Should I sell my comics?

My girlfriend did end up selling a lot of her comic collection years ago for money and ended up regretting it though (for sentimental and completist reasons mostly).

Alternately, maybe ILCers might be interested in what I have: such titillating titles as Bendis's Jinx and a couple of his Daredevil trades, Powers: Who Killed Retrogirl, Jason's Sshhhh!, a couple old school Sin City tpbs, Arsenic Lullaby, Death: High Cost of Living, and maybe the first 5 trades of 100 Bullets.

The 1990s lied. There is no money in this hobby.

I picked up a box of my old comics from my parents house with the goal of selling them. I don't really expect a lot of $$$ from them, it's mostly random X-Men and Spiderman comics from the early '90s, but no one was reading them in my parents' basement so I might as well get a little cash from them. For these type of comics, which likely are not very rare/valuable, I assume it makes the most sense to just try and find a comic book store that will buy them in bulk? Other options are selling them individually on eBay (pain in the ass) or organizing them into lots (like all X-men, all Spiderman, etc) and selling them on eBay.

for some reason I have a lot of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Snart_Adventures

Is there any downside to keeping them? I don't think they could possibly go down in value. You could give some out at halloween instead of unhealthy candy. (Though if this is 90s superhero boom comics, candy might be more healthy)

downside: limited space, no one (including me) is reading them

n/a, early 90s comic bks kinda coincided with a huge speculator-driven frenzy that almost destroyed the entire market. i think you will be very very lucky to find a comic dealer willing to give you money, or even trade, for x-men etc comics from this period. if you just want to get rid of them, why not donate them to a children's home, hospital etc. obv there are a few titles that are exceptions to this ...but ralph snart ain't one of em

dunno what the situation is like w/ ebay for this stuff, but again i imagine that it is a real buyer's market out there

cool, that's what I figured but thanks for the advice.

I have a couple of these, about kids who solve mysteries with the help of their Tandy computer: http://www.atarimagazines.com/whizkids/

I've used old comic books as wrapping paper before. they are already brightly colored and decorative so you can reuse them with little/no craft at all.

see, those are the kind of cool and relatively uncommon comic bks you MIGHT get some dough for

i just looked this up, btw - Jim Lee's X-Men #1, published by Marvel in 1990, apparently had a print run of 8 million copies. even assuming that every xmen fan ever bought two copies, that leaves a surplus of abt 6 million copies, by my reckoning.

x-post to n/a

You can always look through for uncommon things, then drop the rest off at a youth shelter as a tax writeoff.

I sold all 49 of my old comics for $25 (I think) on craigslist
none of them were worth anything

apparently each of them were worth 50c

random friend gave me a box filled with this kind of stuff: micronauts, rom, xmen, alpha flight, batman, superman, gi joe, image... late 80's/early 90's shit. it's a box i've gotten rid of like six times already.
I am actually literally recycling these as I read them. it feels good.

it's a box i've gotten rid of like six times already.

Sure: it's a box filled with comics that not only myself but like 5 million kids my age bought up when we were all around twelve or fourteen. Same era of stuff. At one point, when I pared down my collection for the first time, they were the first books I got rid of. Years later, a friend would say, "hey I'm getting rid of my comics, you wanna buy them" and i'd go over and whattayaknow: it's like 90% that generic late 80's early 90's marvel/dc/tmnt/eclipse/image shit and i say nah, it's okay but he ends up just giving them to me and it's not like I'm gonna turn down comics, right? and then eventually I pass the white elephant on to someone else and then some other guy does it again and this is like the fifth time I've gotten what feels like the same useless box of barely readable larry hama, ann nocenti, chris claremont, bill mantlo, al milgrom, marc silvestri, keith giffen, j.m. dematteis stuff. Just this once, rather than find another person to pass it along to, i'm throwing each book into the recycling bin once it makes the rounds out of the bathroom.

ha, i had a feeling that's what you were getting at. so many of us got into comics during that time - Batman movies/dark grim era/speculator boom, with millions of copies of X-Men #1 or Spider-Man #1 collecting dust in longboxes

Thanks for the explanation forksclovetofu.

it's not like I'm gonna turn down comics, right?

i don't know if I've ever turned down a free comic, much less a free box. I'm not sure who that man would be.

I too have a box of 1990 era shit at my parents house. It's the only thing left there from when I was kid. Some late 80s baseball cards are in there too - lots of Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire '87 Topps rookie cards.

feels like a support group...

I have 3 long boxes of 80s shit at my parents house, same crapola (goddamn Alpha Flight, New Mutants, X-Factor) with the bonus of all the Secret Wars 1&2 and Crisis on Infinite Earth bullshit.

although hidden deep within is some gold like my Phoenix-era X-Men, Frank Miller Daredevils and the complete US Eagle Judge Dredd/2000AD reprints (need to get those, Nemesis rules).

I feel like this is a good start for another thread.

Comics in every box of comics everywhere

I guess I was kinda lucky in that the Finnish editions of Marvel superhero comics were generally running 2-5 years late compared to original American books. (Plus the Finnish publisher for Marvel often released earlier classic stories in various anthology titles.) So even though I only started reading superhero comics during the latter half of the 80s, I got to read stuff like Claremont/Smith and Claremont/Romita X-Men, Roger Stern’s Spider-Man, Miller’s and Nocenti’s Daredevil, etc. By the time the Finnish comics got to stuff by Jim Lee/Liefeld/etc, i.e. the ”dark age” of superhero comics, I’d moved on to Sandman, Corto Maltese and other "mature" stuff, and had mostly given up superheroes. I think Claremont’s last issue of X-Men was one of the last superhero comics I read, until I returned to them in the 00s. So I managed to miss the dark age and the speculation boom almost completely.

(ok, i have this as a stuck bookmark, possibly becasue of a deleted spam message. just bumping this thread to see if that makes the problem go away. pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)