Worthless Childhood

The 1990s presented us with one of the worst shams in pop culture history. If you're familiarized with the terms: "Collector's Edition", "Limited Edition", "Exclusive" then you know what we're talking about. As fans of the comic book scene and other 90s novelties and paraphernalia we couldn't help ourselves but to be mesmerized at the eye candy and seemingly valuable "junk." Flashy, prismatic, assorted and voluptuous were the order of the day. A lavish exploitation of everything from trading cards to toys to comic books and everything in between.

Comic book stores opened on every corner. A comic that came out one day would triple its value in a matter of weeks or even days in some cases! People who never even read a comic in their lives were all of a sudden invading news stands and collectible shops with a copy of Wizard magazine in their hand as their guide. If a person was lucky enough to know someone that worked at Toys R Us, they would have the advantage of procuring action figures which were limited to one per case before they even hit the shelves. It was madness! But we loved it. Worst of all, we bought it... literally.

The advent of Ebay ushered in an uncomfortable realization to most collectors. Items, which were so precious to us in the collectable realm, began to emerge as colossal failures as investments. Many of us were unaware of current prices and assumed that time would be a strong ally in escalating the values of our comics, cards and toys. Ebay provided us an immediate perspective of the true worth of our paraphernalia. The pricing prowess of Wizard guides past lost their reverence as the ultimate reality of the internet opened our eyes to the truth: our stuff had become virtually worthless.

We all fell prey to the greed of the collectable market, believing we held rare and uncommon items that would increase in demand and as the years ticked by; we were convinced that our acquisitions of these treasures would eventually produce profits. What we failed to grasp was the glut of items released by the expanding collectors market. The success of items from previous decades conjured up a false comprehension of what the potential was for profit in more recent times. This began the deluge of collectables. People hoping to get the next Action Comics #1 or Honus Wagner card instead procured such gems as Image comics, Beenie Babies and an immeasurable amount of Star Wars figures and bauble.

We invite you, the reader, to expand upon our blog. We hope to help create a brotherhood of downcast collectors; that we share our empathy, our dreams and ultimately our disappointment in what we held in such acclaim. We also hope that those of you with scarce stories of success will also add upon our accumulation of misery. It could be possible that there is some resemblance of a silver lining out there.

 

 Let's all point and laugh!