I’m not sure what I was looking for on Craigslist. . . I have a number of hobbies that take me there from time to time. Unfortunately for the most part Craigslist has been a series of ‘I’m sorry it just sold before you called’ experiences for me.
This week was different though. Whatever I was searching for lead me to a bit of an oddly posted ad that included a coin-operated Fortune Teller. I love coin-op stuff, and I love fortune tellers so I contacted the seller. One thing after another and I found myself in a suburb far away from my normal ‘stomping ground.’ I left the seller’s house with ‘Destiny’ in the back of my car already excited from an successful day. Samantha (my GPS for the uninitiated) was all warmed up from guiding me to the sellers home so I asked her about comic shops in her lovely ‘points of interest’ directory.
Rick’s Comics was only about two miles away and sort of in the direction I was heading so I asked Samantha to show me the way to Rick’s. She dutifully complied leading me through some areas I wasn’t quite sure I should be driving through, but I made it just fine. As I approached the building I saw a rack of trading cards out on the street with some newish Garbage Pail Kids on the rack so I had some hope that it would be another fruitful stop for me. As the door opened I was greeted with literally stacks of comics, cards, action figures and all the related materials you can think of stacked 10-15 feet high forming a bit of a maze through this treasure trove of a shop. A boisterous voice boomed across the room at me “Hi! How long has it been since you’ve been here?” He asked. I stood, a bit stunned, trying to take it all in before processing what he asked and responded “Uh. . . I’ve never been here before.” My eyes scanned stacks and piles looking for tell tale signs of cards, and they were everywhere. It was like new product had been getting stacked on top of old product for the last 15 years. There were stacks of 5000 count boxes of cards in the back of the room, stacks of 3000 count boxes by the door. A shelf of binders, random boxes stacked on top of and under various things throughout the store, random packs on display taped to the wall, packs of Don Maitz cards on top of comic boxes, boxes of Wayne Barlowe cards on top of a shelf of busts, packs of Disney cards under a rack of comics and books, a tin of Plasm cards, boxes of Women of Marvel tucked in here and there, and on and on and on. It literally would take someone hours, if not days to go through everything in Rick’s shop, and according to the boisterous fellow (Rick? — I’m gonna call him Rick) there is a warehouse where they have even more cards, comics and who-knows-what else.
Rick was exceptionally friendly, in that stereotypical ‘Chicago Guy’ fashion. He was very interested in talking about the hobby, but less interested in digging through boxes to find cards. That’s not to say he didn’t grab various things and show them to me, but by his own admission the monster boxes and shelves were in no particular order. The pricing on most things was pretty much on the fly — most packs were marked $3-$3.50 regardless of age or desirability, the Daredevil box was $65, and Women of Marvel boxes were $90. Rick seemed pretty willing to work on prices for most things and I spied what looked like most of a box of Iron Man. It was marked $4 a pack, and there were 23 packs in the box. . . plus there was a pack taped to the wall making a full box of packs. I had been considering picking up a some Iron Man since I really enjoyed the movie so I asked about the price, and he said he could sell them for $2 a pack. I realize that $48 for a box worth of packs of Iron Man isn’t exactly a spectacular deal, but I had the itch to open something so I pulled the trigger. Once I decided to buy the Iron Man another patron came into the shop and I literally stood there while Rick and this guy had thirty minute conversation about the Watchmen. Various other collectors walked in and walked out. . . some waited to be able to get a word into the conversation to ask a question, but most simply waited a few minutes and walked out. At this point I had been in the shop for well over an hour and didn’t want to walk out empty handed, so I waited for my opportunity and told him I wanted the Iron Man cards.
I was tempted to buy some other packs in addition to the Iron Man, but I’m always leery of buying packs at new shops so I only bought the Iron Man. As I jumped in the card and set Samantha on a course for home I ran through the best cards in the set, and felt that the best pull for me would be Jeff Bridges. Downey Jr. is cool, and more expensive, but Bridges would be my #1 pick out of the set, at the same time I was keenly aware I may have just spent $50 on cherry picked packs. The first stoplight I grabbed a pack and cracked it open to find a costume card — nothing special, but it told me the box mostly likely wasn’t cherry picked. Over the course of the long drive home I grabbed packs when I could (yes I opened packs while driving — sorry mom). Then, about three-quarters of the way through the packs, I looked down to see Jeff Bridges staring me in the face. It was almost like a dream. At first I didn’t realize I had actually pulled Jeff Bridges’ autograph. Looking back I think it was The Big Lebowski rewarding me for waiting patiently for Rick to tell his stories to me and other folks in the shop. The Dude abides, and apparently awards others for abiding as well.
Happy Collecting!
Jon
Unfortunately I’ve seen similar sell offs in the past. . . FPG, Sportstime and several small manufacturers liquidated in the 90s. . . which was also a time when companies like Comic Images had been known to ‘dump’ product directly on the market. What happens at the end of the day? Some products recover, some partially recover and the rest never recover.
The question is how to you survive. . . It certainly will be ugly to watch the prices of the cards you may have fall in value. . . perhaps they’ll recover in price, but perhaps not. . . You can collect some solace in the fact that there is a good chance deals will be out there to be had. . . Unfortunately it’s impossible right now to know what a ‘deal’ is. . . The cards I bought for $20 might be relisted in a few weeks for $15, or $10, or even $5. . . that all depends on how many need to be absorbed back into the hobby — the seller might have hundreds of these that they’ll be selling for the next few years, or they might run out of them after they sell the next 6 they have listed . . . Without knowledge of what exactly is coming it’s impossible to know what to expect. You could ask sellers how many they have for sale, although you may not get an answer, and of course you can watch auctions for specific information — like the seller of the Iler autograph stating there were 340 signed — he won’t run out of those for a VERY long time. The only thing you can do in a case like this is make sure you are buying cards at a price you are happy with, and try to enjoy the ride.
As for gems popping up on the secondary market from the Inkworks vault. . . a new Sopranos autograph Robert Iler as Anthony Soprano Jr has already shown up on eBay with a host of other long out of print Inkworks autographs that have recently been uncommon on the auction site. Certainly the Iler autograph won’t be the first ‘new’ card to pop up, and given that Inkworks was superior at redeeming expired redemption cards it seems likely that many older, long out of print and previously hard to find chase cards will make their way into collectors hands in new waves. What this means for the secondary market remains unseen, and ultimately depends on the quantity of product that will be unleashed to the collecting community and how it happens. If sellers wind up with massive amount of product the prices for these cards may never recover in secondary market value: case in point Sportstime’s Baywatch autographs. However other liquidations of cards have gone smoothly with little lasting impact on the secondary market: Fleer’s Wild Wild West Salma Hayek. At the end of the day, personally, I don’t mind if the prices fall. . . that just means I get to add more cards to my collection, I do wonder, however, why Inkworks didn’t come back to the collecting community it promoted and supported so long and ask them for a bit of help in the form of directly selling or auctioning off their ‘back stock’ to collectors. . . but who knows what is/was happening behind the scenes, that unfortunately is neither here nor there, and all we can do at this point is wait and see what will happen.
As for the insurance I didn’t buy . . . the post office would have never paid out a claim if the autographs had been insured — why? The package itself arrived intact without any indication of damage. The cards were damaged by the packing materials, not by the post office!
