NEGATIVE ZONE: eBay-Worse Than Variant Covers and Obama Spider-Man Crossovers

When you're a Comics Reader you become a Comics Collector, but not all Comics Collectors are Comics Readers. The after market of comics starts in comic stores, back issues in long boxes with inflated prices, sometimes ten to twenty dollars more than what the Overstreet Price Guide lists. At one store a back issue of something you'd think no one would want like, let's say, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures 2nd series issue #1, would be sold at the book price of $3 while another would have it for $20.

This could happen for a few reasons, the "#1" on the cover, the fact that it's a an older series, or because in some cases it's genuinely rare. The problem with "rarity" is that it's subjective from area to area and from seller to seller. Making a trip to visit North Carolina to see Brandon, it feels like I've hit a gold mine when we go to comic stores, things I can't find anywhere up here in any store I find there at multiple stores for cover price. It's simply a matter of a different area and therefore, a different market.

eBay, however, has no area specific market. When you've been looking for that one issue to complete a series or rare gem that you can't find, chances are someone on eBay is selling it. It's easy and fast, and this way you don't have to spend the gas money traveling to the four corners of your state visiting random comic stores. The "BuyItNow" feature allows you to jump ahead of the pack and grab the auction, and with all of the eBay stores, someone is bound to have what you're looking for.

The reality of eBay shopping is that a lot of times there are reserves on items, BuyItNow prices are too high, and "a little wear and tear" amounts to the back cover missing. Sellers who don't read comics but see it as a way to make more money hold on to that one issue, not selling a series in a "lot" but only individually. Most sellers, fortunately, will work with you but often the ones who have what you're looking for still have it because no one else was willing to pay their prices.

The Collectors' market and lack of knowledge about comics and what they are worth is mostly a product of the 90's, people buying every "FIRST EXTREME ACTION PACKED ISSUE" and foil cover with hologram card they could find. Since they aren't a part of the comics community, they haven't paid attention to the trends in the past ten years, and probably have never even opened their "investments" once. The prices they charge slowly become the standard, since other non-comics reading collectors only check a site like eBay for prices.

While it is a supply and demand issue, the demand comes from the person with the supply. Using eBay as a reference for prices and availability is just retarded, something you're looking for today may be on there tomorrow, and there could be ten of them by next week. Seeing one item doesn't always mean that it's so rare there's only one auction, it only means there is only currently one seller of the product. It far too often just amounts to complete rip-offs and a frustrating experience for someone who, you know, just wants to read the comic.

Now that comics are getting some press, the world looks to our little island and is curious. They still think of comics as something quirky and weird, but they understand some of us are willing to pay a lot of money for our little funny books. CNN reports on comics like The Death of Captain America and more recently, Spider-Man #583 which featured Obama on the cover and in the book, making it hard for us who weekly read these books but do not subscribe through our local comic shop or an online provider to get our new issue. This leaves a Reader without an issue, and a Collector with one more to put on eBay.

Right this moment, I went to eBay and typed in "obama spider-man 1st print". I'm not going to link the auction going for $38.05 with 6 bids, or the BuyItNow seller who's asking $84.99. This comic has a cover price of $2.99, and right now is in multiple printings and fortunately is available for the Readers to get their hands on. The one good thing about this whole Collector vs. Reader thing is that the Reader usually comes out on top, the publishers knowing that more printings means more money, and adding Variant covers on top of that can't hurt either.

It may just be a problem with the after market of comics themselves, no Readers or Collectors can really say what something is worth. With more and more older comics being republished online, some back issues may go down in price, the Marvel Masterpieces and DC Archive collections also collect older issues. Dark Horse and Fantagraphics have taken it upon themselves to collect many old, lost, out of print series into hardcover books making single magazine issues that were once impossible to find completely accessible.

With these collections becoming more and more popular with Readers and allowing people new to comics to get caught up, one day the Collectors' market will be just that, for Collectors'. All the Readers will have the issues they want, albeit not in issue form and not in a white box but on a shelf, and all the Collectors can rip each other off.

The Death of Irony? . . . no, just a Moratorium on Cynicism

Leave it to the geniuses over at the New York Times to sort of pre-empt my intentions here in their typically incisive fashion. Satisfied in my intention to present our readers with a penetrating expose on the need for a cessation of cynicism in dealing with matters reflecting the American political scene in comics, I happen to come across Andy Newman's report on the death of irony. It appears that irony is a lot like Superman, or maybe Robin, or any other superhero who has died and yet lives (only to die again, in this case), in that I seem to recall the proclamations of the end of the age of irony in the months and years following Terrible Tuesday of 2001. Of course irony is not the same as cynicism and reporting the death of irony is only cursorily related to demanding the end of cynicism. In any event, it seems that perhaps Joan Didion might need to read these words as much as anyone else, and with that in mind, I dedicate this post to her.


Parallels to the mainstream media aside, these ruminations came as a result of our discussion of Cable #8. In what was an otherwise excellent issue in a consistently excellent series, there was a scene in which Emma is subjecting Bishop to a particularly egregious form of telekinetic interrogation, the effect of which is described as feeling "like his brain is shutting down, one synapse at a time." The exchange between Beast and Cyclops at this juncture plays out like a set piece from the hopefully never-to-be-released Bush administration movie in which the shrinking violet Colin Powell character "stands up" to the sexier, more manly Don Rumsfeld character, only to find out he hasn't been cast in the sequel.

As Brandon pointed out in his comment to the post, the objection to this sequence has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the discussion or the way in which it is handled in this particular comic, but rather that in light of the election of Barack Obama and its implications for this country, continuing to call attention to the Bush administration's dubious anti-terror tactics feels cynical and ultimately sort of dishonest. Certainly the magnitude of Obama's victory has as much to do with the deplorable state of the national economy as it does with the backlash to Bush's morally suspect prosecution of the terror war. Be that as it may, Americans, for better or worse, still believe in the fundamental position the rule of law occupies in our country and this fact was no doubt reflected in Obama's convincing plurality.


The irony--if I may still use that word--of our original response to this issue is that both Brandon and I took particular aim at Brian Wood's DMZ in our expressions of indignation. DMZ is only the most visible of the numerous political comics that have dealt directly with the legacy of 9/11 and the conquest and occupation of Iraq. DMZ makes sort of an easy target because the stances it has taken have tended to the non-controversial in the sense that they comport neatly with those of the country's nascent pseudo-anarchist anti-war movement. It was only in retrospect--a result of Monique's expressing interest in the new series--that it occurred to me that far from ignoring the developments in the American political scene, Brian Wood has essentially been foreshadowing these developments through subtle shifts in the series' focus.

In addition to the details Brandon mentions in his DMZ House Party List post, one of the great things about this new story is how the subtle shifts in the art and narrative focus away from Manhattan, in favor of Staten Island subtly reflects the radical shift that the focus on the American presence in Iraq will be taking with the new administration. The hook of Wood's story is that the American and Free States forces stationed on or near Staten Island recognize that they don't really have any personal investment in this fight and that the war will be ending soon and when it does, they will have to go back to being neighbors with their erstwhile enemies. Thus, it makes more sense for the opposing sides to operate under an unofficial truce, which in turn allows them to enjoy their youth without the ever-present fear that each day might well be their last, than to continue meaningless hostilities, which will only result in pointless loss of life.

The connection of this construction to the emerging situation in Iraq is not immediately clear, and therein lies its particular genius. After eight years of George W. Bush effectively living every boy/president's dream of war president as international tough, Barack Obama will have to step in to do all of the unglamorous, and frankly boring work of pulling out and putting our military--and hopefully Iraq--back together. The soldiers on Staten Island have a similarly forward-looking--and similarly unsexy--attitude toward their deployment on the Island.

Moreover, the spirit of cooperation between once fierce rivals also reflects the increasing commitment to peaceful coexistence between Sunni and Shi'a Iraqis that one senses is the real reason for the decreased tensions in that country--troop surge notwithstanding. The suggestion of the collapse of the island's utopian arrangement at issue's end, rather than nullifying the point being made, speaks to the fact that Wood is writing a comic book whose success turns on its ability to engender suspense and enjoyment on the part of its readers.

Wood's attention to the shifting winds of American politics doesn't begin with "The Island." The recently concluded series about the election of the populist hero Parco Delgado is at base a story of the power of the human spirit in the face of incredible tragedy. The fact that Parco's story is most emphatically not Obama's does nothing to lessen the series' prophetic power.

In his Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley writes, in typically high-flown manner, that poets--and we include comics creators in this equation--are "the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves; the unacknowledged legislators of the world." That Shelley's, and by extension our own, ideals for the poet/comics creator are ambitious speaks to our shared confidence in the power of our chosen medium.