If someone wants to give you $75 for THAT, take it!

See these photos above? I had a kid come in this afternoon with these three comic books, asking me to buy them. Before I even looked at them, I informed him that we don't buy just a few books, we buy collections. So he and his gang of skanky looking friends left.

They promptly turned around and came back in, much to my surprise. The kid who the comics belong to asked me if I could tell him what they were worth, and he set them down on the counter. I shook my head and said, "not much." He asked if I could "look them up or something." So I got out the price guide. He had, as you can see, some great 1992-93 era gems! A Cable #1 foil embossed, a Daredevil: Man Without Fear #3 foil embossed and an Incredible Hulk #393... no wait, it's true... foil embossed. Aparently the poor guy thought they were GOLD embossed or something because he was SHOCKED when I read off the Overstreet price guide prices of $5 for each of them. He was so shocked, he asked me to show him where I was seeing those prices. So, I pointed them all out. It wasn't even like there was a range for quality of the book like most have, it was just $5 - basically meaning that if you were super lucky and convinced some other poor sucker that the embossing really WAS gold, you could get $5 for them. I even looked on Ebay, just for fun, and there were people that couldn't sell these single issues for a penny! In fact, I saw some of these listed as larger runs of 20-50 books that barely got over $5.

Why am I going on about the price? Well, to really brace you for the kicker. The kid insisted several times that "another comic book store" told him he could get $75 for the Cable #1. I even looked it up twice and showed him the second time. NOT A SINGLE ISSUE of Cable was priced that high. I asked him when it was that he got this price, and the kid told me that it was just a few minutes ago, but he wanted to bring it here to see if we'd offer him MORE. I laughed out loud!! I told him to back to the other comic book store and tell him you'll take that $75. In fact, I could find a few more in my back issue bin and he could get $75 for those too and I'd split it with him. He didn't get it. I explained, as I often have to, that EVERYONE has these comic books, even people who don't read comics or care about comics. There are THOUSANDS of them available for sale and no one who wants to buy them. But he insisted again that he was told he could get $75 for the Cable. And, the Incredible Hulk was signed, so he figured that HAD to be worth at least $20... come on, it's SIGNED. I told him that if he could get someone to give him the cover prices ($2.50) for the comics he'd be LUCKY. But, if someone said he could get $75 for that one, he should definately go back and take it.

To ad insult to injury, I took a lunch break and Craig was alone in the front of the store. A woman comes in with about 150-200 comics from....what era do you think? Take a guess... come on... RIGHT, the early 1990's strike AGAIN, and in the same day no less. (So don't let anyone tell you there aren't THOUSANDS of these things out there in the hands of people who only bought them because they thought they'd get rich in 10 years.) She says she wants to keep some of them, but Craig can pick out the ones he'd like to buy. Well, first he explains that that's not how we work it here - we buy the whole collection. Then, he tells her that we don't want them, we've already got a TON of X-Men comics from that time period. Again, she doesn't quite get it, and the guy who she's with starts to get a bit irritated. Craig suggests that they take the comics to Half Price books. The man says, "They won't give us much there." To which Craig says, "if they buy them, they'll give you more than I would." The guy was indignant, not able to BELIEVE we were actually refusing to buy these gems. Come on, they're X-Men, right - super popular X-Men.

Just for the record, let me state as clearly as I can, that we are NOT buying any comic books from the early-mid 1990's. We don't buy less than 100 comics at a shot unless they're something very valuable, and in that case we probably can't afford to pay you what you should get and you should just sell them on eBay because that's what we'd end up doing if we could afford them. The comics from this era are, plain and simple, not worth the paper they're printed on.