Friends, collectors, and citizens of Metropolis – please help us officially welcome comic books to COMC!
Several months ago, as Check Out My Cards became COMC, we launched a Beta program for comics, coins, and other collectibles. It’s been a long time goal of ours to expand our unique consignment model into other areas beyond trading cards, and we are proud to announce that our first group of comics is now live on the site.
Everything that you like about buying and selling cards on COMC will also apply to comics. You’ll still get all of the benefits of the largest and fastest-growing online consignment community, including:
Benefits for buyers:
- Detailed front & back cover scans of each comic book.
- The ability to combine multiple orders from multiple sellers into one convenient shipment from our world class shipping department. All comics will be safely shipped with bags and backing boards.
- The peace of mind of dealing with one established company instead of dealing with auctions and/or unverified vendors.
- The freedom to make an offer below the asking price.
Benefits for sellers:
- We do the scanning and listing – all you need to do is set your prices.
- We handle the packaging and shipping, even to international addresses.
- Trusted & reliable customer service for you and your customers, during and after every transaction.
- The option to make your comics also available on Amazon.com, widening your potential customer base by millions.
- A choice between cashing out your earnings (20% cashout fee) or using your profits to buy other items on the site (no fee!)
Sellers can either ship comics to us or drop them off in person at our secure, climate-controlled Redmond, WA location.
The new Comic Pilot Service has a processing fee of $0.50 per item, and your items will be uploaded to your COMC account within one month.
A few rules for submitting comics:
- Nothing with explicit content or that has a Parental Advisory label.
- Nothing with a shipping or address label on it – retail copies only.
- No graphic novels or trade paperbacks (yet) – single issues only.
Emerald City Comicon
If you’re in the Seattle area and happen to be attending the Emerald City Comicon this weekend, be sure to stop by Booth 1408 and say hello to us. We’d love to tell you more about this new chapter in the COMC saga, as well as get your input about what sort of features you’d like to see in the future.
Vancouver Fan Expo
We will be at the Vancouver Fan Expo April 20-21. More details to come!
We’re tremendously excited to be joining the comics community, and look forward to working with all the fans and collectors.
How far are you from doing authenticated balls? I’ve have quite a few I’ve been waiting for some kind of announcement.
As Jen noted, our current expertise for processing, sorting, and shipping is in flat objects. We definitely want to start doing other collectibles like signed balls, but it will be a while since we’ll need to develop and test a brand new way of collecting the high-quality images we want to be able to provide buyers.
Thanks,
Jeremy
magazines soon?
We’re some time away from large, non-flat collectibles, cardblurb. Magazines will come sooner, Scott – we had many submitted for our Beta and you should start seeing them some time this year.
Glad to see some started trickling in. It doesn’t look like you are charging any different shipping costs, which is nice to see. One question I have is that I noticed there are book values listed, I was wondering where these values come from.
We’re currently getting out book values from a public online database. As we develop the category we’ll be taking a look at where the most robust data is and the costs to licence it.
Thanks,
Jeremy
Awesome, glad to see this is underway! The two things I collect are sports cards and comics so I’m really hopeful that your comic seller sections catches on and grows, grows, grows!
Why no explicit comics? Some of the best and most valuable recent comics like Kick Ass, Preacher, 100 Bullets, The Boys, Punisher, Deadpool, and even Watchmen and everything else by Alan Moore are marked mature readers. Also disappointed there’s no grading of issues. Only takes a little bit of time to grade comics, especially with an experienced collector. If you really want to compete with Milehigh, MyComicShop, or Midtown Comics all their back issues are graded with tiered pricing.
Hi, andrew13.
We may carry explicit comics eventually, but right now we’re focused on simplifying things as much as possible to get the service up and running smoothly.
Although we have enormous card experience here, we’re thin on comic experience and don’t want to give anyone a false impression that we’re experts. As our staff grows in familiarity with comics I expect we’ll start to offer condition review comparable to what we already do with vintage cards.
Thanks!
Jeremy
Questions:
What is the monthly storage fee going to be?
Are you charging for condition notes? ( I will be shipping 50 1960’s comics to you today )
How many comics would you say that you are looking to process this week / month?
Thanks in advance.
Hi, GCSportsCards. Good questions. Currently the pilot monthly storage fee is the same as it is for cards, $0.01/month per item over $.75 (or $2.50 if you’re paying for an account upgrade).
The condition note / review system is still being developed; for the pilot I’m double-checking, but as far as I know we’re doing it the same way as cards – not charging for condition notes but doing reviews for vintage items. We’ll keep folks updated.
By April we plan to process everything that was sent in for the beta service, which is a few hundred items I think.
Thanks!
Jeremy
Thank you so much for branching out into comics! A suggestion:
At present, the “description” and “set name” are the exact same thing: year of publication, name of the publisher, and title of the series.
I appreciate the fact that you include the year of publication, but putting it at the front of both the “set name” and the “Description” makes it difficult to sort by title. And putting the year at the front of the description makes it blend into the issue number.
For example, Amazing Spider-Man #258 is listed as “1984 Marvel The Amazing Spider-Man 2581984 Marvel The Amazing Spider-Man “. For some reason, the issue number and the year in the description are jammed together.
If I click on the listing, I see: “Search for more: 1984 Marvel The Amazing Spider-Man”.
If I click on that, I only see Amazing Spider-Man issues that were published in the year 1984.
Meanwhile, there are 2 other issues from Amazing Spider-Man which I cannot see without searching the entire site for “Amazing Spider-Man” and then filtering it by “comics”.
Even if I do that search, I can’t see the issue numbers of the comics with a “Details” search.
This is going to get really, really confusing when you have millions of comics from thousands of titles.
I would suggest putting the series title in the description. For example “Amazing Spider-Man (1963 Series)” or “Amazing Spider-Man (1st Series). Then, if someone clicks on that link, they can see all the issues from that title across all the years of publication.
Hi, Check Out My Deals.
We definitely agree that our categorization archetecture needs some work – Microsoft is coming out with a new product this summer that we’ll be using to completely redo our search and item hierarchies. On the plus side that means we’ll have much more robust support for gaming cards and other items like comics. The drawback is that we won’t be tinkering with anything until then since it would be duplicated effort. Definitely appreciate the feedback, though, and once MS rolls out the product we’ll want to work with the comics crowd closely to really find a system that works better.
Thanks!
Jeremy
Do they need to be bagged and boarded?
Hi, jsunsuper1. We definitely recommend bagging and boarding for protection, but it isn’t required and there’s currently no extra fee for us removing bags and boards from the comics we receive.
Thanks!
Jeremy
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