{"id":5925,"date":"2008-10-26T04:32:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-26T04:32:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-28T03:08:43","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T03:08:43","slug":"comic-books-and-bubble-markets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/26\/comic-books-and-bubble-markets\/","title":{"rendered":"Comic books and bubble markets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forbes has an article on bubbles in collecting hobbies<\/a> \u2014 certainly recalling what I used to see in my years at Krause Publications<\/span><\/a>, where with our magazines in various collecting fields we were able to follow the speculator craze from sportscards, to comics, to Magic cards, to Beanie Babies, to action figures, to Pok\u00e9mon cards \u2014 in about that order, I would guess. That was an occasion to be glad you were diversified; interestingly, we often saw some of the same dealers migrating from one advertising list to another, following the money. David Serchuk’s article gets into several of these, including some I had no idea about \u2014 like crazes in collecting fossils and meteorites. (I guess we just didn’t have any magazines for them!)<\/p>\n

Joe Koch<\/span> is interviewed and lays out some examples \u2014 and the article gets into April 1993, which is the month when Superman returned from the dead and comics orders hit a modern peak \u2014 48 million copies in a month. It wasn’t apparent for a while that the market had peaked for good, as my recent Newsarama column gets into \u2014 but it was clearly seen as an important moment.<\/p>\n

Not really many historical quibbles \u2014 though I think maybe the mention that the boom period “started in the mid-1980s” might be conflating the Black and White Glut with the later, bigger color comics boom of 1989-1993 \u2014 there was a crash in between, big enough to take down distributors. (The multiple variant covers phenomenon mentioned was definitely a little later, following Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #1<\/span> in 1989.<\/span>) I also wonder if that Amazing Fantasy #15<\/span> price might be for one of the big Golden Age books, unless there’s some monster sale I haven’t seen.<\/p>\n

But that’s only of note to the us in the hobby; this article is a really useful piece to have out there for the general public. We used to say that speculators were like locusts \u2014 wait long enough, and they’ll come back. But now, with the Internet spreading information \u2014 including what supply is really like, both on places like eBay and, in another sense, The Comics Chronicles<\/span><\/a> \u2014 hopefully whatever wave comes won’t be as destructive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forbes has an article on bubbles in collecting hobbies \u2014 certainly recalling what I used to see in my years at Krause Publications, where with our magazines in various collecting fields we were able to follow the speculator craze from sportscards, to comics, to Magic cards, to Beanie Babies, to action figures, to Pok\u00e9mon cards … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[19,14,60,43],"class_list":["post-5925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-1980s-sales","tag-1990s-sales","tag-media-reports","tag-speculation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5925"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5926,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5925\/revisions\/5926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}