Want to save money on old comic books? Here’s and interesting strategy for collectors to consider.

Abandon the Local Comic Book Store

Many of us miss the days when you could go to the local comic book store and pick up nice looking books for a reasonable price. unfortunately, due to the Internet and E-bay, those days have pretty much come to an end. Unless you are lucky, many small town dealers are overgrading and therefore overpricing their comic books. What they are selling as a NM may in fact only be a Fine or Very Fine-. Here’s where the strategy comes in, plus a cool tool just for you readers.

A “Special” Search on E-bay

If you are creative you can overcome the problem mentioned above. Instead of buying a “raw” ungraded (and many time overgraded and overpriced) comic from a local dealer, make sure you check E-bay for a CGC graded copy. Once you get it, just crack it out and enjoy! You get the bonus of the CGC certified grade, plus their excellent restoration services. Collecting and investing habits have changes, especially with the poor economy, and many times you can find mid to low grade CGC comic books at or below Overstreet guide.

So how do you find them? Here’s One Strategy

You want to use a few tricks while searching E-bay. First, you want to search for CGC comics, so include that in your search terms. Next you want to use a little known and under-utilized search function, the negative search. If you were to search for all the lower grade copies it would be a pain, but with the addition of a simple “-” sign, you can exclude certain returns. I would exclude 9.8,9.6,9.4,.9.2, 9.0. Below you’ll see an example of the search for all lower grade comic books.

Enjoy the trick!

Here is the link to an RSS feed of the search if you want to save it in a reader.