Confessions of a Longbox Lifer: Top 5 Collecting Mistakes

If you have been collecting comics for more than a month, you have probably made a mistake. Maybe you overpaid for a modern variant that dropped in value the next day, or perhaps you sold a key issue right before a movie announcement sent the price into the stratosphere.

We have all been there. Collecting is a journey, and the tuition for learning the hobby is often paid in "oops" moments.

At Comic Sell, we want you to build a collection you love—and one that holds its value. To save you some heartache (and cash), here are the top 5 mistakes I made early in my collecting journey, and how you can avoid them.

1. The "Speculator" Trap (Buying for Wealth, Not Love)

In the 1990s, many of us bought twenty copies of X-Men #1 or Death of Superman, convinced they would put our kids through college. Spoiler alert: They didn’t.

2. Ignoring "The Silent Killer" (Poor Storage)

I once bought a beautiful Silver Age run and stored them in a standard cardboard box in a garage that wasn't climate-controlled. Two years later, the pages were yellowing, and the staples were rusting.

3. The FOMO Purchase (Fear Of Missing Out)

A trailer drops for a new Marvel or DC movie. Suddenly, a D-list character’s first appearance jumps from $10 to $300 overnight. I used to panic and buy immediately, fearing the price would go to $1,000.

4. Quantity Over Quality

Early on, I wanted a big collection. I would rather have fifty $5 books than one $250 book. I ended up with ten longboxes of "filler"—books that were hard to sell, heavy to move, and took up massive amounts of space.

5. Not Understanding Grading

I bought a copy of Daredevil #1 raw (ungraded) because it looked "mint" to my untrained eye. When I finally sent it to CGC, it came back with a purple label (Restored). Someone had touched up the color with a marker years ago. The value plummeted.