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Alphasuntory Posts: 18
6/26/2021
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Hi all —
Recovering collector / pack-rat here; in the interest of massively thinning out my collection after decades of lugging longboxes from cramped apartment to cramped apartment, I'm finally making a concerted effort to crack open these heavy-ass time capsules and make a detailed assessment of what I've got.
Having been out of the collecting loop for a long time, it's been interesting and enlightening to see what current tools and processes are available now, from online resources to professional grading & slabbing.
As an avid collector of music as well, and I have to say I was honestly quite surprised that among all the changes and advancements in the comics-collecting world, there does not seem to have emerged any single, dedicated, centralized, de facto authority for comics info — whether as a marketplace (to gauge pricing history / current value) or even just as a database-indexed repository for metadata. Sites like Discogs and MusicBrainz have spoiled me I guess.
So I looked around, checked out a few sites geared toward collection-tracking and value estimation, kicked the tires, and it seems like this place has the best balance of what I'm looking for for my needs — tracking the specific items in my physical collection, making record of their current condition, and monitoring their value over time. ComicsPriceGuide seems to have an enormous weath and depth of preexisting information, and a nicely granular approximation of value-by-condition for everything. I sprung for a gold tier membership, and I expect to be spending a lot of time on here in the days & months to come.
With that said, a few first impressions from a bright-eyed newbie —
1. The ability to export an entire collection & all relevant fields to a single .csv file seems like an incredibly important feature, I imagine for most. I recognize that this can be done on a by-publisher basis; this is definitely better than nothing but it seems arbitrary and frustratingly piecemeal. To me exporting by "box" would seem more intuitive, but I recognize different people use the site in different ways. In any case though, I think there is a legitimate need for an export-entire-collection-at-once option.
2. The "box" concept is useful, but also seems on first impression to be limiting in some ways. There are certain basic collection management tasks, tools, and features that seem to only be available in "box" view. When opening one of my boxes, I can see that there's checkbox selection functionality (individually and en-masse), enabling various item management options; and there's an at-a-glance overview of total box value and item count. Which is great. When viewing my entire collection all at once (at https://comicspriceguide.com/collection/{username} ), I would have expected the same thing; I was surprised that this view is only broken down by series title, not by individual issue. There's no way that I can find to get a comprehensive "bird's-eye-view" look at my entire collection of issues, regardless of box or title — but I may also be missing something.
Overall though I've been really impressed by the resources this site offers, and am glad to have a spot where I can dig in and start getting my stuff catalogued & to get a frame of reference for present-day worth. So I appreciate all the work that's clearly gone into it!
edited by alphasuntory on 6/26/2021
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