I agree with everything you guys've said so far, but think there will be some areas where there will be "holdouts" in poster collecting.
First of all, I think horror as a genre will continue to be very heavily collected for some time to come, though as time goes by the field will be narrowed to a relatively small number of specific titles. As one of you already said, many of these, like the Universal stuff, will be collected almost as art prints along with key mainstream titles. And, just as there is a market for "outsider art" I think there will continue to be some interest in outrageous and outre stuff. This is a niche market but one with some staying power. I deal with quite a few younger artists/musicians/designers who are just discovering this area and have yet to hit their prime as collectors. Dave www.posteropolis.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Bruce Hershenson To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 5:26 PM Subject: Re: [MOPO] Could this replace collecting actual movie posters? My 5 kids (age 4-15) read EC comics because their dad and grandpa reprinted all of them, but otherwise they never read a single comic book. But all but the 4 year old are champions on every kind of video game, and they have every kind of system, and so does just about every other kid in this little town, and all over the world. I had to laugh when I heard there was a "large type" edition of the Comic Book Price Guide. When you and I were teens we were ridiculed by all adults for wasting out time reading comic books, and now it is mostly aging baby boomers who care about comics, and the kids could care less! Bruce On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 4:21 PM, Richard Halegua Comic Art <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: yes Bruce, BLB's are also part of the historical lexicon of collecting. As a matter of fact, BLB's and Pulps have the same problem: only comic book collectors have an interest in them due to the tie between the 3 hobbies. But pulps are in worse shape than BLBs by virtue of % of issues collected. There are something like 40,000 different pulp issues from 1895-1955 (not including most digest sized titles of the 1950s). Only about 2000 of them are collected today and titles like Argosy, Blue Book, Detective Fiction Weekly etc are hardly noticed except for those trying to acquire specific authors. Most pulp collecting is confined to Shadow, Doc Savage, Spider, Weird Tales, Black Mask, Terror Tales etc. Even 95% of all Sci-Fi titles are dogs and things like westerns are better used to keep your fireplace going at least in BLBs there are very many with characters from comics. But yes. all o fthese hobbies are on the way out. For younger collectors, the most popular things will be video games in the original boxes, and box art because like us, who collected comics & posters etc because we had lots of fun with them as youngsters, their generation is all about video. At 02:09 PM 11/30/2008, Bruce Hershenson wrote: Boy, you really are a ray of sunshine today! In your complete dissing of all paper hobbies, and their inevitable doom (insert maniacal laughter) you left out the deadest of all collectibles, the Big Little Books. Find me a collector of those who is under 75 or so. Bruce P.S. I didn't much care for "My Side of the Mountain", but I loved "The Other Side of the Mountain" and posters on both of these can be had for a buck or two each, which is what makes this a fun hobby. You can buy 30-40 year old posters from movies you liked for little money, and what's wrong with that? On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 3:50 PM, Richard Halegua Comic Art <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I've been saying for the past 3-4 years.. maybe longer .. that digital displays are the direction theatres will be headed first of all, printing, shipping and storing posters are an expense that studio owners would love to eliminate. Not to mention the employees needed for such a distribution network. these employees need to inventory, request out of stock posters from other warehouses, have to take those rolls of 50 and pull 1-5 posters to send out to individual theaters etc. shipping by truck after printing and then individually to theaters is a greater expense than printing them also, if a poster has a mistake, it has to be reprinted etc. a digital display can be controlled by one central location by the studio - out of the hands of theatre owners - to maintain a consistent promotion from the theatres in Westwood to those in Montauk and all the way to Japan, India and Australia with great ease. A simple program can be set up to change the language fonts When the studio wants to change the campaign, all they have to do is create it in the central computer & feed it - simultaneously all over the world But then you go further. Digital displays can show trailers intermingled with posters and can draw people who were just walking past the theatre better than a static poster. Plus you can "gang them up" creating ever larger displays with multiple digital panels. How about driving into a mall & seeing 20 digital panels fitted together to create an 8 foot by 20 foot display showing trailers that can be seen across the parking lot. Literally an outdoor cinema The benefits of digital displays for theatres are endless. You have a single upfront cost and then you never ship anything to the theatre again and the same system that is used to feed the displays can also be used to feed the film itself for digital theatres. another savings where does the hobby go? well, it would be hard to say that it doesn't drop some, and certainly newer collectors would be less likely Look at the comics hobby. Marvel & DC publish fewer comics today than they did during the 1940s. As a matter of fact, if you total up all the comic books published and distributed for any month of 2008, it is fewer issues than a single issue of Captain Marvel sold during WW2. (during WW2, Captain Marvel sold 2 million copies @ month. Current publishing by all companies is less than 1.5 million @month. Another comic, Walt Disney's Comics & Stories had a print run as high as 4 million for years from the 40s-50s) As a result of fewer comic book readers (due to social changes- less people reading anything), the comic book hobby is decreasing in size and has been doing so for about 15 years. The result is not the elimination of these hobbies, but serious compression is indeed in the future. At some point Marvel & DC will cease paper publication as will all newspapers and magazine. The likely future is a mini-disc for a "reader" that you take wherever you go, in addition to just reading online of course. When this happens, millions of comics will devalue in a short period of time (a few years). Fewer collectors means more unsold titles and downsizing to just the most popular material for hardcore collectors and historians. Superman comics will always be collected at some level. the 1940s title Mystery Men will be a tiny niche for historically oriented collectors only. The same will be for posters. Younger people will stop buying posters. THat generation will have digital displays so they can change whatever they want to show Posters for the obvious titles will always sell. A poster after all is the same as an "art print". so Frankenstein, Casablanca, Snow White will always sell. Getting Gerties Garter however, or My Side of the Mountain.. well they are hardly requested anyway. So the hobby will compress as our generations die off, much like that nearly forgotten hobby - pulp magazines Rich Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com ___________________________________________________________________ How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L The author of this message is solely responsible for its content. Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com ___________________________________________________________________ How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L The author of this message is solely responsible for its content. Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com ___________________________________________________________________ How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L The author of this message is solely responsible for its content. Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com ___________________________________________________________________ How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
