Collecting advice

There are more online sources of information about comic collecting and speculation than ever, and that is particularly true of vloggers, most of whom publish regularly on YouTube, as well as social media such as Facebook and Instagram. I personally prefer to refer to them as vloggers rather than "influencers" as I think it's more accurate. They certainly do wield an amount of influence, but to me they are commentators on a subject, publishing regularly on that subject, rather than being celebrities providing endorsement to a product to influence their followers. Vlog posts can be a great source of information,...

Pricing is obviously an important topic to most collectors - nobody wants to overpay for something, and rare, sought-after comic books can be quite expensive. Today's collecting marketplace is also very speculation driven - prices to books that are designated "keys" can rise rapidly, and while nobody wants to be left behind, it's also important not to get carried away by Fear of Missing Out. The "market price" is obviously a moving target, and is really only dictated by what somebody is willing to pay for something today. That said, historical price guides can be extremely useful in terms of benchmarking...

The topic of whether people are collecting or speculating can get heated very quickly in certain areas of the community. While "speculating" is often characterised as a slightly grubby, obnoxious, commercial activity, that is solely motivated by the chance of creating financial gain, "collecting" is often described with more romantic notions, as if it were somehow a more noble pursuit, motivated by pure affection for comics. The reality for most people is that they combine elements of the two. There are people who buy comics purely out of love for the story and characters, without any interest in what might...

We started putting together a page of recommended resources for comic collectors - particularly for people who are new to the hobby, or coming back to it after some time - but it quickly grew beyond our control so we thought we'd put it together as an ongoing blog instead of trying to fit it all into a single page! Over the past decade there's been a huge boom in sources of information about the collectibles market - which was also accelerated by the Covid lockdown, as well as the growth in YouTube vloggers. As a result, there are a lot of...