Vin goes to sell some comic books

At the local mutiplex, the tightly edited “coming attractions” are often better than the real movies they advertise.

Unfortunately, when today’s real-world “coming attractions” feature a fast-devaluating dollar, means-testing of “entitlements” (come back and let us know when you’ve sold your house and you’re living under the bridge), making it a crime to “hoard” wealth or move it offshore, and a probable de facto default on federal government debt, leading to an 18 percent national sales tax to try and pay for all that great vote-buying “free stuff” … retirement planning may start to feature more slam-bang action than we’d really like.

What lots of people have already started to do is sell their stuff. It provides ready cash to fill the gaps, plus lightens your load should you need to bug out.

Question is: what’s it all worth?

You can look it up Online, or buy a price guide. In my experience, either course can lead to inflated expectations, frustration, and anger, especially if you skip the little section at the front of the book that says: “Read this important information about ‘condition.’”

I’ve always collected coins, in a small way. For a short time I ran classified ads in the Review-Journal, specifying an interest in acquiring pre-1900 European coins and historical medals, especially British, especially early Victorian: No American except Carson City mint.

These “limiters” might as well have been written in Klingon, for all the good they did. I traveled to view quite a few “collections” (in fact, Mason jars or peanut cans containing assemblages of modern brass and aluminum coins collected on foreign trips, or pulled out of pocket change by grandma) that met virtually none of my criteria.

This became mainly an exercise in diplomatically breaking the news that — no matter how much we loved the departed relative who gathered these conglomerations — they were in fact worthless piles of crap.

Most amazing to me was the intense, unshakable faith of the young women — they always seemed to be young women — who had looked up daddy’s late-19th-century U.S. Barber dime or quarter in a paperback price guide, and were convinced potential buyers were trying to cheat them out of a coin worth thousands of dollars.

“You’re looking in the ‘brilliant uncirculated’ column, ma’am.” I would say in my most sensitive, ‘I’m afraid Fido has gone to doggie heaven’ voice. “This coin is ‘good’ at best. You see how lady liberty’s head is reduced to a silhouette, and you can barely make out the date? Over here, in the ‘good’ column, eight dollars.”

“I dunno. It looks brilliant uncirculated to me. See how it shines?”

“Ma’am, there’s no such grade as ‘shiny.’ Collectors use magnifying loupes to look for tiny spots of wear on the high spots, and they prefer the original patina. The fact that you put it through the washing machine last night, or went to work with a toothbrush and some silver polish, has not enhanced its grade for a collector.”

Then there are the records. Price guides for old vinyl LPs are useful for establishing relative values (buy the Ronettes; buy Beatles in mono; please destroy all your “Sing Along With Mitch” albums, as they appear to be reproducing.)

But most of the old auction reports on which price-guide listings are based for swing, big band — even the later, stereo Elvis — seriously overstate what these will bring today. The fan base for Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, and Harry Belafonte isn’t buying any more. They — or their heirs — are dumping stock back on the market. Prices plummet.

Knowing all this, I don’t think I qualified as a complete idiot when I bought the old box of brown-edged science fiction magazines out of a storage locker last year and found in the bottom a handful of “silver age” Marvel and D.C. Comics with 10-cent cover prices.

Just because my four-year-old “Comics Values” told me D.C.’s “Justice League of America” No. 16 (circa 1962) catalogued at $400 to $600 in “near mint to mint” didn’t fool me into thinking I’d just won a cross-country airline ticket.

These comics had been read by a teen-ager and thrown in a box 40 years ago. They still had their covers attached and most had suffered no major tears, but they displayed various forms of wear and chipping, especially at the corners and near the staples. I’m no expert, but I can read the generalized grade descriptions in the guidebooks, which told me that at “fair to very good,” these books might sell for as little as “10 to 40 percent” of those impressive near-mint values.

I figured even that was optimistic, since collectors want stuff as near to pristine as possible. I hoped the JLA might bring 40 bucks; the Marvel Fantastic Four No. 29 (circa 1964; cataloguing at $400 in Near Mint) might be worth $50.

The big mystery was Amazing Spiderman No. 3, circa 1963, which catalogues at $6,000 to $8,000 but for which the copy in hand would barely merit a grade of “fair,” with part of the cover missing as well as a coupon cut out from an inside page. Ninety bucks?

I placed a handful of such comics in a glass case at the brunette’s emporium of vintage fashion, books and vinyl in the antique mall for most of a year. She never got so much as a low-ball offer.

Maybe they just weren’t getting noticed by the right potential customers. I pulled them all out and decided to do an experiment, visiting several local “authentic” comics stores and offering five or six books in the mid-price range — stuff I figured might be worth $40 to $90 dollars apiece — for sale.

I don’t appreciate folks who impose on MY valuation skills, such as they may be, and then refuse to sell. So I decided in advance I’d complete the experiment, selling the comics at the prices offered.

My first surprise was how many local Las Vegas comics shops — including some rated quite highly on the Internet — don’t buy at all, or sell only new issues and thus neither buy NOR sell pre-1969 comics.

I finally found a place that did, although — predictably — they buy “pre-1968 only.”

“Of course. What’s your spread?”

“We pay 20 percent.”

Next week: What Vin got for the old comics.

One Comment to “Vin goes to sell some comic books”

  1. John Brook Says:

    Vin, you ought to look into collecting firearms – perhaps you already do. They seem to hold their value better. It could be that being able to functioning as a tool is still worth some intrinsic amount.