Sell Your ASM 300? Gasp!

Should you think about selling your Amazing Spider-Man #300 just in case the new movie bombs? Sure, it's one of the most solid investments on the market, but even this behemoth is capable of taking a beating at the hands of a bad movie.

Symbiote fans are in a frenzy these days with the Venom movie debuting next week. With the hysteria at its height, if you have been waiting for an opportune moment to sell your Amazing Spider-Man #300, now is your time.

Of course ASM #300 has always been a holy grail, and with that distinction comes a high price tag. No matter what's going on with the market, Venom's first appearance never fails to make a return on the investment. Every year, it ranks among the top-three best-selling comics regardless of grade. It rarely - if every - loses money.

Wait. ASM #300 is impervious to the ups and downs of the market, right? Not so.

In 2006 and early 2007, the hype for Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 was boiling over, and we prepared for the first onscreen Venom . That's when prices of ASM #300 surged to new highs for almost every grade. Just to give you a snapshot, the 9.8 set a new record of over $1,700, while the 9.0 reached $200, the 8.0 broke $150, and the 7.0 was at $92. Compared to today's highs, this is nothing, but at the time, these were impressive numbers. Then people saw the movie and the one-two punch of emo Peter Parker and Tophenom knocked ASM 300 from its perch.

Starting from May 2007, all the prices steadily dropped year after year. That 9.8 that brought over $1,700 in '06 fell all the way to a high of just $700 by 2012. The 9.0 and 8.0s saw a much faster drop off; two years after Spider-Man 3's release, the 9.0's top sale went down to $123, and the 8.0 brought no more than $75.

Right now, ASM #300 is absolutely soaring. If you had the foresight to buy a 9.8 for $700 or less back in '12, you are looking at an enormous profit margin; a new record-high was set at $3,500 just last month. That's not an anomaly, either. Most every grade of Venom's debut has seen its best sales ever - many in the last three months - and that's saying something considering how long this comic has been popular.

This is why I'm suggesting the unthinkable: sell your holy grail now.

Those high sales I mentioned? It took years for many of those grades to get back up to their pre-Spider-Man 3 numbers. As unlikely as it sounds, the 9.8 didn't reach the $1,700 mark again until 2017. Think about that - it took over a decade for the ASM #300 market to fully recover from 2007's Spider-Man 3. How about the 9.0 and 8.0s? The very fine/near-mint grade didn't surpass $200 again until 2013, while the very fine 8.0 didn't break $150 until 2014. Keep going down the line, and you'll see that this was the trend - years of recovery due to a bad movie.

That raises the uncomfortable question: what if Venom turns out to be horrendous?

This is where comic investing truly becomes a gamble. If Venom is a hit, those fair market values will continue to soar, especially if we get hints that Carnage will appear in the sequel. Transversely, if it is an epic bomb on the scale of Spider-Man 3, then the market will crash like it did a decade ago.

I'm optimistic that it will be decent. Leading star Tom Hardy has a great box office track record, Venom actually looks like Venom, and the trailers have raised my hopes for the movie to be a success. But this is Sony we're talking about - the same company who thought Topher Grace would make a great Eddie Brock/Venom.