Is it Time to Re-invest in The Eternals?

Great review. Also there are saying there might be Eternals 2 and that will go even deeper into the story. First i feel explained the story and we will get to the good parts as more stuff is released.

this is great ! thank you , the advice and the state of the comic market. i learn 2 things here !

"Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me."

Words to live by folks!

• I generally agree. That said, for years now, whenever I come across that altruism, I hear George W. Bush's malapropism (and in his distinctive voice), "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? We don't get fooled again."

Agree with the take here, except for the hair-pulling use of the all too common and completely nonsensical "massive boom fueled by stimulus checks" line.

Did plenty of collectors whose income wasn't effected by covid take those checks and spend them on comic books? I'm absolutely sure they did. But the idea that three checks totaling at most $3,200 over the course of a year to people in the US (many of which were using that money to stay alive since their jobs & businesses were closed) caused tens of thousands of collectors to start buying $1,000-$1000,000 comic books doesn't make sense.

Just taking a single book as an example: a 9.8 CGC Incredible Hulk #181 was selling for around $35,000 when Covid broke out. Six months AFTER the last of those 3 checks was delivered, the book was selling for $85,000.
So the narrative here is that people were lining up to pay $85,000 for that book cuz of they got $3,000 in stimulus checks?

If there was only some other reason to explain why people suddenly had tons of extra cash to spend on collectibles....
some massive world-wide event that completely shut down every other discretionary spending option...like if there were no restaurant dining, no bars, no concerts, no sporting events, no movies, no performing arts, no amusement parks, no hotel stays, no flights, no museums, no conventions, etc. etc. etc. Something like a world-wide pandemic.....

Conservative estimates say that the elimination of those options from COVID put an extra $450 BILLION DOLLARS in American consumer pockets alone in 2020, and another $450 BILLION in 2021. Worldwide (which the comic collectables market is), we're talking close to $20 TRILLION in extra disposable income up for grabs.

Maybe it was the $3,200 in checks that some Americans got.
Or maybe it was the $20 TRILLION in additional world-wide disposable income.


PS - I know this a rant. It's just a pet peeve of mine. Thanks for listening.

• Thanks for reading my column and for this response. Pardon my shorthand, but since the stimulus checks were born of the fact that everything was closed I felt that all the factors you mentioned were implicit. I didn't list them all out here because that's not what this column was about.
  
  But something that also doesn't get mentioned much in that same discussion is how many people SOLD their collections during the pandemic. Some people who needed those checks to survive held back a little to put toward getting keys graded for sale or toward buying bags and boards to make old collections more presentable. And a lot of people who had inherited collections caught wind of the demand for collectibles during the pandemic and so a lot of comics that were in closets and storage lockers hit the market. Some of those collections became the cornerstone of side hustles that became main gigs. I personally know of at least a dozen people who had worked previously in retail that became eBay power sellers during the pandemic. And while they may have only received $3200 in government assistance, they turned that little nest egg into a homestead by buying and selling comics, cards, LPs, video games, VHS, etc. I, myself, purchased several collections during the pandemic and while there wasn't a Hulk 181 in any of them there was a Daredevil #1, several Fantastic Four #48-50s, and hundreds of other Silver Age keys. Those hit the market and sold at peak pricing because those stimulus checks padded my safety net allowing me to invest.
  
  I don't think anyone is making the argument that people were buying 9.8s for $85K with stimulus checks, but if you look into economic causality you will find the relationship between buyer and seller often depends on the former's abundance and the latter's desperation –possibly enhanced by hype.
  
  Speaking of hype, the number of comic-centric youtubers and influencers (and certainly the amount of content produced overall) increased exponentially during the pandemic –and were it not for a little stimulus money, most of them would not have been able to maintain and even grow their channels to the point that their only source of income is now viewer-generated. Most of them have also been buying up collections they found advertised locally, and reselling them.