The comics category on Ebay is a very strange land. Go there, and you'll see brand new comics, even some that aren't even out on the stands yet, listed with the starting bid above cover price. Brand new book. One that you could go to a comic book store and pick up for cover price. One has to wonder if the seller is on crack, or if they're just expecting to prey on a buyer that is. I mean, really... who wants to pay $4.95+shipping for the latest issue of Brian Bendis's Avengers? To be quite honest, I don't even want to pay cover price for that, which is why I'm on Ebay in the first place.
The truly bizarre thing is that, while people are listing brand those brand new comics at inflated prices, they're practically giving away back issues, comparatively speaking. I decided to concentrate my search on late 1970s to late 1980s stuff, paying particular attention to the Marvel Universe of that era. This has totally paid off for me. By concentrating on that era, and only bidding on complete lots of 20 or more books, I've been able to scoop up some good reading for anywhere between 11 to 75 cents an issue. For example, I recently got Fantastic Four #147-222 for around 25 bucks, and followed that up with a fifty issue run (#49-99 in case you're interested) of Marvel Team-Up for $11.25. Hours and hours of classic Marvel stories, purchased (in these two cases) for less than cover price. In the past month, I've bought a total of 216 comics for under a hundred bucks, and that's including shipping.
To me, it's kind'a like hitting the quarter boxes at the local comic book store, only here you can find a complete run of books, and here you can conduct your search from home, or even better at work when you're bored out of your mind. The average Quark Monkey can spend upwards of about six hours a day on Ebay on some days, plenty of time to dig through all the active auctions for that rare run of Power Man and Iron Fist from 1985. The only problem is that some of this stuff is so cheap that I've found myself bidding on comics that I really wouldn't buy if I was in my right mind. For example, Sunday night I bid on 30 issues of Dazzler... and won. Now, I'm not a huge Dazzler fan, but I saw that someone was gonna get these books for like, seven bucks, and I just couldn't help myself but put in a token bid of my own. Before I could stop myself, I had put in a maximum bid of nine bucks, figuring I'd be outbid before the end of the auction. Within seconds I was staring at a screen that said "congratulations, you are the high bidder!" Ten minutes later, I was staring blankly at the monitor, realizing what I had just done.
I'd bought a bunch of Dazzler comics. I don't remember much about Dazzler, but the one thing I do remember about it was that it sucked. And now, I was about to be the owner of 30 issues of this thing. At least I got 'em cheap.
Ah nostalgia. I think from now on I'm gonna stick with Power Man and Iron Fist. Maybe Rom.
posted by Dale Ingram @ 2:55 PM
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