But then when you are buying singles at say P150 or P200 each issue, then the singles often end up costing you more. Collected editions and TPBs will go for between P400 and P800 for 4 to 8 issues or so, give or take. This is all to say that if you plan to collect comic books, you really have to love them. Much to the consternation of my collector’s soul, I quit collecting titles in the middle of story arcs. I obviously had to quit that, and I did it cold turkey. Which is to say that about 70% of my salary was going to maintaining the habit. Especially when you’re like me trying to sustain this, among many other cultural vices and collector addictions, on a teacher’s salary.Ī few years ago, when I was making a little more money than I do now, I had a pull list that had me spending something near one to two thousand bucks a week. What makes the experience difficult to sustain though is obviously the costs.
I also enjoy going to the comic book store every week and checking the pull lists.
Part of the experience of the medium is waiting a month or so before seeing where the story goes. Consider that comic books, at least mainstream American comics, are a serialized medium. We do lose something with collected editions though. A lot of people (myself included) are taking up this option because it is cheaper. Furthering the trouble is that comic book sales have dropped drastically since when I started collecting.Įven with the current popularity of superheroes, the bigs Marvel and DC have yet to capitalize and translate these into vibrant book sales.Īnd while collections and graphic novels give people a chance to catch up, they are also giving people the option to wait around. While there are still a number of Variant Editions that get released, and these have big price tags to go with them, in general the public has called BS on the comics industry and their unrealistic gaming of the market by creating scarcity. Then I had to migrate, needing to leave most of my comics behind (and the pain of that separation was something else), the bubble burst, and most comics dropped in resale value. I thought that I was sitting on a goldmine. I was in junior high school at the time, and I amassed all these DC Zero Hour books, the entire Death of Superman, Breaking of the Bat, and all these other storylines with hologram covers and other snazzy embellishments, and most of the number ones of Valiant and Image. I was under the misguided belief that if I invested and collected and traded the right comics, I might be able to put myself through college. MANILA, Philippines – I began collecting comics during the big bubble of the ’90s.