Most kids live in a digital world now. Get them the Marvel Unlimited app for $80 a year and they got access to 10k+ and most new issues hit the app within 2-3 months after release.
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Comics are by far the cheapest collecting related hobby out there. I see tons of kids in my area, south Texas, collecting comics.
Neither your or my experience and observations matter much, since it’s just our isolated areas, but I’ve heard similar commentary from others as well - that kids are still in the hobby and the numbers are growing.
The average cost to mow a lawn is around $40 now, that’s 10 comics priced at SRP for their effort.
Due to all the premium products in the sports card world, $40 doesn’t even begin to touch a pack of cards that they actually want.
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To contribute my own anecdotal evidence…
When I see kids buying/collecting/reading comics it is often ones they got cheap at VStock, Half Price Books, and so forth. These young folks just grab issues with random characters they like and read them, knowing the continuity might be confusing but its fine. They also seem to buy a lot of trade paperbacks and manga continues to be HUGE around here with kids/teens/etc. When I had my job working with teens any who did read comics bought them cheap or read them online.
Kids seem to really dig Pokemon cards again, but sports cards are moreso adults. I see tons of kids buying Pokemon and a lot of teens buying Magic at my local shops and the school where my wife teaches has a solid chunk of kids playing Pokemon.
New release comics and sports cards seem to be a domain of older teens or adults, basically.
Pfff…I was getting $20 to mow a lawn when comics were still $1.
Why got me onto comics was grabbing any old comic off the newsstand rack and paying $1 or less for a stand alone story. Loved the late 80s Batman/detective books. Loved just sitting back and reading a simple comic…not having to remember what happened last month or stuck with a cliffhanger.
Then the Batman movie came out in ‘89 and Many Deaths of Batman and Blind Justice kicked off the 3+ issue story arcs and that was the end of it.
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I got into them from the grocery store. Used to love going to the grocery store in our town and looking at the spinner rack. Now Comics was big and used to get a ton of their books. Still have a fondness for Now. My mom would give me $5 and I could get all the comics I could afford. Even later, I would still hit up the grocery store when I was bored and buy some comics while waiting for my orders to come in. I would also hit up the two convenience stores that carried them. Later, no comics on the stands. Less accessibility for kids to grab them.
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That’s exactly how I got started. In the mid to late 80s, when I was learning how to read, my mom would always buy me a comic or two on the spinning racks at the local grocery store. I remember it was there that I got my copy of ASM 361. I remember reading to it and talking to my mom about how cool Carnage was, et cetera. I remember her smiling and nodding as if I was making her proud by saying something incredibly profound. Only now, as an adult, do I realize I was just a child whose mom was proud of him—not for the character analysis, but for learning how to read. I must have read that comic 1000 times and I’d be willing to bet it would grade at least a 9.4 were I to send it off to CGC right now. I also remember the summer of '92. My family traveled to Myrtle Beach and there used to be a comic book store there that’s now a Domino’s Pizza. I remember my weekly vacation allowance was 10 bucks for comics and 5 bucks for the arcade. Anyway, when I was at that comic store, there were two books, bagged and boarded, sitting on a rack by themselves. They were both 8 bucks and they were The Infinity Gauntlet 1 and Uncanny X-men 266. I agonized over the decision, but finally went with the X-men. I had no idea that 30 years later they would both be desirable books. I still remember mom saying, “okay, if you buy this you only have two dollars left on your allowance this week, so choose carefully.” These memories show me why some of us fall into the “trap” of buying a book and being unable to sell it because of the emotional attachment we feel for it. I’d never, ever sell those two books and their value to me, independent of what the market says, is immeasurable.
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I get the lawn service guys stopping by all the time asking to mow my yard. Yeah, $40 for a yard that takes me around 10 minutes… Ummm… no thank you. I only have to mow 3 - 4 times a year since I don’t waste water on my yard and if you live in central texas, you know by mid june with no watering yourself, that lawn is dead until october - december. Actually, I think I mowed my yard back in June and didn’t have to mow again until a week ago after we started to get rain again. My grass is the greenest it’s been all year and it’s December!!!
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Yeah, I need to move to some of your locations and quit my day job apparently.
No kid is getting more than $10 top for mowing our basic/average size neighborhood lots in my area.
Recession at an end?
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I’m not clicking on the link because it looks to be in a language I I cannot translate, however let me ask the question have we technically been in a recession in 2022?
I know sales is slow right now, and stores are closing (an LCS of mine is closing its doors in January, more than half the Mall is empty) however there is very specific criteria for labeling an economic downturn as “recession.”
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Never mind…
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An Amazing Fantasy #15 graded by CGC 8.5 set a new record when it sold for $552k. And I was not referring to a technical recession, just the slowdown in comic book sales all round.
Maybe we are. But I don’t have a degree in business or economics to know.
I do like Forbes more wholistic approach looking beyond the one data set. But even that makes it more complicated a definition and more of an opinion. It does show more negatives than positives/neutrals which is bad no matter whether we are or are not technically in a recession.
I’m optimistic right now. This isn’t financial advice, but starting today I’m DCA’g back in.
Energy cost has mostly remained below crisis levels for a couple months now.
Inflation is waning quickly.
We’re about to witness insane deflation for discretionary goods and especially used cars.
Speculative assets (across the board - not just comics) have shed roughly 50-70% of their value.
My thesis is the only element of inflation we haven’t solved yet is the wage inflation that may cause another round of inflation for services (inflation for goods is largely over). However, I think the wage increases will predominately go to the bottom 50% of the income ladder, which in turn, helps solve the affordability issue that inflation caused in the first place.
Do I expect turbulence in the first and second quarter with job losses and diminishing property values in metro areas? I do.
But I think the job losses will be far less than what people expect, and things won’t get as bad as what most people think.
I don’t think things will explode back to normal, but in about 3-9 months I think we’ll have a relatively healthy economy again.
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My grocery bill remains significantly higher. My energy bill is the highest it has ever been and that’s with the primary expensive months yet to come. Shopping for an auto and it looks like my payments will be significantly higher. Land taxes are up about 20% over prior. Auto insurance about 20% higher. Gas remains higher than the last few years despite the drop.
The last couple weeks of inordinate cold temperatures in the Midwest is gonna slam folks with a massive bill as well.
In the long run, the talking heads can publish all the data they want…my budget and bottom line are pretty clear as to how the middle class is likely doing.
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This is precisely why inflation is largely done. Most of the excess money in the economy has been sucked out.
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Since you are in the original art niche have you seen a slow down/price weakness in your OA world?
Just curious if it was affected because it’s such a different group of buyers vs. comic books
You mean DCA into collectibles or equities etc…?
Wonder how many are making correlation charts with comic book indexes vs. DIS stock 
Might be better than correlation of comic books vs Bitcoin. Crypto money is out and not coming back anytime soon into collectibles unless some insanity happens again.
Equities. I’ve been back to buying comics for about 2 months.
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