Back in late April, I wrote a blog asking whether we the comic book market had hit bottom. At that time I wrote that article, there wasn't an easy to answer that question besides looking at Swagglehaus's comic book index on YouTube (I'm sure that was a very time-consuming effort for him) and selecting several major key issues that I thought could serve as indicators for the state of the broader market (e.g., Amazing Fantasy #15, Hulk #181, Amazing Spider-Man #300).
With the launch of GoCollect's new tool, the Collectible Price Index (CPI), we now have an easy way to view the trends of the broader comic book market in a way that more closely resembles the Dow Jones Industrial Average (a stock market index of 30 prominent companies listed on stock exchanges in the U.S.) or the S&P 500 (a broader stock market index tracking the performance of 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S.). While this isn't intended to be a perfect apples-to-apples comparison (comic books aren't stocks), it does provide 30,000 foot view of the state of the comic book market that enables collectors to respond, with data, to the question that I proposed back in May.
Using this new tool, I think the answer to that question is: we haven't hit bottom yet.
While we all generally know that market values across the market peaked at some point in late 2021 or early 2022 and then values entered a state of long-term decline for the next couple of years. Looking at the more detailed data contained in the CPI, it appears as though values continue to decline. In other words, I don't see the bottom yet.
Golden Age books aside (I don't think those books are reflective of the broader market since they tend to be so rare and most of us are priced out of them), the indexes for the Silver, Bronze, Copper and Modern Ages all generally show values have continued decline in 2024.
Let's take a closer look at the CPI for the Silver Age for the past six months:
The Silver Age Index began 2024 at roughly 1,837; today, the Index sits at 1,766. That's a decline of roughly 3.87% over the past six months. While that's not a huge decline, it was a steady one over six months and didn't show any evidence of flattening out or going sideways. We can observe similar trends for the Bronze and Copper Age Indexes although their declines are a bit steeper (3.96% and 5.35% respectively).
One takeaway from this data is that it might be prudent to wait before you buy that big Silver or Bronze Age key issue you've been wanting until we see evidence that suggests that we may have reached bottom (or perhaps turned the corner). Using the CPI, I can't say that we've seen any evidence of that yet.
What do you think about GoCollect's new CPI tool? Please let us know what your opinion is in the comments section below!
