Collecting for the sake of cool
Throughout my life, I’ve enjoyed quite a few hobbies, most of them involving “collecting.” Like a lot of young boys, I believe I first collected rocks that I thought looked really awesome. Obviously, these stones I found in forests, driveways and backyards retained no actual monetary value, but I’d put them in my pocket, take them to my room and store them in a drawer of special childhood treasures.
It’s hard to say what, exactly, drew me to pick up one rock over another, but I’m pretty sure the only thought that crossed my mind consisted of, “Wow, this is cool!” It’s this principle that guided (and largely still guides) my collecting as I moved on from rocks to other things: stamps, baseball cards, pogs (remember those?!), action figures, comic books and most recently art prints.
One of the earliest memories I remember having about collecting came when I heavily invested myself in baseball cards. At the beginning, I merely enjoyed opening a new pack of cards and couldn’t wait to see who I got. My brother and I would trade cards, trying to get our favorite players and we’d store them in these huge binders, flipping through pages organized by team.
But then my neurotic nature took hold and I began to want to complete team sets. After all, wouldn’t it be cool to have all the players from your favorite team from your favorite card company? So, I went to baseball card shops and I became indoctrinated in the concept of “greed collecting.”
Greed collecting, as I define it, is when a collector simply amasses a collection of objects for the sake of a perceived, relative and theoretical monetary value. To this collector, his collection is an investment of sorts. It’s not about completing a set or this is really cool — it’s about money, pure and simple. To them, the hobby isn’t a hobby anymore, it’s business. Buy low, sell high. It’s a farce of an economy created by a false sense of scarcity driven by greed. In summary, greed collecting is for bastards and they ruin everything fun about collecting.
For a while, I will admit, I found myself looking up the value of my cards, totaling this phantom number of how much my card collection was worth. Being a math nerd, this exercise was a great way to flex my multiplication skills, but I’d soon come to learn the realities of the phrase, “It’s only worth what someone’s willing to pay for it.” How true!
Going to these baseball card shops, the first thing I realized that it would be impossible to complete my sets at a fair price. Typically, the cards they sold were twice the price of any pricing guide (Beckett’s was the favored price guide back then of determining a card’s “value” — based on what methods I have zero clue), and if you wished to sell them a card, they’d only give you half its value or less! As I said, complete bastards.
Later I’d realize that these “collectors” basically bought in bulk and essentially held a monopoly on the market. If you wanted a shortcut to getting what you want, then you’d have to pay a ridiculous premium to get it. I found this absurd. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to get what they want?
Naive, I know, but this epiphany changed my perspective on collecting. My mindset shifted back to, “Wow, that’s cool” instead of “Wow, that’s valuable.”
After a while, my interest in baseball waned (the MLB strike of 1994-95 really turned me off to professional sports for a long time) and my baseball card collecting days ended. Soon though, a new obsession would take over my life: Star Wars.
Yes, the famed George Lucas trilogy couldn’t have entered my life at a more appropriate age. The “special editions” made their way to the theaters and I really couldn’t get enough. Lucas knows how to merchandise the living hell out of his franchise, and the re-issue of Hasbro’s “Power of the Force” line of action figures were beyond anything a complete nerd such as myself could resist.
Once again, greed collectors descended into the Star Wars action figure market. As the years went by, it became nearly impossible to find certain figures because these bastards would treat this hobby like a job. They’d hit every retail store that carried the figures each day and buy out any “valuable” inventory, multiples of the same figure if possible. As a kid who just really wanted to find a Boba Fett or a Snowtrooper, this was a huge frustration. After all, what if you were an honest-to-goodness kid who wanted to take these figures out of the package and play with them? Who were these adults buying shelves of toys and leaving the undesirable figures — like Malakili the Rancor Keeper and Prince Xizor — to hang idly on the pegs of Walmart and Toys ‘R’ Us?
Another perfect example of greed collecting came during the 1990s, when comic books suddenly received a surge in popularity. When people started realizing that old comic books (and I mean golden and silver era, stretching generally from the 1930s to 1970) were actually worth something, a goldrush began on the modern era books.
What no one really thought about though was why these old gold and silver era comics were worth so much. Kids back then usually treated their comics much like you probably would treat a newspaper or magazine today. Folding it over, creasing pages, tearing them, eating them with fingers sticky with soda and candy. No one boarded and bagged them back then. And parents often threw them out. No one assigned them any value. In a legal sense, comics were considered periodicals and even to this day comic books in Illinois are immune to the state sales tax for this reason.
So, essentially, when you fast forward to the modern era, not many copies of these comics were around, let alone in any sort of decent condition. You can legitimately consider these comics antiques and rare — hence, they’re worth something. But that’s hardly the case with modern comics.
Still, greed collectors consumed the industry, speculating that modern comics would one day — in their lifetime, no less! — be worth as much as Action Comics #1 or Amazing Fantasy #15. Eventually, the publishers caught on to the fad and started pumping out tons of comics, filled with gimmicks. Variant covers. Multiple editions. Holograms! Foil!
And it probably all peaked with the Death of Superman, which came in a poly-wrapped bag, thus forcing you to buy one issue to keep unopened and another to open and read. Absurd. I remember hearing about this issue on the local news and stores being completely sold out. Copies went for around $200 (maybe even more) back in the 1990s. A few years back, I remember going to a small comic book convention and seeing several poly-bagged copies in decent condition in the dollar box. I laughed.
Today, I noticed yet another example of greed collecting and it recalled all my other previous collecting adventures. The art print community definitely has a very vocal presence online, filled with those who really can be ruthless when it comes to “collecting” limited-edition prints.
As I mentioned previously, Tim Doyle’s “Change into a Truck” now has a second edition. For most people, like you and me, the mere existence of a second run comes as a nice surprise. While I threw down quite a bit of cash to obtain one of the original, first-edition prints, others might not be so inclined to spend that kind of cash, however, a second edition for $25 is a great deal, looks cool and maybe would make a neat gift for that Transformers and/or Obama fan you know.
But for the greed collectors, this second edition drove them absolutely nuts. In fact, they’re livid. Just look at this comment thread on OMG Posters! to see what I mean. To them, it’s the end of the world. It “devalues” the original print. It hurts their “investment.” The artist who chose to do a second run is “greedy” and “has no soul.”
I really wish they could realize the hypocrisy of their statements: It’s OK for you to make money off of the artist’s work, but it’s wrong for the artist to make more money themselves? Are you kidding me? What a bunch of bastards.
To Doyle’s credit, he admits that, yes, it is about money. He’s got a family and this is the way he puts food on the table, pays a mortgage and bills and makes the point that flippers don’t care about the artists at all, only themselves.
But more importantly, Doyle highlights why he does screen printing in the first place:
I love screen printing because it makes art accessible, and not at inflated gallery prices. And doing prints that sell like this enable me as a business to take risks and push lesser known artists on my site I other wise would not be able to.
It’s about enjoyment of the art form. It’s about accessibility. It’s about fun. It’s about discovery and people being able to say, “Wow, that’s cool” and then buy it, put a frame around it and put it up in their apartment for others to see and enjoy.
To me, this is the essence of collecting for the sake of cool. It’s not about “how much it’s worth” to someone else in cold, hard cash. Collecting is about enjoying an idea so much that part of you wants to own it and share it with others.
I think about all these people who accumulate a huge collection of toys, comics, art prints or whatever and store them away in the perfect temperature, sealed as if they were lost artifacts in a time capsule to be opened and sold “in the future.” The absurdity of it all defies any logical sense of why these objects really exist to do. I wonder how many of these people are parents and warn their children, “Don’t touch!” or “Don’t take these out of the bag!” It’s a sad thought.
Toys are meant to be played with. Comics are meant to be read. Art is meant to be seen. None of these are meant to be hoarded and resold. If you’re stockpiling away these things, then you’ll only find yourself among the miserable company that shares the same bunker mentality you do.
I firmly believe that people create things for the sake of them to be used and enjoyed. And if you’re not collecting with that in mind, well, then you’re a bastard.