I wish I had something new and exciting to report but the first six months of this year was just a continuation of what we saw in 2012: a weak Bronze Age, a steady Silver Age, and a stellar Modern Age. The quarterly performance for each Age is summarized below:
As a refresher, here’s the performance summary for 2012:
New Mutants #98 continues to be the star Modern Age performer. Copies have stayed north of $300 since middle 2012.
Amazing Spider-Man #129 and Giant-Size X-Men #1 continue to hold down the Bronze Age.
Titles in our Silver Age Index such as Amazing Spider-Man #1 and Avengers #1 are treading water.
Those Bronze age titles are due to turn around any minute now… right?
The improvement in the Bronze Age from the 1st quarter is significant. Silver Age in the plus and a nice Modern Age return reinforces the strength I’m seeing in the general marketplace at the moment.
I think much of the strength in the market has been coming from the lower and mid grade Marvel and DC keys and semi keys. Bronze Age keys may be making slow steady gains but the 4.0 to 7.0 prices have really shot up.
I wonder if this increased investment in modern comics are coming more from younger and newer collectors who have been buying new comics each month for years now, yet never experienced loss in the 1991 crash? Sort of like the generation who came after their more cautious parents who lived through the Great Depression.
I am glad that Walter sees improvement in lower and midgrade Bronze Age Keys.
I don’t know when the Bronze Age decline is ending soon, however I continue to be optomistic about its future prospects for four reasons:
1) Disney will probably never be able to aquire movie rights to Fantastic Four, X-men, Spiderman and Silver Surfer. They already have made, or soon will make movies for most of the other major Silver Age heroes, so as they continue to build their stable of movies, future expansion may mostly come from the Bronze Age heroes. Two examples are Nova and Ms Marvel who fit in with the Cosmic theme.
2) The convenience of digital comic downloads at a more affordable price will increase the number of new collectors who will eventually want to invest in something they love -older comic books as a financial investment.
3) No other collectable market can be compared to the comic book hobby. Nothing else out there has this growing momentum of worldwide pop culture influence, which in the next several years will become a tsunami. Diminishing supplies will drive upper mid-grade comic prices to current high grade levels.
4) Worldwide pop culture interest is fueling demand for overseas investment. In time, we will see the effects of decresing domestic supply, which in turn will increase prices.
This may sound too incredible to believe, yet in 1970, who would have believed that a $1,000 Action #1 would some day sell for $2 million dollars.
So Bronze Age is a great bargain now. In time this investment could pay off big time. Take it from me. I am right at least 10% of the time.