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Do you think Wizard Magazine was a big contributor to the speculation bubbl6923

Collector Ladic private msg quote post Address this user
back in the 90's? back then I loved wizard magazine, but looking back, you can't help but wonder if those top 10 comics, hot artist and writers, all the coverage for Image and the hype they would rally behind certain comics did contribute into the speculation bubble?
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COLLECTOR shrewbeer private msg quote post Address this user
Absolutely.

Now it’s social media and websites pushing the speculation on modern books. The term “Variant” makes me want to hurl nowadays.

Folks with thousands of dollars in “valuable” ones will see all of that value evaporate overnight just like what happened in the 90s.
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Collector comicsforme private msg quote post Address this user
We are doing it today and dont need Wizard for that.To many Variants today.Look at Action Comics #1000 are Amazing Spider-man #1.
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Collector michaelekrupp private msg quote post Address this user
Wizard definitely did contribute to the speculation bubble, but it was a symptom more than a cause. The true blame for what happened in the early ‘90s is to be laid at publishers who, instead of trying to put out great comics, tried to manufacture collectibles. And the people who bought into are also responsible for causing it to spin out of control. I’m talking about both collectors and store owners here. Who do you blame, the guy who put last month’s back issue on the wall for 20 bucks or the guy who walked in, opened up his wallet and said “ok”? I think both parties bear some responsibility there. The fact that it is happening again with the variant craze and the “modern slabs” is deeply disturbing. It is hard to imagine it ending any differently than it did the first time around. I guess it’s true what they say: “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.
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COLLECTOR JLS_Comics private msg quote post Address this user
Beckett and Wizard were both drivers of the hype train
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I had no way of knowing that 9.8 graded copies signed by Adam Hughes weren't what you were looking for. drchaos private msg quote post Address this user
There were lots of great opportunities to buy comics that would make you money. Wizard was more directed to bubble comics than those that would ultimately succeed.
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I bought a meat grinder on amazon for $60 and it's changed my life. kaptainmyke private msg quote post Address this user
I believe the Key Collector Comics app is the current speculator tool. I see the app ping me for an alert...I go to ebay, within 5 minutes said book appears on ebay for a minimum of $100 or more raw. 9.8s sell suddenly for $250+


Fight me.
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COLLECTOR shrewbeer private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by kaptainmyke
I believe the Key Collector Comics app is the current speculator tool. I see the app ping me for an alert...I go to ebay, within 5 minutes said book appears on ebay for a minimum of $100 or more raw. 9.8s sell suddenly for $250+


Fight me.


That app turned very quickly from a way to look up key books to a modern-speculation show.

I deleted it and unfollowed on social media. I was getting nonstop notifications of NEW “key” books, sometimes in the middle of the night. :barf:
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COLLECTOR shrewbeer private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by JLS_Comics
Beckett


Care to elaborate?
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I bought a meat grinder on amazon for $60 and it's changed my life. kaptainmyke private msg quote post Address this user
Beckett sports cards price guides in the 90s brah
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COLLECTOR JLS_Comics private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by kaptainmyke
Beckett sports cards price guides in the 90s brah


That's exactly what I am referring to, not Beckett Media of today
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Collector X51 private msg quote post Address this user
I think there's far more to it than Wizard hyping comics. Diamond used to allow their accounts to sub-distribute. Their retail customers started doing well and they took advantage of Diamond's discount structure by ordering larger volumes to get the maximum discount. Those retailers would order enough volume to get the maximum discount and then they'd turn around and proactively seek out retail businesses like small book stores, convention dealers, sports card stores and anyone that wanted to expand their product line. The big retail customers would order cases of comics at 52% off cover price and turn around and sell to other smaller retailers at 40%-45% off cover price. Everyone was making money and it gave everyone a vested interest to promote comics to new customers and enlist more people to read comics. Retailers like Kingpen, The Edgeman and others would sell 10-packs of hot comics at steep discounts to normal consumers like you and me. We would go out and tell our friends how great comics are and how we bought a comic in bulk for $6 each and sold them a few days later to our friends for $10 each. Comics were promoted at every level, even at the collector level.

There were also multiple large distribution companies. Diamond competed with Capital City. There was Heroes world. There were regional distributors that pushed non-Marvel & non-DC product.

Marvel screwed things up by buying Heroes World. They were inept at running it and they had to shut it down. They abandoned it and then went to Diamond and signed a contract with Diamond so that only Diamond could carry Marvel's titles. That gave Diamond a definite market advantage over Capital City. Diamond one-by-one signed exclusivity contracts with all the major publisher making it impossible for Capital City to compete. No retailers are going to sign up with your major competitor if your competitor can't supply the titles that are most in demand. I think Diamond bought out Capital City or it just folded on it's own.

Diamond also added a clause that retail accounts could not sub-distribute. In the late 90's, all the marketing that had made comics so popular in the early 90's was gone.

The main reason comics imploded is because of the baseball strike in the 90's. Comics were already over-ordered and over-hyped with everyone thinking they could start their own business. When the baseball strike hit, baseball card dealers needed something to replace their loss of sales. The active season is what fueled demand. Also, Baseball card dealers had a completely different model for ordering cards. Baseball dealers would order cases and cases of product in an attempt to get the star players. They made all of their money off of the stars and the rest was fodder. They'd flush out the fodder at steep discounts and wouldn't think anything of it. When baseball card shops diversified and got into comics, they ordered excessive amounts of product with full intent to flush out any poor sellers at a discount. Comics don't work that way.

When consumers see comics decrease in value or sell for less than what they paid, they get disillusioned and lose confidence in the product. Everyone was telling people that comics were hot. People were buying 10-packs from dealers hyping the product and showing customers an ever increasing value trend. Then one day they looked around and sports card dealer were flushing out cases of comics for less than they paid for their 10-packs. The comics they had been told would be hot were the complete opposite because everyone was believing the same lie. There was a mass exodus of comic buyers from the hobby in late 1994. I used to talk to people who left the hobby at that time. They all left for the same reason... the lie that the product would increase in value and it didn't. The quality of Marvel's product was low too. Thunderstrike and characters like that. Marvel published every derivative character they could imagine. Regardless, those collectors that left the hobby thought they were the only ones fed up. They didn't realize that thousand of other collectors were making the same decision to quit.

Wizard fed the hype, but it was just one source of hype.

The biggest problem with comics now is a lack of marketing the product itself. Diamond and the publishers think it's the store's job to promote the product in the community. The store owners are stuck doing day to day chores and feel that the publisher should be promoting the product. It used to be that you could buy new comics from convention dealers at a show. That's rare now.

There are other factors too. Self-contained story arcs marketed for TPB's give readers a jumping off point.
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COLLECTOR conditionfreak private msg quote post Address this user
The wall of text makes me miss someone. Or sometwo.
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Collector DJC_II private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by conditionfreak
The wall of text makes me miss someone. Or sometwo.


Lol that was literally a wall of text
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Collector Oxbladder private msg quote post Address this user
@X51 an excellent breakdown. Just a minor correction though. Before Marvel went exclusive with Diamond DC had already gone exclusive with Diamond to counter. When this happened it all but killed off the other distributors. I know Dropped my local distributor when that happened as it was just way too pricey to use three distributors. In fact, I was already shopping my store around as the Marvel and pending DC decision wiped out my limited capital. Having to pickup two extra accounts and up my limits just to qualify for a crap Marvel discount all but wiped out my small margins at a time when I could least afford it. Sad thing was is we warned both Marvel and DC that this would make a slumping market even worse and it did. Tons of stores folded within a year.

All that the variant market has done was encourage some of the bad behaviours of that era. I doubt a sudden disappearance will happen but it would be beneficial to all (customer, retailers, publishers) if the publishers just eliminated variants for half a year or more so they could get an idea of what the real numbers are on their various titles and where they need to concentrate on improvements. Right now they just add variants to an issue and they get a rebound on their numbers. That doesn't actually fix anything.

Sadly I don't see the publishers being proactive nor consumers dropping variants so there will always be that threat of a crash of sorts. The proactive move would be the best for the market because a collector driven boycott could have a very bad blowback.
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Captain Corrector CaptainCanuck private msg quote post Address this user
@conditionfreak
Quote:
Originally Posted by conditionfreak
The wall of text makes me miss someone. Or sometwo.

My thoughts exactly.
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Collector X51 private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by Oxbladder
@X51 an excellent breakdown. Just a minor correction though. Before Marvel went exclusive with Diamond DC had already gone exclusive with Diamond to counter. When this happened it all but killed off the other distributors. I know Dropped my local distributor when that happened as it was just way too pricey to use three distributors. In fact, I was already shopping my store around as the Marvel and pending DC decision wiped out my limited capital. Having to pickup two extra accounts and up my limits just to qualify for a crap Marvel discount all but wiped out my small margins at a time when I could least afford it. Sad thing was is we warned both Marvel and DC that this would make a slumping market even worse and it did. Tons of stores folded within a year.

All that the variant market has done was encourage some of the bad behaviours of that era. I doubt a sudden disappearance will happen but it would be beneficial to all (customer, retailers, publishers) if the publishers just eliminated variants for half a year or more so they could get an idea of what the real numbers are on their various titles and where they need to concentrate on improvements. Right now they just add variants to an issue and they get a rebound on their numbers. That doesn't actually fix anything.

Sadly I don't see the publishers being proactive nor consumers dropping variants so there will always be that threat of a crash of sorts. The proactive move would be the best for the market because a collector driven boycott could have a very bad blowback.


That makes sense. Marvel's move to Heroes World would have prompted DC to align with one distributor also. I wrote that based upon memory. The order could be wrong on some things.
You are correct. There is no sales trend data because because of variants. They don't know if they are winning or losing readers on a month to month basis because they are always tossing in variants and publishing short lived series'.
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Collector michaelekrupp private msg quote post Address this user
Great point about how the variants skew sales data. This is exactly what happened in the 90s as well. As long as there were people buying ten copies of “hot” issues, you could lose the guys like me who were buying one of everything and still show an increase. The problem was (and may be again)when the “hot book” guys quit buying their ten, publishers quickly found that there was no one left.
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Collector BLBcomics private msg quote post Address this user
There have been wave after wave of comic book speculation(s) going on for many decades now. This is part of what my comics business book Comic Book Store Wars carefully explains. I began my speculations in comics as early as 1968. I knew other guys were speculating on comics as early as 1952.
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COLLECTOR conditionfreak private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by BLBcomics
There have been wave after wave of comic book speculation(s) going on for many decades now. This is part of what my comics business book Comic Book Store Wars carefully explains. I began my speculations in comics as early as 1968. I knew other guys were speculating on comics as early as 1952.


So, is this your polite way of telling us you have boxes of Hulk #1, AF #15 and ASM #1 stashed away for retirement? If so, can we be friends?
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Collector BLBcomics private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by conditionfreak
Quote:
Originally Posted by BLBcomics
There have been wave after wave of comic book speculation(s) going on for many decades now. This is part of what my comics business book Comic Book Store Wars carefully explains. I began my speculations in comics as early as 1968. I knew other guys were speculating on comics as early as 1952.


So, is this your polite way of telling us you have boxes of Hulk #1, AF #15 and ASM #1 stashed away for retirement? If so, can we be friends?


I do have between 8,000 to 10,000 NM 70s comics for sale as one lot. There is an additional 30,000 other comics 1940s-early 1980s as another load lot. Am physically damaged and can no longer be a comics dealer. They say Bronze be the New Gold.
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Collector Oxbladder private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by conditionfreak
Quote:
Originally Posted by BLBcomics
There have been wave after wave of comic book speculation(s) going on for many decades now. This is part of what my comics business book Comic Book Store Wars carefully explains. I began my speculations in comics as early as 1968. I knew other guys were speculating on comics as early as 1952.


So, is this your polite way of telling us you have boxes of Hulk #1, AF #15 and ASM #1 stashed away for retirement? If so, can we be friends?


What he's saying is that speculators are not the problem. Uneducated speculation can be harmful but this hobby is as much about the money as it is the books. I'm not going to say that I don't like that some of my books are worth some decent coin. It's definitely not the priority for me but it is a nice added bonus.
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Collector X51 private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by BLBcomics
Quote:
Originally Posted by conditionfreak
Quote:
Originally Posted by BLBcomics
There have been wave after wave of comic book speculation(s) going on for many decades now. This is part of what my comics business book Comic Book Store Wars carefully explains. I began my speculations in comics as early as 1968. I knew other guys were speculating on comics as early as 1952.


So, is this your polite way of telling us you have boxes of Hulk #1, AF #15 and ASM #1 stashed away for retirement? If so, can we be friends?


I do have between 8,000 to 10,000 NM 70s comics for sale as one lot. There is an additional 30,000 other comics 1940s-early 1980s as another load lot. Am physically damaged and can no longer be a comics dealer. They say Bronze be the New Gold.


Sorry to hear about you declining health. Best wishes.
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Collector X51 private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by Oxbladder
Quote:
Originally Posted by conditionfreak
Quote:
Originally Posted by BLBcomics
There have been wave after wave of comic book speculation(s) going on for many decades now. This is part of what my comics business book Comic Book Store Wars carefully explains. I began my speculations in comics as early as 1968. I knew other guys were speculating on comics as early as 1952.


So, is this your polite way of telling us you have boxes of Hulk #1, AF #15 and ASM #1 stashed away for retirement? If so, can we be friends?


What he's saying is that speculators are not the problem. Uneducated speculation can be harmful but this hobby is as much about the money as it is the books. I'm not going to say that I don't like that some of my books are worth some decent coin. It's definitely not the priority for me but it is a nice added bonus.


Increased sales for a publisher would be a good thing. More distributors competing to sell more books would be a good thing.
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COLLECTOR shrewbeer private msg quote post Address this user
@BLBcomics hows that book coming along?
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