LogFAQs > #926590786

Broken_Zeus posted...

I would honestly discourage anybody from buying them for re-sale value because it's too hard to predict the aftermarket. Funko releases way too many figures and they tend to have large runs (even the Hikari, Funko's sofubi line that's supposed to have a designer vinyl thing going for it, was doing runs between 500 and 2,000).

There's an old rule of thumb for this sort of thing. It basically boils down to something like this:

"The moment people realize something is collectable, it stops being collectable."

Early Funko runs are mostly worth money because they had low runs and people weren't necessarily buying them as collectibles because they were still too new for that to be a thing. But once people realized Funko Pops could be worth a ton of money if you bought them and sat on them for a while, supply started to exceed demand and the value of newer releases has dramatically dropped. There are still some valuable pieces (mainly the ones where artificial scarcity has generated unnatural supply shortages and greater demand), but overall, newer releases are worth less because they're being produced in greater supply and more people are buying them up front.

It was the same deal with comic books. Early stuff like Action Comics #1 or Detective Comics #27 are worth so much money today because no one thought they'd be worth anything. Kids folded them and shoved them in pockets, parents threw them away, and then 40 years later they were so rare in perfect condition that people were willing to pay a shitload for them. But then people realized comics COULD be worth that much, and started buying multiple copies, putting them in plastic bags to protect them, stored them in vaults, and otherwise guaranteed that supply would far exceed demand. The upshot of which being, very few comics printed after the 1970s are worth all that much more than cover price. Even "milestone" issues like the first appearance of [insert major popular character here] rarely rise in price to make owning and preserving them worth it. The moment people realized that comics were "collectible", comics stopped being collectible.

Worse, the publishers became away of how "collectible" comics were, and began to exploit the mentality, resetting every comic to #1 to create artificial milestones, releasing multiple variant covers ("gotta own 'em all!"), prismatic hologram covers, polybagged trading cards or other value-adds, and basically forcing collectors to buy so many copies of any given issue that they effectively crashed their own market. Arguably, the comic industry still hasn't really recovered from the Crash of 1993, and the massive drop-off in sales helped encourage the shift to focusing on films and the loss of readers.

Collectors also need to learn the lessons of the 1980s - back then there were a ton of "collectibles" that were pushed as such by the people selling them to increase demand, like Cabbage Patch Dolls and Hummel figurines and limited edition commemorative coins and plates from the Franklin Mint. People were sold them on the premise that you could start a collection, and it would be worth much more later when you sold it. But the only people who wanted those things bought them as they were released, so years later, when those collectors (or their children who inherited them from dead parents) tried to sell them off, they suddenly realized that there was no one who wanted to buy. There was too much supply and very little demand, so prices plummeted. Most of those collections were sold at a loss. Beanie Babies sort of went through the same cycle, people having spent HUGE amounts on them in the 90s slowly realizing that no one wants to buy them now.
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