Comic Book Market Quotes

When I was at Marvel, they were in bankruptcy, which is hard to believe now with 'Avengers 2' out, but it was during the 1990s. It was a troubled place. Comic book sales were dropping. Work was scattered.

The '90s was a great period for the fans that were collecting at that time. Comics sold at an all-time high and reached the largest audience in our modern age, and the energy in our business was fantastic. Any bad feelings from fans of that era were a result of the poor delivery of the product we sold them.

I collected X-Men, Spider-Man, and Daredevil comics. I definitely had a few Captain America comics lying around in those protective plastic baggies.

I think it's good that we're not embarrassed that we're comic book creators anymore. It's good that people are able to make a good living at doing it, and not doing the traditional sort of mainstream fare.

My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it.

It got to the point in the late 70s and early 80s that I was spending so much money buying golden age comics that I could only justify it if I got work in the media.

I don't really have any great interest in writing for movies. Comics, to me, is a much more promising field. There's still a lot of ground to be broken in comics, whereas movies, to a degree... I don't know. They're a wonderful art form, but they're not my favorite art form. They might not even be in the top five of my favorite art forms.

It's business, selling comics, you work out what sells and you don't want to muck about with it too much.

Anyway, in the mid 80's I was spending a fortune buying old Golden Age books from the late 30's and 40's and I was making personal appearances at a lot of sci fi and comic book conventions all around the country here so that I could find books for my collection.

Maybe there will always be a market for the regular comic books because you can read [them] at your own pace. You can save them, collect them, [then] go back and read them again.

That became a big time in comic books because it's when people were starting to break out into independent stuff, the market was getting choked with speculators and everybody was trying to do their own trick covers.

I'm a big believer that if you buy a comic, you ought to own it.

I was a huge comic book fan as a kid. The only problem I had with comic books is how expensive they got. I didn't have a lot of money, so I had to be very specific about what I wanted to collect. I think they're all somewhere in the basement of my folks' house.

As I see it, mainstream comics now speak only to the hardcore few who stayed; conversing in a weird, garbled, visual pig latin only they can understand - rendering the term 'mainstream' a hollow joke - while the true mainstream, the other 99.9% of the populace, find enjoyment elsewhere.

The direct market has evolved into a machine that is very good at selling corporate-owned superhero titles published by two main companies: DC and Marvel.

I don't know how comic artists feed their families, if they do. But it's a fascinating form and so I think that after a long period of nothing happening and work, nothing very impressive, we are into another golden age of comics. Unfortunately, it's not a golden age for the artists themselves economically. I don't know how they get along.

My brother had boxes of comic books. He was really the collector.

I grew up when comics were only sold in food markets and news stands, so the direct market is vital to me. The best way to make it stronger is if everybody buys my comics in multiple copies before they buy any others.

The world of comic book collecting is not a pretty place. For a bunch of guys who like good-over-evil stories, you sure meet a lot of morally bankrupt assholes.

I'll still do print comics; as long as there's a market, I'll still be there. I just have a hard time believing that's the future.

Marvel books also feed into the smaller publishers and the fact that this is happening in the same month we're launching Ultimate Fantastic Four is no coincidence.

When I was coming up, I kept a ton of comic books, almost 300 comic books. Back in the day, they didn't used to cost that much, so I used to keep 'em, collect 'em, trade 'em.

My brother and I were really into baseball cards, and it seemed like an easy switch to jump over to comics.

I have 15,000 comics in a warehouse, all bagged individually.

Comics are printed on paper, which is expensive, making it tough to stay in business.