The Four Color Media Monitor

Dexerto has something to ponder in this report about people on Reddit helping a collector sell his comics:

Many who got into collecting comics when they were younger eventually find themselves parting ways to make ends meet or just to free up space. Unfortunately, while there are books with value, it’s just not the booming collector’s market it once was in the ’90s.

That means it’s now an industry rife with scammers and con artists, leading many collectors to believe decades of saving and protecting collectibles was wasted time. Fortunately, there are communities like Reddit’s comicbookcollecting subreddit, where dedicated fans are offering advice to collectors who are ready to sell.

What some collectors fail to realize is that, if the story and art are bad (think Rob Liefeld, in example), the pamphlet in question won't retain value in the long run. That's but one reason why the speculator market collapsed years ago, and is now a joke, because there's a lot of modern items since the 1990s that people put in polybags, and those certainly don't have value if they're bad. The part about scams is certainly telling, and nobody should be buying old pamphlets just because they're supposedly going to be valueable some day.

And just as important, all this collection obssession's obscured the importance of entertainment value. And it continues to shock how many speculators are so disinterested in reading for entertainment, let alone something that can provide what to think about.

Labels: history, sales, technology