‘Tis the season of Charles Dickens’ classic The Christmas Carol, but for this piece, it’s more appropriate to open with a line from another Dickens novel, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” In this case, we’re not telling the tale of two cities, but two tales of the same market. Are collectibles still stuck in their post-pandemic funk, or are there signs of life?
The case for the bears. If you spend any time on comics YouTube, you’ll see a bunch of channels that racked up the views during the frothy days of the most recent collectibles boom (2021-2023-ish) now lamenting how the bottom has fallen out, with auctions results falling 50% or more from their recent highs on key books. “I lost more than $100,000 on vintage comics!” screams one clickbaity headline. “This comic has dropped by 93%!” shouts another.
Broader economic and cultural trends provide a lot of reasons why this could be the case. Obviously there are a lot more things competing for people’s money right now than during the pandemic, when being stuck at home bidding on auctions rated pretty highly as an entertainment option.
The economy itself has been through some things too. Inflation, which probably affected collectibles as much as anything else, peaked at close to 9% in the summer of 2022 and has plummeted since then. Prices in some cases have stayed high, but the rate of increase is way, way down. Meanwhile interest rates are up, which means returns on speculative investments have to compete with greater returns on relatively safer ones like money market accounts or CDs.
Then you have headwinds facing the demand side, like the relative decline of superhero movies and TV shows as the dominant box office force they were previously. A huge amount of money trades hands on first appearances and key books for characters rumored to be featured in upcoming, soon-to-be-announced media projects, and once those get scrapped or slow down, the value of the underlying assets plummets.
Image: Heritage
Exhibit A for this is Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula #10 (1973), featuring the first appearance of Blade the Vampire Hunter, which sold at CGC 9.8 for $48,000 at Heritage in September 2021, and just(?) $20,400 in the Heritage auction that ended November 24, 2024. The drop followed the conspicuous absence of a new Blade feature film, originally due out next November, on Marvel Studios’ most recent upcoming slate of films released shortly before the auction (see “’Blade’ Off Schedule”).
Then you have growing collector dissatisfaction with CGC, the premier grading service, due to perceived inconsistencies in grading standards (a perennial gripe) and the security problem that surfaced earlier this year where a few slabbed comics were found to have been swapped out for lower-grade copies (see “CGC Files Suit”). Despite assurances from the company that there’s nothing to see here, if you can’t trust one of the foundational arbiters of value in the ecosystem, expect the market to be a bit queasy.
The case for the bulls. Those looking for evidence that the sky is not falling need look no further than the same Heritage Auction where Blade’s first appearance got put to the sword. Elsewhere, big ticket items saw very healthy returns, with the auction netting $16.6 million.
Buzzy media properties still get collectors to pry open their wallets: witness the $960,000 that some collector of means and discerning taste paid for page 14 of New Mutants #98, featuring the first appearance of Deadpool, drawn by Rob Liefeld. Overall, original art seemed to do better than collectible comics, although there were a few record prices on first appearances of Plastic Man and Adam Strange.
Outside of the most heavily-promoted auction of the most heavily curated blue-chip items, things are still slow, but there may be relief in the future. The speculators banking on the ridiculous returns on investment during the pandemic era may have finally capitulated, allowing things to reset at a more reasonable level.
Then you have the stock market going bananas, with all the major indices hitting record levels since the election, accompanied by a resurgence of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin hit $100,000 for the first time last week, engorging the wallets of the same kind of investors whose windfall gains likely powered the initial collectibles market runup. In an uncertain world, tangible goods like collectibles and art represent a proven store of value, especially when the CGC census provides a fairly clear picture of the supply of any given book at a particular grade.
Finally, there are new signs of life in the media. James Gunn’s rebooted DCU has just debuted with Creature Commandos on MAX, and Marvel’s Agatha All Along was the company’s biggest Disney+ hit in a while. We may see some better things ahead as we turn the page on a fairly humdrum 2024 and look forward to 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World, Marvel’s Thunderbolts, DC’s Superman, and of course the 1960s period piece that could be the least terrible version of The Fantastic Four yet to reach the screen!
Headwinds and tailwinds. The biggest danger for the comics collectibles market is how closely the value is tied to a body of lore that is known about by a relatively small number of people and cared about by even fewer. Most people know who Superman, Batman and Spider-Man are. There are now also an unexpectedly large number of people who know who Groot is, or who Doctor Phosphorus is. So that helps keep demand for certain key books ahead of supply in ways that suggests ongoing value.
Once you get past that top layer of consciousness, plus aesthetic considerations like iconic covers, it gets more difficult to see how the work of artists and writers not much known outside of comics fans can outlive the nostalgic affection of those fans. That feels like a long-term risk to collectors who assume, like most collectors do, that their taste reflects the tastes of the wider world in perpetuity.
On the other hand, we are deep into the age of “LOL! Nothing matters!” Millions of people who know next to nothing about sports betting are nevertheless betting (and losing) billions of dollars to the square of glass in their pocket, so why not gamble in other kinds of markets? As the future becomes more uncertain, it’s easy to justify making big impulse purchases in the here-and-now, especially in items that feel fun, cool and connected to big media and entertainment.
The continued quantification of the comics market by CGC and related entities, plus the relentless propaganda of auction houses and others with a vested interest in the financialization of the hobby, all but guarantee an influx of new money from the rising class of tech oligarchs, crypto-barons, and whatever other lucky duckies benefit from the current environment.
Whether that can continue to trickle down to comic shops selling non-premium back issues to modest-means collectors, or to publishers banking on speculators shelling out for variant covers, #1 issues or media-ready story beats, remains to be seen.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Rob Salkowitz is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture and a two-time Eisner-Award nominee.
Source: ICv2
