Does it cost alot to have old comic books?

Question

Does it cost alot to have old comic books graded or rated ?
My son-in-law has tons from his youth and is trying to find out. He is wanting to sell them.

I would say 85% of what he has is in great condition. No tares, marks, or folded pages.

He has some in the 50's and 60's as well.
printed dates that is.

Answer 1

First off define you must define the ages of the books. Speculation and multiple printing began in the late 1970's, the earlier you get from let's say 1979 the less comics there are that survived in general. The later the more books of that type are on the market. There was a glut in the late 1980's of black and white titles hoping to cash in on the Ninja turtles. In the 1990s there was a glut of gimmick covers.

Now fan interest (a coming movie or a character that is hot) might drive select books up form these periods but that is the exception not the rule.

You can buy a price guide and take some time to do it that way. Note: price guides are what fellow fans would pay, not what a dealer will pay as he will generally sell them at guide so he/she needs to buy them lower.

Another way that is kinda quicker would be to go to ebay. Type in a comic i.e. Spider-Man #45 and look at closed auctions to see what the final bidding price was.

Now selling them is another demon.

If you have a lot of older stuff it might make more sense to sell it book by book, but this takes time. You can use ebay for this.

Another way is to sell them by the lot. Group all the Superman comics together for example. This way you don't get cherry picked, where somebody buys all the cream leaving you the hard to move pits.

You could sell the collection as one lot. But it is a pain to ship and you gotta do your home work, how much is postage, you can take a beating if you don't do it right.

Other ways would be to take a table at a convention and blow them out, have a dealer sell them on consignment or look in the guide for dealers who buy whole collections at one swoop. Good luck.

Answer 2

Golden Age/Siver Age/Bronze Age/Modern Age... the mantra of the grader.

The older the book, the higher the cost to grade it. This is probably due to the care that must be taken to not damage the book while checking it.

Modern age books cost around $20 to grade at CGC, plus shipping. Older titles cost more, on a tier pricing chart. They do have a website.

As usual, the more money the book is work in Overstreet before having it graded and sealed the better reason to pay the premium. Not all older comics are worth a lot... now, anyway. Some might indeed blow up in price simply due to age over a period of time.

Good luck!

Answer 3

is collecting your goal? when i was a kid (i'm old now), i used to hit garage sales and buy tons of them dirt cheap. nowadays there's Ebay and stuff. if your just wanting to read, Marvel comics has 1000's of digital comics now and for around $60 a year, you can read an unlimited amount. (that includes a lot of the older comics too, like the first issues of the fantastic four, thor, ironman, silver surfer). hope this helps.

Answer 4

That depens on how old it is, like 1980 comics and 1970 comics made back then.

Answer 5

Well they do cost at least $39 to get it CGC'd and at least $20 to get them graded by PGX----so depending on what titles you have-it might be a great ides to get a few graded.

buy an OVERSTREET Price Guide and do some research yourself!

Answer 6

It depends.. Some are favourited,some are not..