Sounds complicated!
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I know little about bankruptcy other than I had a few businesses go through the process when I had orders with them and I never received my money or product.
I’m not saying this company won’t make good on orders and such, but isn’t it pretty risky to be placing orders or having the expectations you’ll get stuff from a business dealing with this? Do customers have any recourse whatsoever? I know there are things like credit card resolution but we also know how long the vast majority of comic preorders, CGC signed books can drag out.
On another note (sort of related)…one of the larger online toy sources (dorkside toys) also folded recently.
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And Old Republic Collectibles this week.
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One of my LCS’s is going under…having a liquidation sale in January. I was wondering why it wasn’t getting New books the past couple months… if they filed Chapter 11 Diamond/Penguin likely was not sending them books.
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To support your point, I’ve only purchased one store variant ever, and it was from Frankie’s Comics. They sold it under cost too. It was Moon Girl #19 virgin CGC 9.8 for $19.75 shipped on Ebay. I only got it because I liked the cover and it was cheap.
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Damn that is a good buy, was it at auction?
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Getting a bit granular here as I really want a nice copy of Darth Vader #3 but have never bought an “expensive” (for me) book. Any feedback is welcome
- I’m a buy and hold sort of investor - like Aphra - but is there value still in this book?
- buy a 9.8 for market value or a LCS NM for around 180$
- have prices come down for this book at all?
Yes, it was an auction, and I think it was just too obscure to be on anyone’s radar. Moon Girl was already a low print run. This is the book - I just really liked the color splash:
I wouldn’t pay $180 for a NM (i.e., 9.4 raw) copy for $180. Unless you are very good at picking 9.8s and it looks like a 9.8 candidate.
That book was notorious for color rubbing off the back spine…so be weary.
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Aphra is still a good bet just from an investment standpoint. If you like the character that helps the sting of a big purchase as well. Prices have come down a little but not all that much considering how bad the economy has been overall. For a DV #3 I would say bite the bullet and buy a CGC 9.8., but don’t feel like it has to be today. Look around and find a deal. There are some to be had out there. Look for decent priced copies with best offer options and see what you can work out.
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DV3 prices are pretty reasonable. You can find already graded 9.8’s for under $300. Lower if you keep at it. I had an offer from a seller on eBay for $216 for a CBCS 9.8. I passed as I’m focusing on older books.
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Lots of comic shops closing…
Closing or (hopefully) pivoting. One shop I frequent is doing fewer and fewer comics. They continue to do a lot with board games and trading card games and also now buy and sell vintage video-games. Folks love old games.
I think we saw a bubble as well… when I first got back into comics back in 2013, I could barely find online shops to order from and pre-order. Then a few years later you could spit in any direction on the internet and hit a comic book shop online.
It was too easy for anyone to start a online and comic book shop, now the market needs to correct itself as most of these fly by nighters need to go bye bye…
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Exclusives and people seeing them skyrocket for a while in secondary markets 100% helped cause a lot of that. For about a year making exclusives (and not having any shame in the quality of what you make or lying about numbers) was like printing free money. And now in the last 6-9 months, you’re seeing that people finally stopped buying EVERY exclusive that came out for EVERY comic, and you’re starting to see a lot of those online stores that never actually set up proper businesses or brought in customers or new products outside of a small ever-shrinking audience get caught holding the bag.
It’s kind of a unique thing to comics as well, that the product itself (comics) is super hard to make a profit off of – unless you’re selling curated back issue/key issues or something high scale. The margins are low, the returns/damages are high, shipping is expensive unless you break the rules and rely on media mail, and the audience is being split into a billion directions between their LCS, online ordering, and people who create FOC-only Shopify shops or eBay-only shops. Exclusives let a lot of those operations survive because they’d make the bulk of their profit off exclusives + incentives, but there’s a lot of people out there who thought they “beat” the comic shop industry and were going to get rich who are realizing there’s a reason people who open shops usually do it for the love of comics and because they’re passionate, not to become multi-millionaires.
I know most people here have always said it, but the last few months has hopefully really driven the point home to people who purely buy comics for investment purposes that exclusives should only be purchased if you like the art, want to support the creator(s) of it, or want to support the store(s) that made it. Not to hold/sell/flip for value.
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Yeah, the key to comic book selling and new books is quantity, move that inventory and build up a pretty decent base of subscribers. When you start playing the spec game yourself on per-orders and raise the prices on release day, you’re going to lose eventually which I think is also the reason for the fall of these fly by night new stores.
It’s rare to just see a comic book shop without them selling other merchandise or doing other things within the store to widen the consumer audience.
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I look forward to less YouTubers pumping spec. If people can’t make money, they stop watching. If people stop watching, there is no incentive to make stupid YouTube pump videos.
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What will the YouTubers do tho when pump money is gone? More lame prank vids?
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Rely solely on YouTube advertising money which, at their views, is not going to be great.
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Rely on drama Jerry Springer style to draw in views unfortunately