How to sell your comic book collection in 24 hours (well, maybe 1% of it)

So here's what I did.  With a neighborhood garage sale underway over the weekend, I decided at the last minute to put my comics out there.  I put in for a vacation day Friday, my wife put together an awesome craiglist add and some great signs, and then I stayed up until the ungodly hour of 1:30 (Hey, for me that's late) taking inventory and getting everything priced out.

I made the terrible mistake of buying the overwhelming majority of my comics in the 1990s.  And none of them were superhero books, either, so I'm already at the big disadvantage of missing out on the "spontaneous purchase for the whiny kid" market.

Here is one conversation I know I would not be hearing over the weekend:   

"Whaaa, Daddy, buy me that issue of Verotika!"
"Okay, son, hope you enjoy that space-mutant-bondage story as much as I did."

Well, before I get put on any lists, I'll get back to the sales prep.  I've got ten long boxes full.  To the laymen out there, that translates to "A whole hell of a lot of comics".  Most are complete sets of DC Vertigo stuff, which is generally considered to be for "mature readers."  Some are big sets, like Swamp Thing or Hellblazer, and some are expensive sets, like Preacher.

I didn't want to split up any of the complete sets I have, so I pulled them out and put each set in a separate box.  It looked really neat:

This is about half of them...

It looked better on Friday when I had them on a couple of tables outside under a tent, but we took this picture after we had to set them up inside on Saturday to avoid the rain.  Sadly, we couldn't avoid the snakes the like hanging around outside the garage, but that's a story for another lifetime, preferably in Ireland.

So I put all the sets together at just under "ebay sold" prices, and then put everything else in two-for-a-dollar boxes.

Here's where I went wrong, at least from a garage sale point of view.  People don't show up at a garage sale planning to drop a couple hundred bucks on a complete set of Swamp Thing.  They go to garage sales to browse for a bargain.  Most of the comic collectors who came said that the prices were good--most books ended up listed at less than a dollar--but if you have the first 135 issues of Spawn, for example, in a box for $100, it's just too much for a garage sale.

Over half of the stuff I did sell came from the 2-for-a-dollar boxes.  I think I would have made a lot more money by splitting up most of the sets and putting everything out there in dollar boxes.

But that's okay.  My motive here wasn't necessarily to sell the collection, but to learn.  I have no idea what the best way to sell 1990s mature label comics is, so this was one way that didn't work out so well.  I did have interest in some of the larger sets ("Good price, but I can't afford it", "I don't want to buy it, but don't break it up, and don't cut the price") so we'll see how it goes if/when I try selling stuff online.

In the end, it was kind of fun hanging out in the garage, talking comics with people, and meeting a lot of neighbors that I hadn't met before.  I don't know if I'd do it again, but if I do I'll definitely have to do it a different way.