 Welcome back to our Come Again Beginners Guide series where we dive deep into the world of collecting and tell you everything you need to know to get started with your collections. And as always, if you enjoy this video, make sure to subscribe for more content. Also hit the like button and give us a thumbs up and leave your comments below. Hey guys, welcome back to Come Again. Right now we're getting ready to go over a Beginners Guide to comic book collecting. Yes. A lot of people don't come into the store, they'll want to sell their comics here, which is fine. I always encourage that. I also encourage donations. But they want, they already have a price in mind, which again is okay, but typically it's the price they see on eBay. And it's, you can't really go about eBay prices. And if they don't... There's a sandwich on eBay that looked like Elvis Presley that sold for like a thousand dollars or something like that. Right. Or they have a stack of old books that they think are worth something. They don't do research. They come in, they can, oh, these are old. These are worth money. And a lot of times you want to go grab Archie up there, it has no cover, or the junk in it behind it works too. So they'll bring in old books. And a lot of times, now they'll look like this. You can see the cover is really, it's not there, but it's old. So it must be worth some money. Right. So in the back, definitely show in the back. Yeah. So not necessarily the case. A lot of times I'll get books like this or books like this, for instance, which isn't necessarily in bad shape. But it's not going to be worth $20, $100, $50. In case this was $3. So research is kind of key. Knowing what to look for is also key. So let's start with this one. Since it's well, I'll tell you what, what I'm going to do when you bring me your books. This and I always walk the customers through this. This is what you look for. I'm going to open this up. Okay. So this book, not really too bad shape. Okay. So the first thing I'm going to look at when I take you and look at your book, I'm going to ask you if I can remove it from the back and forward if it has one. I do this so I can actually look at the old book and you notice how I'm handling it. Okay. I'm not taking it. I'm not handling it like this and I flip it around like that. You know, I'm not doing any of that. So I'm handling it very carefully. Very delicately. So the things you're going to want to, I look for first off, I look for the corners here. The typically the sharper the corners, the better. Front and back. Look at the bottom here. I look for creases in the spine. And if you flip it over, if it's been read a lot, you're going to have a long white line along the edges of the spine. Like this here. Exactly. That means it's been read a lot. It's been opened a lot. It's been flattened out most likely. Yeah. That's how you get the white line is mainly when they flatten it out. Because if you keep it like this, it doesn't really get that too often. Here's how I typically read it. And I always encourage you to read in a comic book. I don't open the comic all the way. And again, comics, and I will say this till the day I die, comics are meant to be read. Okay. But if you're a collector, this is kind of how you want to handle them a bit. If you're a real hardcore collector, you have to wear gloves. But I'm not that kind of collector. I keep them in as best shape as possible, which is why I always keep them in a bag on board. But if I want to read them, I'm going to take them out and I'm going to read them. I'm not going to worry about gloves. But gloves are an option. So now you're going to want to open the book. And you want to see how white the pages are. And you can see these pages are actually kind of white. They're pretty good shape. See if there's any coupons taken out. So a lot of times though, you're going to get pages that aren't so white. And that's just because of age. Also, you can see the edges are, you know, something else to keep in mind. If you're in a home, a smoker's home, it's this book, it smells like smoke. I'm not taking it. Collectors don't like their kind of books smelling like tobacco. So kind of, you know, kind of a downside being a smoker really in the smoker's house, unfortunately. Sometimes you'll get comic books. I've seen this a lot. They'll have creases right here because the pages have been folded. Pages inside will have the same crease because, you know, you got people who write them and they want to mark their page. And another thing to look for is on the cover specifically on the back cover is a lot of times the older comics won't have boards and sometimes people double up comics. Don't do that. And the ink will actually leave an impression like with this board here. I don't know if you can see through the plastic or not. It is good to maybe every 10 years or so, switch out your boards. Right. It's kind of yellowish. Yeah. Some of my older comics I can actually make out exactly. Yeah. Now it doesn't really damage that comic so much. It's just pretty much the board. Something else, like this comic here is worth $3. I go on comicscomicpricedguide.com and there is a rating scale there. Once you get good at looking over comics and everything, you can kind of get an idea of the grading scale. If you don't know numbers, you know, it has mint condition, you're mint, fine, good, poor, any good idea. This would be considered poor, very poor. I would, well I've seen some, there's like, there's poor and then there's bad and very bad. On a point scale, this would be a .05, you know. So on that scale it'd be worth like maybe three cents, five cents. Typically books like this with covers hanging off. If on the, on that scale, it's not worth at least two or three dollars, I throw it in the freebie bin. I have a roll rag with some free comics on it. They're in that kind of a condition. So open door covers, pages hanging off. This page, this isn't even connected. It's just, so this book again wouldn't even be, you know, worth a dollar. I used to have some comics like that. I still do. I have a Morbius comic book like this. It's like issue two. It's always why I haven't gotten rid of it. So, so that's condition-wise. I don't think I'm really missing anything. It's pretty, going over the basics here. So that's what you're looking for, condition-wise. Let's go over something real quick. Now we didn't mention, we did mention the crease and the spining. Now other than that, this comic here is still in pretty good condition other than maybe the very bottom where you can see it's been pulled in and out of the bottom, top and bottom. A little bit worn. You can tell it's been in and out of either a plastic bag or a cardboard box. Or it could have been somewhere sticky. Yeah. But other than that, it's not in very bad condition. I would say this would probably be good condition. Good or on the scale four. Scale four or five. Now a mint comic. Sharp edges, nowhere along the binding. Almost, almost off the price. Right. And those are the ones that tend to be worth a little more. Now the books that you're, if you're looking, as if you're a collector, the books, and if you want to bring in your comics to comics, to really look for. Comics from the 60s to I'd say early, maybe middle 80s. After that, comic books kind of, they're just not worth as much as you would think. And like here, see, some comics have the staples. Some even have the staples in the bindings. Yeah. See this, the staples are almost pulled out of there. So this would probably be poor. And the spine is bent. Right. I would, well, let's see, if it's still attached. I think it is. It is. It's very attached. It's still very readable. But as you can see, the comic itself is just, it's dirty. It wasn't taken care of. It's been probably sitting in somebody's box. You can see the pages here. If it did have plastic, it was probably doubled up. Bagging, bag imported, I probably would grade this as three, because it is still very readable, so collectible. The pages you can see are actually yellowed. So probably also gave it smoking home. Definitely came from smoking home. With comics that are old like this, it is very difficult to find a comic that doesn't have some color discoloration in the pages. Yeah. Because back then they used a different type of paper than paper. They didn't use the high gloss paper that we get today. No. This was basically newspaper paper that they used. Pretty much. And even different inks that used on this. And books like this now that I would consider a three. I would look on the grading scale. I say, okay, Captain Barbell should 43. I graded a three. Oh, it's worth less than a dollar, but it's still in pretty decent shape. I'll put it at in the dollar box. So I won't waste bag and boards on it just because the bag and boards together right. So so pretty much the basics as far as condition. Next we'll go over what kind of comics to start collecting if you're a beginner. Stay tuned. So we just went over the basics of what to look for conditions. If you have any questions about that, please feel free to comment, message, you know. So now what kind of right, what to get started with. My brother just recently got into comments after years of watching the movies in the TV series. He decided he wanted to get into it. He didn't know where to start. So obviously right off the bat, he decided to get into DC Universe Rebirth, which isn't a bad place to start. No, they just started rebranding the books again. So but say, okay, say for instance, you've never seen any movies, okay, you're straight away too much pipe, you're not into it. Maybe you're just not a fan of movies. Your best bet is what do you like when I say that? I mean, are you a smart Alec? If you are dead cool would be the way to go. Dead Spider-Man, Iron Man, Constantine. Are you somebody who likes Crosshole or somebody who likes to see a bunch of superheroes together? Then you got Avengers Justice League, Brave and the Bold, Teen Titans, Brave and the Bold. If you guys don't know Brave and the Bold started out as a Batman team up. But it kind of raged out into any two superheroes. Right, Batman is eventually moving away from the Justice League and making his own team. My suggestion to you is go to your local comic book shop and ask the guy, hey, what's selling? What's hot? And maybe by one issue of his suggestion, oh, hey, I like the way this guy looks. Honestly, I started by, oh, this is a cool cover. I'll check this out. Covers gets a lot of people into comic books. I knew nothing about Spider-Man when I started collecting. Spider-Man, the Fox, Spider-Man cartoon hadn't yet come out when I started collecting. It is a black cover Batman. A lot of people would probably be directed towards this simply because just like Metallica's black label. Yeah, that's what it looks like. Metallica's black label. You can see that there's still a cover there. There's still embroidered pictures and everything like that on there. It's just this pretty much a solid black. It looks cool. Again, again, why is somebody holding a gun to Batman's head? You want to know. A good way to do that. Pick up the issue, open it up. Another one that I saw this last week, I thought it would be good. I thought about buying it myself. It's not a very expensive comic, but you have the Sons of Batman and Superman. I thought that was kind of cool. Hold that one up. So here's one that depicts the classic 90s X-Men team. They're on their way to battle. This is one of those type of covers that had multiple covers that you can put together. Can I open this up and show them? No, it doesn't have the whole picture. Oh, I didn't? I know one of mine had the whole thing. Yeah, that's just one of those. And this is cool because this cover, there are like I think four or five different issue ones with different covers and you can piece them together to form a wine picture. So that could be your starting to collecting comics. Another way to get started would be to go with start out with the pulp comics and see if you like that kind of direction. Yeah. Pulp comics would be something like say the Green Hornet and Cato where the heroes carried guns, the phantom, the shadow. Maybe you're starting really late in life and you're like, you know, I remember listening to Green Hornet radio or watching the Green Hornet TV series. I wonder are there any comic books of those? There are Green Hornet. There is. Or if you grew up watching Westerns, there are Western books we have. Well, if you're a kid of the 80s and you liked G.I. Joe or Transformers, there are comics of those. So most kids in the 90s really got into the maximum carnage from Spider-Man. Yeah. They got into the clone saga from Spider-Man. Again, covers is a huge, huge thing. So if a certain cover catches your eye, like, you know, there's a hero but the villain looks really cool. He looks super cool. I'm going to check out his story. So you grab that issue and you start. Or you could even get into comic book adaptations of the movies. Right. Which here we have X-Men the Movie, the comic book adaptation, which is one of how I got into really deep into comics. Yes. A lot of my first comics were movie adaptations. Like I have a customer just came in looking for any comics based on the mask from the movie. There were two issues of that from Dark Horse Comics. I actually have those. Star Trek, I think Star Trek 4. I have that adaptation. I've got Superman 4, The Quest for Peace, Don't Judge. So one thing I highly recommend when starting off in comics is getting one of the trade paperbacks. A trade paperback, what a trade paperback is, is... Then it can be pricey, but yeah. It's an entire collection of stories from a certain series like this one. Is this Tower of Babel? No, no. Is this just? It's just volume three. Okay. Actually, the story might actually be... See, certain books don't always tell you what the storyline is, but they'll usually tell you what issues are in here. Like this one collects issues, JLA issues 18 through 31. There you go. And this would be a... This looks like it would probably be a late 90s, early 2000s story, right? Oh, yeah. Well, I know. And usually on the first, either on the inside of the cover. The copyright page. Or the second page. Yeah. Well, this collected came out in 2012, but those issues, issue 18 through 31 came out in 98 and 99. So, but the collected here came out in 2012. And a good way for DC Comics, for Justice League, a good way to tell what year the Justice League comic came out is take a look at Aquaman and Green Lantern. Let me show you. The mid to late 90s had a thing. They redesigned most of their heroes. Green Lantern was a completely different person. Kyle Rainer, he had a completely different uniform than what we were used to. Aquaman, he had a hook hand. He got rid of the orange shirt. Yeah. Became more barbarian-esque. Almost, yeah. More warlike. And also Flash. This is the Wally West Flash. I've mentioned this a few times in other videos. Yeah. And how you know it's the Wally West Flash is Barry had a solid lightning bolt running from side to side, going across his belt line. And he had the, did he have the lightning bolt ears, right? I think so, yeah. Whereas Wally has more of the wing ear pieces and he's got more of the double bolt things coming to a connection in the middle. Multiple ways that you can get into comics. Again, if you're not sure what you like, if you're just, you know, all the cover looks cool, but I'm just not sure, ask your local comic book shop guy. He can tell you exactly what's hot, what's not. He may even have some choices he likes that he could try passing on to you. Which right now I'm starting to get into, and I recommended this to my brother, Project Superpowers from Dynamite Comics. Very good series. It focuses on a lot of the golden and silver age heroes that kind of fell off the face of the earth. Silverstar, who isn't part of Project Superpowers, but he's in Dynamite Comics, one of Jack Kirby's lost characters. Right. There's even a character called Dare Devil, or the Dare Devil. I know. He's the Death Defined Devil. No, the Death Defined. And Shannon just bought a comic. The Death Defined Devil. He doesn't talk much. He's kind of a mysterious character in the comics, dressed in red and black, kind of like two face almost. Yeah. Mine, for instance, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, Wolverine. I love Dr. Strange even before the movie's done. She-Hulk. See, that's something else, too. Shannon agrees. Even if you've heard of these characters, like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Green Lantern, maybe some of the characters you haven't heard of, like She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, Hawking Dove, Blue Beetle, Booster Goal. Some of these are even really cool characters that you might be interested in. People just don't really give them a chance because they're familiar with the more... They're not, you know, alien characters. Right. And like Invincible, I remember when this character first came out, they did, Image did a digital comic that you could read on their website of his first issue before they released it. And it was actually really good. He got his name kind of like in the Spider-Man movie where Aunt May says, you're not Superman, you know, and Peter just kind of looks at her like... There was that kind of a moment. There was that moment where his principal tells him, you're not Invincible, you know, and he's like... Hey, hey, Invincible, yeah. But he's a very popular character right now, so... So, I mean, that's really... I mean, we can keep talking about, you know, who we like and what we think you should like, but definitely, you know, go check, you know, go look for yourself. And make sure when you buy comics, always put them in bags and boards. Don't just bag it, make sure it's bags and boards. Because even though you intend on reading them, it's always still good to keep them in good condition. You can get them to read them, you can get them to say, okay, I'm never going to open this, I'm never going to read it. I want to want to save it because it might be worth something someday. And that's the case by two. Because again, comic books are meant to be bad. By two, by one to read, by one to save. Now, let's talk a little bit about the crash of the comic book, you know. So, there's two. There were two crashes here. We had the early, like, 50s, 60s, I think it was 40s. From 40s, 60s, and 60s, comic books like Superman were big, of course Wonder Woman, Batman, Marvel hadn't really come out of heaven to have established themselves here. And those comics are probably the most valuable because at that time there was World War II going on. Well, there's other reasons besides that. Because you also had another comic called AC Comics. AC Comics was known for comic books called Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror. I mean, these really gritty, gruesome horror comics. There was a gentleman who created a book called Subduction of the Innocent, who pointed out that, you know, these are books are corrupting the youth. So a lot of these parents read this book and they burned and threw away a lot of comics, which is why issues like Superman and Action Comics, Batman and Action Comics, the first appearances are worth so much. Exactly. And then that was kind of the first comic book crash right there. The second one came in the 90s. With the death of Superman. The death of Superman was announced and it was such a big deal. Even though he had actually died a few times before that. Yeah, kind of unceremonious. This was more of a, you know, this was advertised as the official final, you know, which we knew that wasn't going to be, you know, and this was my first big comic book event. Mine too. So, you know, I was super excited. What happened was DC had printed up so many copies of the death of Superman. Comic book stores were literally getting like full truckloads of just that one book, just that one issue, not including all the other, you know, comics that they had ordered. And that brings me to another point on how to grade your comics. First edition, second edition. First printing. Yeah, first printing. Now here's the thing, getting him into the death of Superman, just because that is a key issue, doesn't make it worth money. Right. It was in the day when they were selling out, but now what makes the comic death of Superman is a dime a dozen. Yeah, you can pick that up, bagged or unbagged. There were multiple prints. I think there were like five, at least five printings of the four or five printings of that issue. So it's so easy to come by. And what happened was so many people said, oh, Superman's dying. So they bought up literally a stack of thinking later on out in the row. They were like, we work so much money. And is that still filming? Yeah. Okay. They thought they were going to work so much money. And I get people coming in here, they're like, I have the first, you know, the death of Superman. And I hate to tell them that a lot of times, and how you books weren't anywhere from three to $18 most of the time. And how you can tell if it is a first printing, second printing or whatever, is for, let's say this was the death of Superman, there'd be a Roman numeral, like I've got a fourth printing at home. So there'd be a Roman numeral for IV right here next under the number of that particular issue. Now, they don't really do that anymore. So what they would do now to check is you can you walk up the copyright pages are a little tricky to find at times because it's either on the back of the cover, or it's on like the first one of the first three pages, you want to look at the copyright. Now it's going to say somewhere in here, whether it's first printing, second printing. Now if you don't see the words first printing, or second printing, then chances are that it is a first print. It will say first print, second print, third print. And also issue number ones are done as well. Yo, yeah. Of what? Anything. Not really. You find me a Superman number one. True. Well, it depends on which super new 52 superman number one. You find me the originals of the superman number one or maybe spider man number one. So yeah, but just because it says issue number one does not make it worth money. I had a book in here and I also recommend reading by the way, it's called Mort the Dead Teenager. I read it by the way, it's hilarious. But this book, nobody's ever heard of Mort the Dead Teenager. It was done by Marvel in 1993, I believe. Nobody's heard of this. And case in point, it was a four issue miniseries and it bombed big time. So that book, you bring that in number one, it's a number one issue. Guess what? That book is worth maybe a buck. What you really want to look for is key issues like this one. This would be the first appearance of Tim Drake outside of the Robin costume, correct? I think so. This is one of the first appearance. This is one of the books. It's kind of a key issue. It's Tim Drake, the second Robin. No, he's the third Robin. Third Robin. That's something else too, you'll learn. A lot of different people have portrayed a lot of known characters. There's been a couple of Batman. There's been a multiple Robins. There's been a few different Spider-Man. And something that can take a very popular, very expensive comic and make it plummet is if that comic featured the death of a character in it and then they bring that character back to life, that comic no longer is no longer worth much. No, not as much as it was. Right. It's still considered a key issue. Case in point, the death of Jason Todd and the death of the family storyline of Batman, it's still a fairly appreciation. I've had it in here a few times, but it would have been even more had it been in better condition and had they not brought the character back a decade later. And the reason it's still a very an expensive issue is because it's a key issue. It actually it's what that base that character is based around now. Yeah. Again, if you will go on commaspricecar.com and go to the site, you'll have to sign up. It's free. Once you sign up, you can look up multiple books, many of you want without, you know, being a member. Excuse me. If it's a key issue, it'll actually tell you if it's a key issue or not and why it's a key issue. So it's the first thing the character will say push the parents off. And something else I want to mention real quick, kind of comic book related, kind of not is action figures. If you're getting into collecting action figures, this is another thing you need to look for. This should be another episode. We'll kind of action figure hints at it here. But Sherlock, you wouldn't think it'd be too expensive. And he's got a $50 price tag on it. Now this figure normally goes from 20 bucks. This was a Toys R Us. However, the packaging he was packaged and he didn't open the package. Packaged upside down. So that's what's what makes them more valuable. I've had figures with pain apps that were supposed to be included but not. I've had figures with two left arms attached and set up a one left and one right. Stephanie McMahon, which has no pain in underwear on. That my WWF heat action figure that I have here in store was painted with no underwear on. Yes, he did say WWF because it came out before WWE logo. Don't ask how I had to figure that out. Let's just say I got caught by a lot more employees looking up stuff in a dress. But those them in that figure. One of the reasons why that figure is unique is because not only was it a paint app mistake, like she didn't have underwear painted under a skirt, it was recalled because most of these figures, they're not recalled. They're just sent out and okay stop production until we fix it, fix it and send more out. This one was actually recalled. Do you think she was probably a little embarrassed when she heard about that? I think she was scanned that way. I actually hear she's a really nice person in real life. She was a very gorgeous woman when she first debuted in WWF. She still was. The attitude kind of makes that plummet. Yeah, I mean, that's not real. It's kind of hard not to look at her and not see that attitude. And again, these are things that I will be discussing on my new live podcast. I'll be appearing on Facebook here probably next month. I'll shoot for this month, probably next month. I'm looking for a new co-host. Shannon doesn't watch wrestling if he would be joining. But yeah, we're going over Raw, SmackDown, we're going over 205 Live, NXT, hopefully Ring of Honor at TNA. The Pay Per Views. Pay Per Views. So I mean, check it out. The title of the show is The Pit. So it will take place probably, I think, on Thursdays. We're shooting for it to a car. So I'll be live, Facebook Exclusive. So hit me up. All right, we'll be back next week with some more comic getting. Have fun guys. 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