Coming Next Week: A Revolution in Comic Pricing

We’ve always felt that the Comic Buyer’s Guide price guide used by ComicBase was the best-researched and most valuable guide to comic values in the industry. But now, we’re replacing that venerable price guide with the one thing that’s even more valuable: straightforward market price reporting for every single issue in ComicBase.

Using the massive amount of inventory and sales data provided by Atomic Avenue (currently home to over 1.2 million comic listings!), supplemented by high-end auction reports from Heritage Auctions, we’re replacing expert “price guide” analysis of what comic prices should be with verified sales and inventory market report showing every week what comic prices actually are. This is a historic move for the industry, and it’s the comic book equivalent of moving from a tip sheet to a stock ticker. And we’re doing it for each and every one of the more than 440,000 comics currently listed in ComicBase, starting with this week’s update.

With almost two decades of comic pricing experience, even our experts found some surprises in the pure market data. Some comics turned out to be softer than even our notoriously hard-nosed price guide had supposed, while other comics turned out to be overlooked gems, outperforming any guide’s estimation of their market value. As we look over the actual data, however, perhaps the hardest thing for us old timers to get used to is that comic values no longer fall into the nice, neat value ranges based on issue number that we’ve grown to expect ever since the first price guide was invented. That’s because every comic is now evaluated according to its own unique market price and sales history, with the valuations constantly changing as new sales and listings are tabulated.

For ComicBase customers, this means that when you download this next week’s guide values, be prepared to see a lot of “action” in the issue valuations as market prices replace the old guide prices. Each week’s update will also reflect the very latest sales information, and will change to reflect market conditions in real time. Issues that go up significantly will be colored red in the issue listings, and those which fall will appear in blue.

We hope you’ll be as excited by this as we are, since pure market-based pricing has always been the Holy Grail of comics valuations, but it’s never truly been possible to do it on this scale until now. And by all means please join our forums where we expect a lively discussion over this very exciting change.

All the best,

—The ComicBase Team