Something quite miraculous happened last weekend that hasn’t happened in a long, long time… so long, in fact, that I’m going to write about it.
Because last weekend, I sold a comic!
It was a rare Rare that survived a brutal comic burn, and I got a respectable price for it.
True, I’ve sold a collectible now and then, but typically when I put a comic or collectible on the market, it just gets added to the monthly ritual… when all of my notifications go off - Bling! Bling! Bling! When I check the app, all of my market listings are expiring at once.
I take the time to look them over; some I move up in price, some I move down a little, but most of them stay about the same. I decide if I want to add or subtract anything before setting up all of the listings, then I repeat the ritual month after month.
It’s like being a kid back in the 80’s, when bottle caps, baseball cards, and collectible stickers were still a thing. Some kids would swap back and forth so much that no one knew who originally owned it. Some would swap their stuff for candy, or promise eternal friendships for your Star Wars sticker collection.
But if you wanted to trade something with me, good luck.
You want my Don Mattingly? Well, your trade had better be good. No, no… multiple cards, kid. I don’t care if I have a spare or not… go open another pack, he’s not that rare. Unless you can finish out my Yankees checkbox, he’s not going anywhere. I’d rather keep the spare, he’s my favorite player this year.
I didn’t really take care of my cards, comics, or anything as a kid. Star Wars movie posters got the scotch tape treatment on my walls and the cards got rubber cemented in acidic scrapbooks. But that’s normal for kids, really; the dirtier and more banged up a toy is, the more you know some kid really loved it. I still respected my stuff, and I wasn’t about to trade it for extra lunch money.
As for yard sales? The idea of putting 25 cents on a tag was not going to happen. That broken X-wing is getting a 5 dollar price tag and it’s going back in the house afterwards, thank you!
It didn’t matter that it wasn’t worth much in the grand scheme of things.
In fact, that’s true of some of my collections now; they’re not worth much.
I went into a comic shop a couple of months ago and found a stack of Richie Rich Digests. They had the typical acid paper issues, but were otherwise spotless. There was no indication of how much they were, and when I took them up to the counter, they sold them to me for cover price. “Always been there.” “We’ve had them for years.” “We moved them around now and again.”
Yeah, that’s pretty much my collection journey in a nutshell.
Most of the things I collect don’t seem to matter to anyone else but me.
But how does one determine that, really? How does anybody really judge what something is worth to a person? Collections are very personal things.
In every collector’s market, it seems that you have traders with different sets of values.
You have the gamblers (I already did a blog on that one) who just value the biggest wins.
You have the flippers, who value every dollar made once the fees are paid.
You have the investors, who value the potential of what they collect.
You have the die-hards, who value every completed collection, and who are perfectly content to vault them forever - or for posterity (whichever comes first).
Then you have the in-betweens, who don’t fit inside or outside of any of the categories. They value their collection based on what it's worth to them personally. They treat their comics and collectibles with respect, and would prefer to hold on to what they own before they let something in their collection go for less than what it’s worth to them.
When I put a value on a comic or a collectible in the market, I price it with respect. I put a tag on it based on what it personally means to me, regardless of whether anyone else feels the same way or not.
When something I own finally sells, it shows me that there’s someone else out there that respects the value of that comic as well.
And that shared sentiment… can’t be bought for any price.
Because value is more than just a number.