GIDATS4978's Comic Book Blogs

The Comic-Book industry should learn from the Trading Card industry.  If you flood the market with too much product, then the product will be worthless to collectors in the end. 

Baseball cards in particular used to have one (Topps) company for years.  Granted, there was no variety or competition but those cards from those years are extremely rare and valuable. 

Fast forward to the 90's and there were more companies producing cards.  To make profit (and to "One-Up each other"), they inundated the market with gimmicks.  Holograms, Foil-cards, Signed cards, Cards with game-worn jerseys on them (supposedly).  Those gimmicky cards started out collectible but once they all started doing it the market dried up.  The trading-card industry is now virtually non-existent to collectors from that era. 

Comic-Books in the 90's did the same.  Too many titles, Variant covers, Foil covers, Holograms, Polybags (HELLO...Superman #75) etc.  And the print-runs on all of those comics were incredible.  Most (I would say 85-90%) of comics from that era are virtually worthless now!  Comics of the 90's have not retained their value in the current market.  Print-runs of hundreds of thousands (or, in several prominent cases, over ten MILLION!!!) copies produced of certain issues.  The value of these comics has all but disappeared. "Hot" comics like X-Men #1 (5 different covers for the same book) and Youngblood #1 (huge print-run) can now be found selling for under $1.  The cover-price of those books were $2.50 for Youngblood and $1.50 for X-Men.  You do the math!

How much money did collectors and the average person looking to read a quality comic-book lose throughout the years on gimmicky comic-books?

I recently found New Mutants #87 and #98 in my collection.  Sure, I was excited, but then I realized why those issues were valuable.  New Mutants was not a huge title.  It was the forgotten X-Men title.  Marvel didn't produce a huge number of those issues.  And they didn't fall into the gimmicks on those.  Hence, their current value.

Comic-books should be collected, read and enjoyed!  Don't put them in a polybag where if they are opened they become worthless (but if you leave them in the bag it destroys the comic because it's not acid-free).  Don't produce 15 versions of the same exact comic with different covers.  Concentrate on the story and the artwork and enjoy doing it again.

We now have some of the most creative minds in the history of comics!  Creators who should be given the chance to concentrate on their work.  Creators who can put out quality over quantity. 

Let's make comic-books great again!