This is what I posted to my Twitter feed. (My official Twitter is for my main website; The Clutter Reports being a side project it doesn’t have its own Twitter.) Let me back up a bit and explain where this comes from, but that’s this week’s topic.

The plan this week was to price up a bunch of my comics and put them on the Clutter For Sale page. Given my low reader count the odds of selling it there are quite low. The two sales I’ve made are a fluke and I know it. I want to be able to list them on other services where I have a better chance of selling them. Also, it’s a list for myself of what I have to sell and what they might be worth selling for. However, to sell any of them anywhere I want to find out what they’re worth. While part of me wants to sell them for what I paid them for, that’s kind of silly when I really need the money. Not to mention that some comics may have gone down in value rather than up so if I price them too high they won’t sell, while if I sell them too low I lose out on money I could really use.

For this I need a price guide. Note that it’s a guide. It’s not a given that it will sell at the price they list and it does depend on condition, though most of my comics are in very good condition at least. So I went searching around, using a few different search engines in the hopes of finding something that would give me some prices to go by. You’d think with all the websites out there I’d find a few, average the prices listed between the sites, and come up with a fair price based on the condition of the comic. As you can guess from that tweet, I was not successful.

Now before the suggestions start flying (a boy can dream even when he’s in his forties) let me go over some of the sites I tried.

  • Comic Price Guide.com came up a bunch of times, but you have to sign up to get any prices. I don’t care if it’s free, like I said in the tweet I shouldn’t have to sign up to every website on the internet just to use it. So all I can learn is that a comic exists. I know that, it’s sitting right in front of me.
  • I managed to get Comic Book Realm working after a few tries, but I don’t just want to go with one website unless I see enough of a pattern that I only need one.
  • Comicsvalue.com wasn’t much help because it’s just a selling site. Instead of prices I got listings, all of whom appear to be lots and combined with another comic title that was technically connected to the title I started looking for, namely issue #1 the Sonic X comic, somewhat based on the anime that had been dubbed for Fox’s Saturday Morning Lineup at the time, the “Fox Box”. At the same time Archie Comics also had a regular Sonic The Hedgehog continuity and the lots would contain both. That doesn’t help me either.
  • Some websites wouldn’t even give me what I wanted because there wasn’t a listing for it. CovrPrice, which you also have to sign up for to get the actual price guide, does have a marketplace but when I went to the list of comics I couldn’t find our test subject. Quality Comix hadn’t even seemed to have heard of it. Most of the other tries were just selling places and even used a search engine. I’m not going to list them all but I did try a few others and that failed as well.
  • I even tried Google Shopping to see what came up, as it scours a few different seller site and I could get an average that way. I forgot how stupid people are. Some of the prices they wanted were outright stupid. There is no way this comic is worth just under $100. It’s not that good, doesn’t have anything that contributes to culture, and probably isn’t rare enough to be worth that much. Other prices fluctuated between $3 and $40, so getting a decent average out of that wasn’t helpful. I don’t know what they ultimately sold for but $99.99 is going to sit there a very long time. I’ve seen lots that include this comic for $40.

So in the end it looks like I’m only able to use one site to get an idea what it’s worth. I don’t know how accurate the prices will be, online comic stores mess with numbers as well (the more I think about it the more that last batch of comics I sold off was sold at a fair price despite seeing it super high on Mile High Comics but I’m starting to wonder about that place despite being ingrained in my nostalgic mind for all the ads with prices they put into the comics I grew up with), and a lot of this is going to be guess work. For now I’m going to just go with that site, post a bunch to the comic for sale page, and see from there where I can sell it. Probably one of those other sites that really exist to sell comics, or eBay. My local comic store might even find some they need but given the majority of my collection starts in the 1990s I rather doubt it. The “game” continues.

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