at the most recent Overstreet guide shows no mention of anything special happening in St. George #2, where I was expecting at the very least “1st Shreck, later Terror (see TERROR INC.).” A Near Mint copy of this will set you back a whole three bucks, according to the guide, and, well, about that….

Let’s take a look at that Terror Inc. scan up there at the beginning of this post. Well, here, let me give you a larger scan of what I want to talk to you about:

Seeing that sticker on that comic tells me that particular issue of Terror Inc. has been sitting in our back issue box since, oh, the early 1990s. And so had the rest of the series. The best case scenario is that maybe, say, through the early to mid 1990s we did sell some Terror Inc. issues and restocked them repeatedly, and that the last time we restocked them, I went ahead and priced the issues to help Ralph keep up with his pricin’ ‘n’ gradin’ duties. I suspect, however, that isn’t what happened.

Now, I should say we were missing one issue when I checked our Terror Inc. section over the weekend…we didn’t have #13, guest-starring Ghost Rider. Relatively recently, I did have someone looking for Ghost Rider appearances, so maybe that’s when we actually were able to move a copy of this. No worries, we had another copy in our backstock that I pulled out to replace it. By the way, the MAX series Marvel did a couple of years back didn’t move the earlier series at all.

Looking in the price guide, most of the issues are priced at three bucks a pop, except for the two issues with Wolverine ($4 each). A quick glance at the eBay shows a #1 “in high grade” selling for a quarter, and a run of every issue except #1 selling for 99 cents. And judging by how few copies we have still in our backroom, I’m guessing a number of them ended up in our bargain bins, and we may sold a few that way to any folks willing to search through those boxes.

And that’s okay. Sometimes the fate of certain series is to end up in the bargain bins, where folks are willing to throw down a quarter or a buck to take a risk on some oddball forgotten title, or to take home a shiny-covered Turok Dinosaur Hunter #1, oh God please buy more of those. And then we have copies of those same comics, sorted and guide-priced in our regular back issue bins, for anyone who would rather have the convenience of finding the book right away without having to search through long boxes of unsorted cheap books. Not that this is something that’s happened much with Terror Inc. anytime recently, but you never know…that day may come. Weirder things have happened.

It’s also a matter of marketing, too. We simply haven’t got around to getting those Terror Inc. issues priced and graded and put on our website listings, where any Binging or Googling or Veronica-ing Terror Inc. fans can find it. Or maybe when we get that #13 I just pulled out of the backroom priced, I can put it in our Recent Back Issue Arrivals boxes where it may get more eyetracks than it would in the ol’ Terror Inc. section in the regular back issue bins.

I know that this seems like a direct contradiction to my recent post claiming that there still is a back issue market, but the comic market at any time will have more than its share of dead stock. Or slow movers. Like pitch-drop level slow movers. And the quarter boxes, the dollar boxes, or whatever…that’s a partial corrective tool that doesn’t solve the problem, but does lessen it slightly. Very slightly, judging by the number of Turok Dinosaur Hunter #1s I have still. …Anyone need any?

So Mike L. asked about Uncanny X-Men #201, a comic for which there was a brief flurry of demand during the high-flyin’ Wizard Magazine-fueled comics market times of the early 1990s. For folks who may need a brief reminder…in 1990, New Mutants #87 was released, featuring a new character called Cable, co-created by rising star Rob Liefeld. As both Cable and Liefeld grew in popularity, demand for and prices of New Mutants #87 began to rise.

Now, Cable’s deal was that he was the son of a couple of members of the X-Men, Cyclops and…um, is it still Madelyne Pryor or has that been retconned away? Anyway, he was from the future, and still only a child in present times, and then someone had the evil thought “hey, wait, that means the baby born to Cyclops and Madelyne in Uncanny X-Men #201 back in 1986 is technically Cable’s first appearance!” So, in the rush to create yet another “rare” collectible UX201 was pushed as the New Big Thing, and, like Mike L. said, sold for about $30 (or more!). And it did sell.

Cut to a couple of decades later. The most recent price guide still lists that issue for $30 in near mint condition, but let me tell you, it ain’t selling for that anymore. I can’t remember the last time anyone asked for “that comic with Baby Cable,” and a quick glance at online sources show copies selling as low as 99 cents, and some allegedly high grade copies going for as much as about $15 (not completely unreasonable for an actual mint copy of a 27 year old X-Men book). The $30 guide price may be the result of simple inertia…people pricing their copies at thirty bucks because they’ve always priced their copies at thirty bucks, and hey, it’s a “key issue” even though realistically nobody cares any more. Maybe if Cable pops up in an X-Men movie someday, there will be some demand for it.

I’m still trying to come up with an answer to pal Dave‘s question from the end of yesterday’s post, about which pricy comic took the biggest dive. I’m still thinking about it, though I believe it’s more a matter of “shifting demands” than “huge price drops.” There was certainly many comics that sold well in the ’90s which don’t any more, though few of them really got that expensive in the first place. There are even a few items that retained some value: New Mutants #87 still guides at $45 in high grade, which, if the book actually is in high grade, isn’t too far out there of a price, in my opinion, and in fact still sells for us, when we can get them. However, it’s greatly overshadowed by an issue later in the run, #98, which features the debut of current flavor-of-the-month Deadpool. That guides at $100, but I’ve seen sales well in excess of that price.

One thing I was reminded of, thinking about ’90s back issue sales, was the Punisher. Boy oh boy, was that character popular. Multiple titles, all sold great, and then suddenly the market crashed and / or people burnt out on the character, and the sales on, and titles for, the Punisher dried up. I remember being stuck with a pile, a literal pile, of Amazing Spider-Man #129, featuring the Punisher’s first appearance. We had loads of them, in a variety of conditions, priced at the then-inflated-by-Punisher’s-popularity values we had been selling them fairly regularly for. Once we realized we were in for some rough times after the collapse of the comics market, we slash-priced those books and moved ’em out best we could.

Kinda wished I had them now, as the market has recovered somewhat and people are looking for the book again and the current guide has near mint copies at nearly a grand, even though we could probably sell them in any condition. But if we could see the future, we probably wouldn’t have sold all those New Mutants #98s for about five bucks a pop all those years ago. Or put all those DC Comics 100-Page Giants in the 50-cent bins way back when…I mean, those are mostly just reprints, who’d want those? Anyway, that kind of backwards-glancing and second guessing can drive you crazy, so we just price ’em, file ’em, show ’em to customers, and hope for the best.

Well, at least for us. We still sell plenty of back issues at our shop. Lots of them. Across a whole range of prices. Of course, after 30+ years in business, plenty of collectors in our area and environs beyond have learned that we’re a good and well-stocked source of reasonably-priced and accurately-graded old comics. That drives plenty of folks to our shop, turning over our stock and giving us the impetus to continue acquiring even more old comics to offer to our customers.

Of course, the situation described here is not new…there are some comics that are just common as dirt, that have a “book” value of some amount, but realistically, will not sell for anything. It wasn’t that long ago that we divested ourselves of 100,000 copies of that very kind of comic, a bulk sale to a wholesaler who paid a nickel each for whatever we wanted to unload, primarily ’90s market-crash comics that nobody will ever love, ever again. After years of nobody caring that Deathmate: Black is the first appearance of Gen 13, years of never once realizing the price guide price of $6 in an in-store sale, I was happy to get that fat nickel for every copy I was able to pass on. And the Team Youngbloods. And the Brigades. And the Valiant Comics that aren’t the first issues, last issues, or “gold” issues. And so on.

As noted in the linked article, the decrease in potential values was in part caused by the democratization of back issue sales via eBay and Amazon and the like, where vast amounts of essentially the same product is available: instead of going to your local comic shop and hoping they finally have that one back issue you’re looking for this time and paying whatever they’re asking for it, now you can search online and potentially find dozens of people competing with each other offering copies of that book in whatever grade or price range you’re looking for.

There are other factors as well, such as extensive reprinting in more convenient formats like trade paperbacks, or digital availability, or certain characters or titles falling out of favor, or the economy being terrible and nobody wanting to spend money on things they can’t eat or wear or live in.

Like I said, we still buy old comics, and we’ll still pay good money for stuff we can turn around relatively quickly. But more and more, people are unloading whole collections on us. We prefer not to take whole collections; the amount of time sorting out the wheat from the chaff usually isn’t economically advantageous. When we do buy collections in bulk, we make it very clear that while we pay real money for what we can use, we can only pay very little for the rest, reducing our costs and making it more likely for us to come out ahead when processing the bulk, even if it only ends up in our bargain boxes. In general, most people are okay with that, since they’re trying to clear room and understand that, for some comics, anything is better than nothing.

The linked article notes that the owner of the collection discussed greatly overestimated its value. Again, that’s something we’ve seen over and over again at the shop over the decades. Someone gets their hands on a price guide, dutifully marks the mint price for each book on a Post-It note and affixes it to the bag or just directly to the cover, and then hauls the lot into the shop expecting to get full retail. They don’t realize that shops can’t pay equal to what they expect to retail the book for, or that just because a book has a certain price in a price guide, that anyone’s actually going to pay that anytime soon. Yes, it’s great that Power Pack #27 is listed as being $3.00, but does anyone care? Is someone going to rush into the shop demanding to buy Power Pack #27 Right! Now! Unless I’m completely out of any copies of Power Pack #27, and if the copy is still in brand-new condition, and if I can get it cheaply enough, I’d buy it. Maybe.

So what back issues are selling for us? A whole lot of stuff! Anything pre-Code! Romance comics! Cheap Silver Age books! High-grade Silver Age books! Batman! Old Archie Comics! Deadpool! War books! Classics Illustrated! That one guy collecting Doctor Doom appearances! The first few issues of most New 52 series! Sonic the Hedgehog! Adventure Time! Avengers! Green Arrow, apparently, judging by the huge pile of them I pulled out of the backroom when restocking on Sunday! Basically, a whole lot of different titles, but those are the ones that stick out.

I’ve seen some pooh-poohing of the back issue marketability of ’70s and ’80s Uncanny X-Men, the once-red hot Byrne issues in particular, but we still get asked for those all the time. High-grade copies blow out the door. A long time ago, we were lucky enough to get a lot of high-grade #141s and #142s (the classic Days of Future Past storyline). We kept pricing them up ‘n’ up, and they kept selling, and now I’m pretty sure we’re completely out of them, or darned close. And keep in mind the bulk of these sales were before anyone even knew those issues were going to be the basis for a movie.

One trend we’ve been noticing lately is the slow upwards creep on prices for a handful of books from the post market-crash era, when sales were down on everything, from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Stuff like the 1999 Amazing Spider-Man relaunch, or Simpsons comics, or final issues (read: even lower print runs than the already low numbers most titles were at) of certain series, or other comics published then that folks still have an interest in now, particularly if still in near mint or better condition. When I made a mention of this on Twitter, I wasn’t specific enough about what books were showing such an increase, so everyone was all like “BUY MY SHADOWHAWKS, MIKE,” and I looked down and whispered “no.”

I may have more meanderings about back issue stuff later in the week, but let me stop for today after dealing with one more bit of business:

Pal Dave asked me on the Twitterers about which once-valuable comic took the biggest dive in price and is now basically worthless. Now, I thought about that for a long time. In the subsequent discussion on Twitter right after Dave asked, Superman #75, the Death of Superman issue (I’m sure I don’t need to remind you), was mentioned. At the time, I recall hearing stories about people selling copies for $100+ the weekend after its release, though I never saw it with my own eyes. At our shop, when we finally started dealing with it as a back issue item (after sorta avoiding it for a while, waiting for the market to settle) we were charging $15 for the still-sealed-in-the-black-baggie edition, and that’s where the price stayed for years. I think now we have it at $25, and yes, they’re still selling. So, at least for us, this comic didn’t dive in price.

One that comes to mind is Harbinger #1 (1992) from Valiant Comics. I seem to recall that selling for about $100 at one point at the height of Valiant-mania. I remember having a bunch of them on the rack when it was new and thinking “we’re never going to sell these stupid things.” Well, sell they did, and I still get requests for it. There is still a market, as I implied earlier in this post, for early Valiant comics, and even before this most recent relaunch of the Valiant brand there was demand for Harbinger and early X-O Manowar and whatnot. A quick glance at the eBay revealed a couple of sales in the $30 range, only half that of the $60 price in the most recent Overstreet. While there was a drop in price, I wouldn’t say it’s worthless, and people are still looking for it.

I don’t know if this counts, the WildC.A.T.s #1 Gold Foil edition, which we sold in an in-store auction for over $100…and now we have a copy, signed by Jim Lee himself, in the shop for $15.00. I don’t know if that $100 price tag was typical for the time, or just a fluke at our shop, but that’s a big drop for us, at any rate, added to the fact that nobody’s looking for WildC.A.T.s back issues.

So I still don’t really have an answer for Dave. There were a number of titles that were briefly hot that you can’t even give away today…New Warriors #1, for example, though never worth a lot of money it did sell regularly, unlike now. If you folks have any suggestions, you know where to lay ’em on me.

Surprisingly, I don’t often see old comics (and I hate calling this particular comic “old,” but it is from twenty years ago) come back into the shop with our original price tags still on them, but I have been to other shops out of town and seen my writing on price stickers that the other shop just left on there (with the “store name” bit of the sticker removed at the perforation). “Well, whoever priced this comic is clearly wise and all-knowing in the ways of comics retail. We shall honor his magnificence by leaving his price tag as is!”