Hi, this is Jon Cohen, I’m from Beyond Comics in Maryland and I’m her to talk to you about how to start a comic book collection. While the most important things for any future value in your comic books is your condition of your comic books.
There are many factors that will play in to how your comics can get damage over time. If you look closely many of the comics that are older they start to yellow. You can see stains on some comics that come through from getting water damage, brittleness from being in too excessive heat, yellowing base on acidic content in the paper or in the area around it, the yellowing of the pages will result to that as well. You see mildew of in the appearing comics because we have installed it in the wrong areas and it tends to be slight discoloration but not even. Other things are wrinkles and tears in comics often lower the value dramatically, missing pieces, chipping, tears, and crises, all these are negative effects to the value of the comic book.
So, what I want to do next is show you how to protect your comics after you purchased them. The best way to do it is tom use bags. Depending upon the comic you buy, there are several different sizes. The main noted sizes of the comic are what we call modern or current, silver age and golden age. Depending upon the time frame of the comic book you should make your determination on what size bag you want to use. There are several different kinds of bags to choose from. These are probably purpling they are similar to polyethylene but are clearer and tend to have a nice filter to the comic and create a glossy cover. Those are the ones we recommend. The other type of way to store comics is in mylar these are a lot more expensive but they are better of in a long term and are considered to be inert when it comes to acid content and they are vital. Being a lot more expensive and most modern comics don’t hold a high value for a long time, people tend to use the more portable bags.
After you decided, what bag you think will fit your comics the best it’s recommended to use a backing board. Most backing boards are acid free, some are not. You want to check the acid content and an acid free backing board is much better than one that’s not. As we mention before the acid content on the comics affects the yellowing of the pages and there fore the acid content in the board can also cause the yellowing of the back of your comic book.
The next thing you need to do is put the comic book in to the bag. There are safe ways to put comics in to bags and ways are a little more haphazard. I recommend putting the board and the comic together with the slide edge out for the board, so it slides in to the bag first and then everything follows through, you just safely put your comic book in to a bag, its now safe from moisture handling problems.
Once you have put the comic book in to the bag just make the flaps is going to fold this way and it doesn’t drop out so you are going on the correct way. Most collectors like to put extremely valuable comics in the mylar because of the effect of the archiver and they are inert. Same thing is done with the comic, you put it in the board, you make sure its held flat, and that the board comes out a little bit below. Mylar can actually sheer of the cover, so be very careful when you are putting the comic book in to mylar. You flip back the top, take the comic and very carefully lifting up on the top and pushing down on the bottom, making sure that nothing gets folded or crease, slide it in so it doesn’t hit that edge. I usually don’t recommend you put comics less than $15 to $20 value in to a Mylar bag. That’s how it’s done and it looks really good in Mylar.
Now that I have shown you how to put your comics in to the bags I want to show you how to keep them safely close.
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