Badr Milligan 0:00

In this episode of the short lives.

Matt DeVoe 0:02

We want people to be doing this for years to come and not to burn out. Um, so a lot of our focus is just that is teaching people what to look for and in all these different cycles, whether you're digging through a long box, through dollar bins, or at a garage sale or at an antique market, or you're ordering new stuff, you know, what should you pay attention to? And not just value-wise, but just good books to read and good books to pick up and interesting things that are happening in the space that that are worth your time and time and time and time and time.

John Sulaitis 0:34

Ladies and gentlemen, short box and short box podcast is recorded live from Jacksonville, Florida.

Badr Milligan 1:00

Yoo, Short Box Nation, hello again, welcome back, and thanks for press and play today. If you're brand new, hey, welcome to the show. I'm your host, Badr Milligan, and this is the Short Box Podcast, the comic book talk show, where we bridge the gap between the panels of your favorite comics with the people who put their blood, sweat, and tears into making them. This is episode 506, and today I'm joined by John Sulaitis and Matt DeVoe. They're the founders of the comic book collection management tool, CoverPrice. Now, if you're serious about uh collecting and cataloging your comic collection, if that's the kind of like world you live in, you probably have heard about Cover Price. They've been around for a while now, since 2018 to be exact. You definitely have heard me mention Cover Price uh a few times on the show. I've I've mentioned Cover Price as well as the CLZ app. Um, you know, full transparency, uh, Cover Price is the presenting sponsor of this show, but I've been a user myself for I think the last like three or four years. I've been using them for a while. So uh I'm not only a champion, but a client as well. At its core, CoverPrice is a comic book collection management tool that helps you track the value of your collection. And while there's plenty of apps out there that do very similar things, I I personally find that cover price really leans into creating not only a user-friendly experience with a really nice eye for design and visual aesthetic. I mean, we're talking comic books, right? We're talking visual. So, you know, you would want your comic book tool to also be visually appeasing. And I think that's what separates cover price from the others. It's also the closest thing you'll come to like flipping through a long box of comics without having to lug that heavy son of a gun out of the closet, okay? I'm speaking from experience. Well, that's enough for me. I I have been curious on how they track trending comics. How do they calculate things like fair value market? All right. In other words, I want to get geeky and nerdy about what's under the hood, all right? How do sales data, how can that help the modern collector? So if you're into uh collecting, if you're into cataloging or the investment and speculative side of comics, I think you're gonna enjoy what we got lined up with this episode with John and Matt. But before we get started on that, I want to give special recognition to our amazing sponsors who help us keep the lights on. Big shout outs to our presenting sponsor, uh, CoverPrice.com, which we're gonna spend the whole episode talking about. So I also want to thank Gotham City Limit Comic Shop. It's the best comic shop in Northeast Florida. If you happen to live in Jacksonville, you can go visit them for yourself today on Southside Boulevard. But if you don't live in Jacksonville or if you don't even live in Florida, good news, you can buy comics from them online at GothamCityLimit.com. Big shout outs to our sponsors once again, coverprice.com and Gotham City Limit. Could not do this without them, or the loyal supporters over on the short box Patreon. I love you guys. Thank you so much for the help. Now, without further ado, let's bring on our guest of honor today. These are the guys responsible for creating a tool for all serious comic book collectors. Let's give it up for John True Litis and Matt DeVoe. Hey, John, hey Matt, how y'all doing today? Hey, butter. Good, how are you? You know what? I am I'm doing well. I am uh I've officially gotten over this cold that has been weighing me down for the past week. Um, we are recording the week before San Diego Comic Con. I don't know if I've shared this with the listeners. I think I have. I'm going to San Diego Comic-Con this week. It'll be my first time ever. I'm excited.

John Sulaitis 4:19

We'll have to see you there. Man, we're going to be walking around. So definitely let's uh let's meet up. We'll go grab a drink or some dinner or something.

Badr Milligan 4:25

Oh yeah, I like the sound of that. I guess uh how many San Diego Comic-Cons have y'all been to? And then do you have any advice for a first timer like myself?

Matt DeVoe 4:33

Do you want to take it, Matt? Uh I've been going since I think 2003 was my first one. And I think my first panel was like a heroes panel. You remember the TV show Heroes? Um I think that was my first panel I ever went to. And then at that panel, they gave you like a free comic at the end, and that kind of opened my mind to like you can get free valuable things from the, you know, the from this convention. There's there's no one way to do the convention. You have to have a plan of attack, which is actually what we'll talk about a little bit today. That we that something with that helps us out. We kind of created it for ourselves and then have extended it to the community because it really helps us to form a budget and a plan of attack when you're going for exclusives. We could touch upon that a little bit in a little bit. But there's no one way to do it. It depends what you're there for. I know people are there for just toys, and you can be in lines all day long for the whole convention trying to get toys, right? And action figures. You can be there all weekend in line to go to Hall H and other panels, and you know, that could be the only thing you do. Um, you could be there just picking up comic books, you know, exclusive comic books, which would take you the whole weekend just to walk from one to the next. Um you could be you can uh you could you don't even have to step foot in the convention, and there's enough to do outside the convention.

Badr Milligan 6:00

Oh wow.

Matt DeVoe 6:00

I didn't hear that. Because like like Magic the Gathering is taking over Petco Stadium, and you can get a free Magic the Gathering training card there, you know, for a show.

John Sulaitis 6:10

A couple of years ago at Petco Stadium, they also did like a massive drone thing where Galactus, like you know, those big 3D drone arrays that they do? Galactus came out of the stadium and I remember that year. Yeah. So it's always crazy.

Matt DeVoe 6:23

A few years ago, they had like a walking dead zombie run, or you can go dressed as I was a zombie pretty much, you know. There's it's a it's impossible to answer because most conventions are you show up, you go, you go, you walk the floor, you go to a few panels, and you call it a day. This is something, this is a the the convention never sleeps for for five days straight.

John Sulaitis 6:46

Yeah, and Matt never sleeps or goes to the bathroom when he's on the floor, we've noticed.

Matt DeVoe 6:50

So I don't know why we needed to bring that up.

John Sulaitis 6:52

No, because he's so dedicated, it's insane. I'm no everything we all do. On a note, uh no, Matt Matt's body shuts down and he just becomes a focused comic book hunter. And it's actually something to see because uh, you know, he doesn't run marathons, he doesn't uh do triathlon, but but when it comes to comics, he is literally an athlete uh going around uh searching for the colours.

Matt DeVoe 7:16

There are things that you need to do to prepare yourself for a for a convention, yes, for sure.

Badr Milligan 7:20

John, what what's the most memorable uh San Diego Comic Con experience you had?

John Sulaitis 7:25

You know, to be honest, like yeah, be careful because that can that can be a loaded question. Um, you know, when we first started Cover Price, uh, we were thinking, okay, you build a website and we completely organically grown, we never had any funding. Um, and we just you know put blood, sweat, and tears into this thing. And we went there in 2017 and Matt and I were walking by. So San Diego's on the um like on the ocean. It's right there you can walk by the um the water. We're walking, and like Matt was saying, there's always like after parties and stuff like that. And we saw this yacht, and um, people were going on celebrities and stuff, and I was just like, damn, wouldn't that be cool? Like, I mean, we're just comic fans, so like would that be cool to be on that like a yacht one year? Then two years later, we we brought on a PR person who helped us get into these parties and we started making networks. I was on that yacht and it was crazy. And they had a um a margarita, like a slushy machine. They have like Game of Thrones stuff happening. Uh, it was it was insane. So my I think my favorite memory was just like holy crap, like we're actually like doing stuff at Comic-Con and and like you know, it's starting to blow up. So that was that was fun and and dangerous because there was a lot of alcohol.

Badr Milligan 8:35

Okay, so it sounds like my my big takeaways budget, come up with a plan, find the margarita slushing machine, bring a bladder bag. I think I I think I'm I'm picking over here.

Matt DeVoe 8:46

Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean there's enough bathrooms there, you don't need to bring a bladder bag. Uh you might want to bring some snacks because conven the convention food does get pricey. You know, that that stuff gets expensive.

Badr Milligan 9:00

Oh, I bet, I bet. Last weekend I went to um IC3 Indy Indie Comic Creator Con as well uh slash First Coast Comic Con. And uh that was to me a good, like, okay, I'm getting my reps in, right? It was a great show, like standing on its own. Um, but I know that San Diego Comic Con is a whole different beast. As someone that's been to New York Comic-Con twice, I've been told like even that kind of pales in comparison in terms of like just how packed the weekend can be, how uh uh how much uh just like the the physical and the toll that it takes. But uh I'm really excited about this. And um you guys brought up that you guys are also doing a panel uh at C Nigoga Comic-Con, uh, which will be Saturday, July 25th. You guys are doing this panel with Carla Cohen and Lucio Porello. You guys are talking about uh uh career-defining covers, how they've created some of the you know most collectible covers in in the modern era. I was curious if you could maybe talk a little more about the panel and then what made these two specific creators, you know, uh Lucia Porello and Carla Cohen like the perfect focal point for a conversation about aftermarket demand.

Matt DeVoe 10:07

Yeah, do you want me to jump into this one, John? Or do you want to go for it? Yeah, so we we've been going we we we've had a lot of trial and errors on what works for a panel. And surprisingly, uh a data focused panel is not doesn't grab people.

John Sulaitis 10:22

Turns out it doesn't fill the seats.

Matt DeVoe 10:26

When we give a data-filled uh panel, we we didn't get people showing up too much. So we pivoted to like how can we still show off the data and the list and the and but have it very focused on one particular artist. So we did this for the first time in Chicago at C2E2 with Jenny Frizen. And that went and it went fantastic. We had a full room, we gave away a lanyard that she designed, and it was only limited to like 250. So, like we haven't seen one show up on eBay, so uh I guess people are keeping them. Um, but it went really well because we really got to dive into her backstory through the journey of showing her books. So, not your typical tell us about yourselves, how did you get into it? We went book by book, some of her book models and went into it via via that way. It was a really fun insight to the covers, really fun insight to her artist journey. So we we extended that to uh Carla Cohen and Lucio Perillo, their husband and wife, very successful popular artists in the space. Uh Lucio Perillo um is is started in um Spain, and he was uh a big name there and kind of then crossed over to the US market, and he's he's definitely a premier artist here for the I um I was familiar with with Lucio Perello and then I did some research on Carla Cohen, found out they're married, and I was scrolling their both of their Instagrams last night, and it's like on another level the artistic talent I'm staring at.

Badr Milligan 12:02

Like like uh painted quality, lifelike. I mean, the the image, I mean, there was an absolute Batman cover, I think he did, that is insane how photorealistic it looks. And then the vampirella stuff, I mean, yeah, you couldn't have picked like two more talented you know artists.

Matt DeVoe 12:18

No, and they're they're full-blown paintings, too.

Badr Milligan 12:21

Yeah, wow.

John Sulaitis 12:22

They just go all out. They um the cool thing about like these types of interviews is like Matt was saying, we get to ask these fun questions. Like when we were talking to Jenny Frasen over at C2E2, we did a panel with her. Um, she shared a story about like her for the first time her comic was in a comic book shop, she bought it, jumped in her car, and she was holding it up out the window of her car to people, and people were like, Who cares? Like, this is me, I have a comic book. You know, but like all these little like tidbits that we see their art, we don't know them, you know, and all of a sudden you get their story. And like we always ask, you know, how'd you become an artist in for comic books? What comics are you collecting? Like what what defines your style? And you get these really cool stories about like, you know, how they came up and and why they're excited about it. So it's fun. I think I think it's gonna be a fun interview.

Matt DeVoe 13:05

Yeah, so this interview style has worked well for us um for our panels, and it's just such anything was an experiment. And because it worked well, we're like, this is what we're going to do for every panel moving forward, because it's really engaging for the artist and really engaging for our users and shows off the site. It does everything that we wanted it to do while you know having fun ourselves.

John Sulaitis 13:28

That's cool. Yeah, the cool thing about cover prices because we collect so much data and have so many comics over almost a million comics in the database. We literally have a lot of these artists' collections and they don't even know. They've done so many that they forget that they've done this many comments. Yeah. And so when we're going through it, it's almost like a memory lane kind of conversation because they're just like, oh my God, I have you have that first one? Oh, or they'll correct us. They're like, Oh, actually, that's not my first one. My first one's this magazine that no one ever knows about. And so it's really fun. It's really kind of a cool thing.

Matt DeVoe 13:57

We did an interview with David Nakayama, and we're like, Hey, did you know you just broke a thousand comics this month? He's like, I hadn't he had no, like, no clue how how many covers he had ever done, but we keep track of that. So we're like, here's how many covers you have produced.

Badr Milligan 14:14

And I've definitely run into that uh as well uh throughout the years, interviewing different uh, especially on the on the artist side, is that you're right. It's like I think because comics can be such a fast-paced thing, it's like onto the next project. You know, I've I've got maybe 10 projects on my plate, and I'm I might not remember as as well as like say someone that maybe doesn't, there's more focus work. But it's always interesting when you do come across, I find that writers specifically, uh, who did I recently have? I think Erica Schultz uh is so as a name that comes to mind as a recent interview I did where it feels like writers do a really good job of cataloging their uh bibliographies and work. And I'm always curious about maybe what's the big difference between that. But this sounds amazing. I think that's a really great approach to doing a panel, being able to talk about, you know, the data that you guys collect. It's like a good like middle ground between like, hey, we're gonna, you know, talk about obviously uh what cover price, you know, the the features and things, but also like put a spotlight on like the you know the the the reason why we even have this app. And I think that speaks to the out-of-the-box thinking that that you guys have going on over there at cover price, which I I enjoy. Not only do you guys do your main job really well, you guys, you know, are able to tell me the value of my collection and and what my comic books are worth. You guys do that very well. But then you do a bunch of other things really well, and specifically content creation and editorial. Like you guys have some really well-written articles and and regular weekly recurring content, like the weekly new comic book day report. You guys have a weekly crowd-funded comic highlights report, you know, the one-year reflectives, you know, where's this comic at now? You know, a year later. I think all of that is great. And it makes cover price more than just a uh, you know, a collection management or a value indicator. It's like this kind of ecosystem in this platform to champion comics. It provides an interesting way to talk about value, collectability, you know, the impact of new and old. I mean, it gives old comics like a platform to still be relevant. Like, when did you know you wanted cover price to be more than just a collection management tool?

John Sulaitis 16:23

Um, I I I'll jump to the origin because it's kind of I think it's kind of relevant. But um, Matt and I have known each other since like second grade. We've uh we met literally playing on a jungle gym at elementary school. Um, and ever since then, what we did when we were kids was go play video games at the bowling alley and go next door to the you know the comic shop called Graffiti, pick up a couple comic books. And like that was our youth, basically. And Matt went into entertainment. I went into like uh UX design and website stuff. And when Matt came over, like back in 2016, Matt came over, we're playing video games brothers. He's an adult. Damn it. Real quick, well, yeah, I didn't know.

Badr Milligan 17:04

Where's all this taking place?

John Sulaitis 17:05

Like this is in uh Hermosa Beach, uh, California. And Matt was in uh Westchester, California, over near LAX Airport area. And um, yeah, I was working at uh as VP of a uh of UX at a digital agency down in Hermosa. And so Matt came over, we're hanging out, and he's like, dude, you know that NYX number three that you have? It's worth about like it's like a it's almost a thousand bucks. And it blew my mind. Blew my mind. I was like, I just finished watching it was after the 2008 like money cry, you know, the the housing bubble kind of stuff, and there is the um, there's a the movie The Big Short or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so my mind was thinking financial stuff, and Matt was like, Yeah, that's worth a thousand, a thousand bucks. And I was like, how did something in my house that I have is worth that? And I didn't know about it. That's a three dollar comic book. And so, you know, I was asking Matt, I'm like, is there anything you we can use to like track this? Like, how do I, I don't not everyone has a Matt in their like in their life, you know? And so um started thinking about it. And then we just kind of started building the you know, the infrastructure. My background's all web design. So I started building out all the layouts, and Matt and I would come in over, come over and do like workshops together and just start like, what should we call this thing? And anyway, long story short, the premise was put it in your collection, set it and forget it. We'll do all the work, we'll we'll track actual sales data from multiple online marketplaces, eBay, heritage and auctions, and a bunch of other ones, aggregate all that sales data, create a fair market value based on the latest sales with some sort of magic and weighing of it so that it's actually relevant. And we'll do it for raw comics and for graded comics. And that was that was the genesis and literally the beginning of what it was. After that, there was so much data coming through and coming in that we started off. We're like, well, we have a top 10 because we're collecting this data, we see this data and we see stuff trending. We have a top 10. And Matt just ran with that uh from the content side and just kept adding articles based on the data, probably to his dismay, because now he never he never sleeps because it really is just 28 articles a month, four live YouTube shows a week. But it spawned from the top 10 in the shaker article. Um, and I'll pass it over to you, Matt, to get back to the question of how did we make the decision to get into the content side.

Matt DeVoe 19:10

Yeah, I mean, uh I would say either some of our competitors in this space either don't do any content or they do a lot of like um white papers type stuff. Here's the state of the industry, here's overview stuff of like the bronze comics in today's market. Like it's very top-level stuff. I knew I wanted our focus to be around navigating the current market because what we also try to do is serve the current industry. Because we're an aftermarket site, how can the other side of us serve, how can that aftermarket data serve the front end of the industry of how do we get new books in front of people? Um, and how do the uh how does the whole cycle come together? Which is like paying attention to books at FOC, ordering books through your shop, picking up those shops in a comic book day, adding them to your collection, checking out what's trending the next day, go back to your shop, pick up those books that were like you missed, come back, add those to your collection. And then our Friday articles are shaker report. Here's books that you didn't even know existed that are selling for new all-time high prices. And then and then an FLC report. Again, it just goes, it kind of comes back around. And then we do these big convention focused reports, and and then we do our crowdfunding report. We're the only ones, I think, in the industry that do a crowdfunding focused article. It's again just to give exposure to all these independent creators who don't get any exposure outside their own little Instagrams, right? I say little, you know, it seems so demeaning. I mean, they they make like hundreds of thousands of dollars on Kickstarter. Very large Instagrams. Uh but like so the point is they still don't have outside their circle, it doesn't get past that, like they're they're direct users. So a lot of what we try to do is build exposure to books that are coming out, books to artists to pay attention to, trends more is is to get and also to teach, um, I guess our standpoint is through all of this, I call it life cycle content, um, sustainable purchasing, right? Because when we say that is it's ideal that you're not chasing these books in the aftermarket when they come out. We try to get in front of it. Hey, here's some books to pay attention to now at FOC so you can call your shop, get them for cover price, get them for a low, like if it's a variant, a predetermined value, like I want this for twenty dollars. If you order it, I'll pay it. You know, can we do it for X amount? Like this should all be done at that point and not chasing these things down in the aftermarket and paying a premium. That does happen, and that's fine. That's okay. We want people to be doing this for years to come and not to burn out. Um, so a lot of our focus is just that you're teaching people what to look for and in all these different cycles, whether you're digging through a long box through dollar bins or at a garage sale or at an antique market or you're ordering new stuff, you know, what should you pay attention to? And not just value. Wise, but just good books to read and good books to pick up and interesting things that are happening in the space that that are worth your time.

Badr Milligan 22:08

I I guess I'd be curious to learn, you know, since launching cover price, you know, you mentioned uh 2017, 2018 timeframe. So we're looking at like eight, nine years of sales data and just a ton of other data that you guys have amassed. I guess what has surprised you the most about modern collectors? Like, is there like any interesting trends in collector behavior or data points that maybe it might reveal more about the comic book industry or comic book enthusiasts that we might not see at the surface level? Like Asian.

Matt DeVoe 22:38

The trends is that the trends are always changing. That's that's the honest answer. It's like people, um, you know, there's there was this commentary um post endgame when Eternals came out and a bunch of other content came out, when those did poorly cinematically, or they were poorly received, maybe they did fine in theaters, people stopped um speculating and investing in Marvel content through through some time. And then at that point, the the industry was like comics are dead because they saw this big dip in those Marvel keys, and they saw people stepping away from those books. People at conventions are like no one's buying these, and to them, in their in this bubble, they're like comics were dead. While we were seeing data, they just moved on to other things, they moved to independence, they moved to nostalgia, they moved to pre-code horror, they moved to like 90s books like Youngblood and Wildcats and Spawn. Like they just the market shifted, and they didn't some of these people who were making these comments couldn't see that shift because they were in this Marvel bubble. And then now we're in a trend where you know the trends used to be okay, we'd have a few years of where people are only in there for the covers. For the most part, people are speculating on uh cinematic content, and they're only buying like this just got a show, this got a movie. They're following those trends. Then they're in a market where it's a reader-only market. This is when you're like in the 2011s when it was like Walking Dead and Morning Glories and Saga and Why of the Last Man, where people were just reading, like wanted these books to read. We're in a market now that blows everything out of the water where everyone's doing all of these things now at the same time.

John Sulaitis 24:24

We um we're we're launching um on the side an update to the comic detail page, and we're actually gonna have some cool graphs and stuff like that. You can actually track like um, you know, the value of a comic over time. And the one thing that stands out on pretty much every major book is you get a little bump, well, not even a little, a big bump across like uh 2021 to 2022, that whole covety time. And I think that just really had a huge influx of collectors coming in who then to that point were focused on the content, who then bought based on content. And then they they eventually matured and turned into, you know, like Matt saying, you know, collectors outside going to Indy and stuff like that. But one trend that I noticed more and more, and we did a whole talk on this, was the explosion of variants more and more. And for the this, the modern age of comics in the last like decade, and maybe probably the last two decades, um, you see a switch from you know 1990s where it's like, oh, we have this you know foil cover, oh, it's amazing. And you see this, you know, embossed cover to now where it's like absolute Batman has like, you know, a hundred or so variants, and it's normal. It's normal. You know, you start seeing stray, stray dogs or um some of the amazing Spider-Man stuff that they do, like promotional stuff. Instead of just an A and B and C cover, maybe, you get, you know, your Chase cover, you get your limited uh, you know, edition covers, you get the convention covers, you got the reprints, and then you have, you know, facsimiles. And it's just it really exploded more and more. And we tracked, I think when we looked at like San Diego Comic-Con 2025, 2026, it went up at the con itself by like what, 700 comics or something.

Badr Milligan 25:56

Like there's crazy amount of growth uh just in the in the Yeah, I don't think it'd be hyperbole to say that we are living in an age of variants and and surprisingly, like blind bags. Like the amount of blind bags that I see every week I go into the shop, it's like a new blind bag, a new campaign that that's revolving around uh uh variants. Uh just out of curiosity, and you know, just I'd love to hear your personal opinion. You know, what are your thoughts on you know this emphasis on variants and blind bags? I think as someone that's like uh kind of sees himself as a reader first and collector second, yeah. I'm always kind of cautious about the level of emphasis on just it feels like most of the talking point is about, you know, the cover or the blind bag gimmick. It's rarely about the story, the creative team. I would love to hear, you know, your thoughts on that.

Matt DeVoe 26:42

A lot of it comes back to sustainable purchasing, right? We've seen people who take advantage of the blind bags where they'll put in a lot of junk. And, you know, maybe there's one or two good covers and you pay twenty dollars for it, and most people are getting covers they don't want, right? Except for the few that hit. Then you have some people that are like there's some companies out there that just put all good stuff in it where everything's a hit, and then the chase is just gravy, like and they and they price it appropriately, right? And you have good, like that it has good aftermarket value for it. And then I've seen other people like uh Skybound and Image and DC and Marvel have all done it recently. Like Daredevil was very popular recently. I mean, it was fun to buy that for I think it was ten dollars. It was either five or ten, it was pretty affordable, and you would get a variant cover or or a standard cover, potentially. I think it was all variant covers, but then you also got the chase. I know even for myself, I was not planning to pick up a copy of Daredevil number one, but I ended up picking up four of those blind bags because I just like I like the gamble, right? Yeah, I like the chase. Yeah, just a matter of like, okay, I'll read this, but while I do it, I like the chase. I would love to get a sketch, I would like to try to get that sketch. So it got me, where others may have not, because I knew that there wasn't enough in there for me to do. It's it just it all depends how responsible uh publishers are with it. Like, how much are they giving back to people, other than some people will use it? Hey, I have five covers, three are terrible, two, one is okay, one is great. I'm gonna put them all in a blind bag and then just get rid of them, all of my supply by doing it that way, right? When there's only maybe two hits. That's where you'll see a lot of people start to like, you know, you'll see people stay away from those. Um I think Mark Spears did a monstrous one where like every one was five bucks, and people were buying 50 to 100 of those because my local comic shop cannot keep it like in stock at all.

Badr Milligan 28:50

Yeah, yeah.

John Sulaitis 28:51

There's you're appealing to uh, I mean, the comic book person, the persona, is that we have three people basically, aside from publishers and retailers, but it's the reader, the collector, and the speculator. Um, and like you said, you're the reader, but a reader can very easily go up that ladder and be like, well, this comic is worth something. I'm gonna put it in a bag and board, you know, and now you're a collector. And then all of a sudden that collector goes, Oh, wait a minute, that comic's worth a thousand bucks. Maybe I'll sell it because I need some cash. And now, now all of a sudden you start speculating a little bit. But with the blind bag uh stuff, I think the natural psychology of a lot of collectors and collectors in general is we're treasure hunters. You know, we're trying to find stuff, we're trying to find that that little thing. And it really, it really scratches that itch, I think, of a slightly addiction, slightly fun, gambling. And when you have the blind bag, it it really does motivate people. But like Matt was saying, it's really an unregulated market, um, collectibles in general, right? And you know, we have we have fun stories just from like when we we first launched people calling us and saying, like, I purchased this for $10,000. You should add that price to your collection, your thing. And we'd be like, we'd tell him, like, well, who sold what why? He goes, Well, it's like a $5 comic. Why'd you pay $10,000 for that? Oh, here's the person who sold it to me. Hi, I sold it to him. And we're like, wait, you guys are in league with each other. You're just trying to put it on the bottom. Wow, okay. I didn't even think so now we have a lot of we have a lot of strict like regulations on that. But I'm just saying that it's mostly an unregulated, you know, type of uh collectible industry thing. And blind bags also run the gambit of being shady blind bags versus more legit blind bags. And I think the industry is still figuring it out. And Matt, like Matt was saying, sustainability. Like if you want to sustain this, you have to give a reward. And of all the publishers out there, I think Boom is doing the best in terms of like their Sic Tech uh covers where they did like, you're gonna get one of these three, you will get one of these two, and you might get this one. Like, you know, there's there's ways to do it where you're gonna get some shit covers that you don't want, then you're gonna get some great ones that you can have, and then you might get this other one that is impossible, but it's like playing the lottery. And and everyone's gonna be able to do that.

Badr Milligan 30:53

Are we allowed to customize by the way? Yes, you have we do have you feel free to let her uh feel free to let them fly, man. I uh I I guess I've never thought, I mean, I I've I guess I have thought about it, but I've definitely seen instances about like shady characters, you know, trying to uh um manipulate the market, uh rig the game. I've never thought about it from that perspective. Is there another instance where you guys have had to roll out a feature or an update as a response to like, hey, we really want to make sure that you know we're on the up and up, you know, there's some shady characters and you know, uh uh schemes?

John Sulaitis 31:33

Our process, just to give some insight, is we bring in tens of thousands of sales per day. I think it's around like 25,000 or so. And then of those, we algorithmically go through and search for keywords and then put them in certain categories. Then we have um a team of people, if we can't, if this, like for example, if a comic gets categorized with something that's selling for $10, but this says it's a thousand dollars, it gets outlier detected and it gets put, doesn't go make it to the site. It goes for a manual review. We have a team of five data integrity specialists going through and checking those sales and verifying it. Then we use verification techniques from a lot of these marketplaces to make sure that they're accurate sales because some places um will say, hey, it's sold for a thousand dollars, but then you'll look at the actual buy value and it's like $700. So they kind of inflate it a little bit or just report the the what it was sold, what it was listed at, not the actual sales price. So we correct that and make sure that the market is as honest as possible. And in actually just this week, we've integrated an image recognition engine into our flow. So now we're gonna be able to bring in probably like a hundred literally a hundred percent more sales that are 93 to 97% more accurate, um, which is gonna be a game changer for I think the values on our site and the volume of data that we'll be able to collect. So so just to like our approach to that has been we we're not police, people can do whatever they want, but we're not gonna bring in stuff that we think is uh shady. And there's a ton of different things in with the data that we're collecting that we can actually see shade, like a first-time seller who's never sold a book before sells a $10,000 book for no reason. Interesting, gets flagged. We look at the Raiders' um rating in their platform. So say they're coming in from eBay if they're a five-star versus a two-star, one star, we're like, you know, one's more questionable than the other. So all these different things play into a uh an approach to try to make this as honest and as fair as possible without inflating the price of anything.

Matt DeVoe 33:25

A lot of times, oh, people will come up to us and be like, hey, you're missing the sale. It was a thousand dollar sale, and we'd be like, No, that sale didn't go through. And that sale was that book was relisted. But other sources will show that sale that it went through. And so people will point out that our sales are wrong because we didn't put that one sale or missing sales when uh a lot of people don't realize some of the background of some of the stuff that's happening of what's happening in behind the scenes uh um in that. We we see it.

Badr Milligan 34:00

And I mean, yeah, it's it's a little frustrating, but we tell people, you know, well, I like hearing this due diligence because as someone, like I said, that is only recently, maybe in the last three, four years, really looked at his collection and was like, How much uh how much am I really sitting on? And I think that the need for that arrived from um I got limited space. All right, there's only so many comics I can store in this apartment. So I he looks crowded. I was telling man, if I turned this camera around, I'd be in my mom would be embarrassed for me. She'd be like, that is not the sun I really um but yeah, the need arrived because I just was sitting on a lot of comics that I just generally did not have any need for. Like I picked the ones that meant something to me. I I keep those stories. Your point, John. Like, yes, like I am a reader first, but there is that side of me that's like, well, I I spent money on this, and if it can return the investment, if it's worth something, I'm probably going to take better care of it, right?

John Sulaitis 34:52

It's college fund, the classic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Badr Milligan 34:54

Yeah, quote unquote college fund. But you know, uh, the need arise a couple years ago when I was trying to just downsize make space. And uh I saw things on Facebook Marketplace all the time. I had never tried selling a whole short box full of comics. And uh it it came in handy to have both CLZ and uh cover. Now I sound like a commercial, but this is like real life experience. Like it saved me because it gave me just a general number. It was like, hey, you know, I scanned every single book in my in the short box. I had like a rough estimate of fair market value, and I used that. You know, that was my justification. Because if you know anything about Facebook Marketplace, you're going to deal with a lot of lowballers. But like being able to have information and data, uh it went a long way. It was like, hey, look, I'm not asking for a lot. This is what it could go for according to this. Here's some screenshots. And I found that a really, really valuable. So it's great to hear that there is that you guys are doing the due diligence on the back end. For someone like me, that's like, I don't have the time to scroll through a hundred eBay listings and make sure that you know it's uh it's a sale that went through. It it's not like a ploy or some sort of scheme. Like that is reassuring to hear that you know you guys uh have so many like checks and balances. That's awesome.

Matt DeVoe 36:03

It's a price guy, not a Bible, right? So like when you show when we show you your collection value, it it is a starting point because you as a seller are gonna want uh the the highest price you can get, and a buyer is gonna want the lowest price that they can get. So you're gonna get to a spot where you're like, okay, all these books that you say are worth X amount of dollars, I would only sell them for a dollar, right? Like I'm I will buy your collection for a fourth of the price. Like whatever, whatever that is. But at least you start with some understanding and you come to a point where you're willing to sell it for a particular price.

John Sulaitis 36:41

The good thing about I think what we do is like when we first launched, we saw other competitors who were creating algorithms to just guesstimate like what a comic's worth. And they'd put like, oh, it's a 10, so it's it's worth 10x, whatever this amount. And you're like, that know nothing comic book that no one cares about is worth over a couple thousand? Like that's that doesn't make any sense. So we built our system based only on actual sales data. So there's no speculation, there's no guesswork. It's like, this is what it's sold for. Will you get that? Maybe, maybe, but that's that's literally what the market said it's worth right now. Um, and so that's what we try to do. And like Matt's saying, like it really is that barometer of like, here's your starting point. Like if you sell your entire collection at once to a retailer, you're probably gonna knock off 30% of what it is, right? Because that's what their profit margin is. But if you're selling it like you did, one-on-one uh eBay marketplace, that's where it really shines because you're like, you're gonna get the most value for it. And at least now you have that like that security and knowing that this is what it's selling for.

Badr Milligan 37:34

Yeah, I think you said it best. It's a good starting point. It gives you some legs, it gives you some confidence, like going into a negotiation and you and you go from there rather than being like, uh, I don't know, there's 50 books in here at $4. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's come a long way and it's really easy. Um, I do want to have a little fun. I got a fun question for you guys. Just because I feel like you guys know your data like the back of your hand. I imagine that you guys are like, one, you got obviously you guys are inundated with so many different data points, but just out of curiosity, when you think about 2026, like I said, we're recording uh July 16th, when you think about 2026, what are some of the the the Absolute Batman?

John Sulaitis 38:11

I was just gonna say nothing absolute Batman, which would not be the wrong answer, right?

Badr Milligan 38:15

Which is not a wrong answer. But I am curious, like what books do you think define 2026 in terms of like you know, trending hot sellers? Like, obviously, absolute Batman is, I think, like the right answer, but what are some of the other books that would be uh, you know, in that room with it?

Matt DeVoe 38:30

Oh, I mean, it absolute Batman is is such a loud book in this market, it is absorbing everything. Let me uh real quick, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Badr Milligan 38:39

When's the last time that that you guys have seen something, uh a property, a book perform like Absolute Batman? When's the last time?

Matt DeVoe 38:48

To this degree where it was so comprehensive and across multiple titles. New 52, when Batman, when when DC relaunched to their new 52, it had a lot of spotty um market trends. It wasn't across the board and it wasn't for every issue, but that was where you got the quarterbows and some of like that was First Snyder and Capullo's run, right? Um, that really put them on the market. There was a lot of success in the 52, but not even to the extent of the absolute uh universes. If I if you had to go comprehensively across like one title after another, you really have to go back to the early 2000s of the Ultimate Line when that started. Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men, the Ultimates, all those were huge successes, like massive successes, and all those books and their variants were very expensive in the aftermarket. So it really kind of goes back to that when you look at this whole big picture of the absolute line itself. Um, it really goes back that far.

John Sulaitis 39:51

Yeah, a lot of a lot of like hits and misses, but like Batman Dark, like for me, is it was that was that to that hit our top, right? Batman is it dark dark, right? Dark patterns? Uh no, the the Bat Wang. Oh uh which was that one? Batman, it's Batman Dark, right?

Matt DeVoe 40:07

No, no. It's now you have Batman Dark in my head. What the heck? I forget what I was talking about. So you like washed it out. I'm like, I know if there's a proper name now, but all I see is Wangs in my head.

Badr Milligan 40:20

Oh, it was Batman Damned. Batman damned.

John Sulaitis 40:22

Damn, that's what it was. My bad. That one hit our our top 10 list for like months, months at a time. And then uh one singular book. That wasn't that was a singular book, yeah. And you see, you know, when we first started all the Avenger stuff, every every single week it seemed like a new announcement or a trailer or a casting call went out, and that would really move the market. But like, yeah, I personally I don't think I can recall anything that was similar to the absolute line. Uh, even for the Eisner Awards, uh uh Absolute Martian Manhunter um is is was was nominated and stuff like that. Like there's a ton of and the covers and all this stuff are literally what people are voting to give the most prestigious award in comic books towards. So it's not it's not just fluff. It's like I remember when I first, it's right behind me, actually, right there. But when I when I first read it, I was just like, ooh, whoa, this is a totally different take on Batman and and their relationship. And oh my god, they went there, they broke like this continuity out the window. And it was so good that Matt and I actually got uh the DC infinite um thing so we could start reading all the apps that we could read them digitally because we're like, oh my god, this is pretty cool. It was great, it's great, it's a really good story, and it's not fluff, it's really like a defining uh shift in the character.

Matt DeVoe 41:34

Brought a lot of new users, uh, a lot of new collectors to the market. For example, there was someone that we were just hearing the shared story. Um, they were in line for um, I think dragada's or cantana's signature, something like that. Um, and there's a huge line for it. And next to them, I don't know who this artist was, but it was there's another very popular artist next to them with no line. And people were like, I'm like, oh, why don't you go over why don't you go for them? That would be great to get they don't and they're like, oh, they don't have any absolute Batman titles. Like they were only there for absolute Batman. They didn't care about any other creator, they just want they were just there for absolute Batman. Um to that point, there's already over 50 individual covers that say me out uh Comic-Con 26 for the absolute Batman series.

Badr Milligan 42:25

I think I checked my um my CLZ and cover price this morning. Just I was like, oh man, it's been uh it's in full transparency, it's been I have not logged any new comics that I've purchased uh in the app uh this year at all. So it's based on like you know, last up to last year. But like all of my top most valuable books was Absolute Batman. It was like the Ash Cam that I got, you know, the issue one, uh issue two A. I was like, God, it really is, it's it's not hype. It's like it's it's real.

John Sulaitis 42:56

They have um, I'm just looking at the site right now. Uh for Absolute Batman one, uh, there's 82 variant covers that we've tracked.

Badr Milligan 43:02

Wow. You know, I'm I'm glad that you brought up how, you know, uh uh casting rumors and movie announcements, you know, sometimes uh uh give books a certain bump. I know that we used to see like books skyrocket the second a movie or a show was announced, you know, online it was called like the MCU bump. You know, anything MCU related would give books a bump. I guess is that still as powerful as it was like say five years ago or post-endgame, or collectors being more selective about what they chase?

Matt DeVoe 43:32

Oh, very selective. So if it we do have this article, it's our top 10 reflective where we go back uh one to five years, depending like so the first week of the month, it's the one year later, second week is two years later. And a lot of the stuff five, four, or three years ago, were all content driven spec books. And some of them were just wild. They were just like, Oh, here's the elementals in Spider Man Far From Home, right? And then all these elemental based books were. Moving and multi-man was trending, and Hydro Man was trending. And it turned out after you watched the film that those were all busts. It was just mysterious. Spoiler. It was mysterious. So there was a lot of lessons learned. That's the whole point of that article is what lessons have you learned? Is like, okay, this wild speculation and wild spending is not sustainable spending, right? And a lot of people have learned those lessons the hard way over at least a good solid 10 years of that wild marvel speculation. Because there would be like something would get announced, and for a year those books would go crazy price-wise. Like uh Eternals was, I think at in a 9.8, I got as high as $2,500. It is currently worth about $250. And so that's that's how hard that market swung. So I think people have learned those lessons. It's not that those are bad books, it's not that those are bad first appearances. It's just that people went so deep, so heavy into this thing, thinking that this was going to be this the Eternals are showing up, they're here for the next 15 years, and now the Eternals is going to be a household name, and everyone's going to have eternal t-shirts, and now you know these characters are going to be. That's what that spec was based on. And a lot of that stuff didn't happen because the brand was mishandled for a lot of years, and it was it got a little, it got a little lost, right? A lot of people were love some stuff and did love other other things, and you know, that kind of led to all those lessons. There is today still some reactions. So, like if there's something that appears in Spider-Man, those books will pop off, they will do well, but not as hard and not for as long as they used to. So now for maybe a couple weeks, they'll stay up there and they won't quite settle down, they'll be higher than they were. Yeah.

John Sulaitis 45:56

Yeah, that's one thing Matt always points out to me is like you see the rise in the fall after content, but the fall, like look at Shang-Chi or look at Morbius or anything like that, or Lobo, like nothing, nothing, nothing. Boom. And then all of a sudden, it's still, even though it crashed, it's still significantly higher than what you would pay before the announcement or before the the you know, they're in the uh Z of you know, whatever.

Matt DeVoe 46:18

It's still a good exposure.

John Sulaitis 46:19

Yeah, yeah. It's good marketing.

Matt DeVoe 46:21

Yeah, but but there is some element of that if just understanding how the market works. And we always tell, like, when we look back at the reflectives, they're like, Well, all this stuff is is dead. I'm like, it's not dead. The reason why they're on this list is because they were available to purchase, right? There are there are plenty of copies out there, especially if there were new books, people grab multiples, and then what you do is like if there's a book trending for 20, 30, 40 plus dollars, you're and there's a stack in front of you, you're gonna grab multiple, right? Um, if your store allows it, hope. And then you're gonna come back with those copies. But it turns out everyone else did that, and so you know, now you have a high supply that keeps growing, and demand can if it doesn't keep up, that price starts to fall, and then that price settles and it drops, and then you can't sell those extra copies. And so what happens when we do our reflective is all supply and demand. When we go back, it's not that there are bad books or bad speculation or bad reads. It was just that there's so much supply out there now because they're everyone grabbed these copies and demand can't sustain that. Um, and and that's just how those new books work when there's a big trend like that. The books that do well are those books from 10, 15 years ago that no one was paying attention to that had small print runs.

Badr Milligan 47:39

What are some of those books? Like, like when what what comes to mind uh in terms of books easy one. Go ahead, hit it, man.

Matt DeVoe 47:46

Invincible. So Invincible was a small printer run series all the way to they they took a loss on that series, Robert Kirkman and Otley, just to get it the story finished all the way through. They didn't have enough readers to make it profitable by the end, but they were just doing it to get it out, and now that entire run, uh literally from start to finish, almost every issue is um, you know, the lowest one is $200. I mean, Invincible One is now a seven, almost a $7,000 9.8. I'm I'm still so mad, Matt.

Badr Milligan 48:20

John, I'm right there with you.

John Sulaitis 48:22

I I got Invincible One, and the of all the comics in all of my life that I've ever purchased, I didn't look at the cover. I just grabbed it on the shelf and bought it. It had a printing error where the the thing was smeared, and I went and got it graded. And what was it, Matt? Like a like a 6.5. 6.5. And I'm like, so it's still over a thousand dollars.

Matt DeVoe 48:40

It's still worth a thousand dollars in that great book that came out like 15 years ago.

John Sulaitis 48:46

Like I I had it. I had that. I could have bought you know, it was right there.

Badr Milligan 48:50

The amount of times I've had Invincible One in my hand for like someone was asking 200 bucks, 500 bucks, and I was like, Are you crazy? This is invincible. This isn't, you know, Spider-Man. Are you crazy now? I'm like, ha ha ha. Someone is out there laughing at me big time.

Matt DeVoe 49:07

I mean, that's a perfect example of that. Was the low printed series? It was always fan loved, right? People loved the book, loved the story, loved the characters. The content hit and the content was successful, grew that exposure. Now the demand can't keep up because the demand is too high and can't keep up with the supply.

Badr Milligan 49:27

I hope my economics teacher from high school is listening in and just appreciating this very I mean, like supply and demand. Like, you know, I guess uh what's helpful about this conversation, it demystifies a lot of like the collecting side of things for me, where it is like it comes down to like supply and demand hype. And I think that's what interests me about the rise of the speculation, just like the re-emphasis on the collectability side, which has always been a part of comic. You know, we look at like the 90s and and and you know, you mentioned the early 2000s, it's always been uh integral. I've always said that comic books to me is is the best medium because you got pictures and words, but then you have like all of this nuance when it comes to like the economics of it, you know, the consumerism side of it. Like it lives really on this delicate balance of like art, but also consumerism and how like that keeps one uh you know uh lifted and vice versa.

John Sulaitis 50:21

It is it is interesting. Like it's it's passion. It's passion and it's and then it's you know, Matt and I have always talked, you know, always talk about this. Like magazines went digital, newspapers went digital, but comics can't go digital really. Uh if you're a reader, sure. But like they inherently have value and explosive value for in some cases, you know. So it's like it really is one of the only mediums that your economics teacher would be like, yeah, you know, there's limited of my my my cousin when right when we started cover price, he calls me. Like, this is like literally working on like the prototype and getting the MVP out. And he's like, Hey, my uh my wife uh father passed away. We went through his garage, box of comics. Can I show you some? And I'm like, Yeah. He shows me Captain America number one with him punching Hitler on the face. Oh wow. Right. First, first uh Green Lantern, first Wonder Woman. And I'm like, Do you do you even know what you have? But my point being is like, and he sold them through Heritage Auctions for like, you know, a hundred, I think he did 160,000 or something for the Captain America, something crazy. But the point is, those comics, they're not making any offer right now. Yeah, that was I was like, all the money's in cover price, Max. We have no money.

Matt DeVoe 51:32

We probably would have been more successful if we made the offer.

John Sulaitis 51:35

Yeah, that's true. That's fair. It would have been easier. That's true. Yeah, yeah, it would have. Um, but but like those comics were destroyed. There were papers being shredded, you know, for the war for efforts. There were, you know, they had to survive time. This thing's over like 80 years old, you know. It's so it's like it's 100% supply and demand, especially when you get to the older stuff.

Badr Milligan 51:55

So okay, I want to ask you guys a question about uh grails. I feel like the phrase modern grail or just grail in general gets thrown a lot. And like I said, we're we're living in an era of a limited print run, store exclusive variants, you know, blind bags. How do you personally define what a true modern grail is?

John Sulaitis 52:15

There's been a lot of uh like with modern comics, the moment a new character is introduced, people are like, that's key, right? And we have we have if you go to Cover Price, we have a website, you know, we have a list where it's like key comics. You know, if you want to find a key comic, go there. And people write in all the time, they're like, oh, this is the second time Wolverine popped his claws when he was combing his hair. That's key. And we're like, no, it's not key. And um, you know, it's it's it's a it's a challenge because who's you know, what defines, like you said, a grail versus a key? I know uh CLZ has a really nice um designation of like major and minor, and then grail, I believe, um, which I think is perfect, especially in in light of the current market. But for me personally, a key is a comic book that has a um notable incident that has stood the test of time. It has to have time behind it, otherwise it's just like you don't know. You might just be like who totally cares. Like you know what I mean? Um, what was there's some characters? I know DC put out uh uh what was her name? Uh Naomi, right? Naomi. Like that was the key character, but it's kind of like she didn't do anything. Nothing ever happened with her beyond that. It was her first appearance. There's other characters that pop out that like, yeah, you just they seem like they're gonna be huge, and then nothing happens. So yeah, for me it's it's notable event, time, and of course, fan interest. Like if people talk about it, then that's like obviously something that's uh in in demand.

Matt DeVoe 53:40

For me, um, I mean, grail is a personalized is it's a personal thing, right? It's it's your your personal goal object, right? Is your personal achievement, your person, your per your coveted prize, right? So to me that word means it's more personalized. So when people say that's my grail or that's a grail, I kind of I kind of define that as they mean that's my that's the book I want more than anything. And so a lot of you know, these these a lot of this terminology is like there's no definitive source that's ever put a finger on like this is what this means. Like uh this is what you know we when you say grail, it means the defin, you know, there's no no one has done that. Um so a lot of people use these terms loosely. And when they say key, it's also been defined differently over the past 10-15 years, where to John's point, it used to mean something of significance uh culturally for comics, like first appearance of Wolverine and First Appearance of Spider-Man. Where now it is a little more broad because it means something notable. That's what that's been d digressed to. So it's it's kind of hard to define these things uh definitively. Like for me, like if I say that's uh that's a grail, it's that means that's what I my interpretation of a coveted book.

John Sulaitis 55:01

I I think that's a good point, Matt, because I we have come across collectors who collect every random thing, people who collect calend books with calendars on them, people who collect, you know, you know, the red dress girl, the uh, you know, kind of that kind of cover. Girl in a red dress. Girl in a red dress, um, milkshakes, you know, like birthdays, your your birthday year collector, you know, who just collect stuff from the year that you were born, like stuff like that. It's really, it really is a personal hobby, which is kind of part of the fun.

Badr Milligan 55:29

Uh on that note, my buddy Um Drew, uh, as a wedding gift, gave me a short box full of nothing but wedding comics. So any comic that featured a wedding, you know, it was one of those moments, I think, John, to your point, that just showed like just the different nuances and just how granular you can get with your collection and how it really can be a reflection of your personal taste. I think even whether it's a um whether you you curate it on purpose that way, or even like subconsciously, I think you know, your collection is a reflection of like who you are and the things that you like. Uh, which leads me to my next question. Uh, you know, we're talking about grails and you know how it can be personally defined and you know, objectively defined. But from a personal perspective, when you guys think about, you know, the grails in your collections or the comic that means something to you like personally, I guess what what comes to mind? I'm curious, like what's in your collection that you guys really value for a sentimental reason rather than you know a monetary reason.

John Sulaitis 56:26

Yeah, you know, to be honest, like it I always use this whenever I go to cover price to test the site, but it's uh NYX number three because, like I said in the beginning, like that was the comic that launched Cover Price, and to me that's a huge sentimental thing. Um Invincible before Invincible and after it got hotter and hotter. I really loved that series and then um you know read through the whole thing cover to cover. Um so like that one I think was a really sentimental, fun one. Um, I love um East of West. Classic. And oh, I forget that's um, I forget the writer, uh Jonathan Hickman. Hickman, Hickman, that's right. And when he took that run on X-Men and like just blew it up, like those to me are like good stories. I'm so I was so tired of like fluffy comics that you could get through in like three minutes and be like, eh, great art or bad art or whatever, but it's like the story that the creating the world building that people were doing. Uh something skilling the children was was also a more recent one that I really fell in love with. And I mean, it's funny. I'm looking behind me because I have like every time we go to different cons, I pick up either the trade or we'll we'll get some, uh we'll buy some or get comps and all those things. And uh over the years, like there's all these Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Um, I never collected the comics, and then because we go to conventions all the time, I saw like all their covers and I was like, oh yeah, I'll just pick these up. And then it turns out that the there's a spike cover with him in red, uh, that's like the virgin, and it's worth like 500, 600 bucks right now. And it's and I I went and got it graded, and I was the census breaker. Like that was the first one on the census. So I don't know, stuff like that that I had an emotional connection to that that I got to read as a comic book. Uh, I think those are my personal ones.

Badr Milligan 58:04

So I did like, you know, I opened CLZ today, and then, you know, obviously I've got the cover price add on there. And I was like, oh, I wonder what like, you know, what valuable comics I've got, you know, which ones have like, you know, went up or down. And, you know, speaking about like just having, you know, your collection can reflect like, you know, your thing, I'm really into Street Fighter. So I've got like a bunch of Street Fighter comics, and I've got a few where the they've um a couple of years ago, Udan was doing these homage covers to other popular comics. So it was like, you know, the Age of Apocalypse X-Men number one cover, but done in a street fighter fashion and the wizard number one, you know, this wizard homage cover. And it it blows my mind every time I look at my CLZ, and it's like those are in my top 10 because of the low print run, which I had no idea. I was just collecting them because I was like uh Street Fighter, you know, homaging like famous X-Men, you know, like X-Men covers, you know, sign me up. So, you know, what I'm saying, I guess like it's been an interesting experience using CLZ and cover price, and just I don't know, like it's almost like being reintroduced to my collection, like finding out like what makes me tick, you know, as someone that, you know, like it takes you, it gives you a chance to like step back and you're like, oh wow, yeah, I guess I do collect some cool stuff.

John Sulaitis 59:19

That's a great way to look at it. It's it I should just uh make a distinction um from like CLZ and cover price because we get this all the time. Um we're we're we love CLZ. They're our partners, they were two separate businesses. If you sign up for CLZ, which is a great collection management system for comic books, you can add on cover price if you pay for a subscription to us, and we'll we'll port our valuation data into CLZ. Gotta love it. Or you go to cover price and use collection management and do it there, but both work. Uh so there's this distinction because some people think we are CLZ and we're like, oh no, no, no, it's two different companies. Yeah. But yeah, no, there's nothing like going through like when you add it to your collection and going through it, filtering and going like it's memory lane. You're like, well, those are the 90s. Oh my god, I collected all those maximum cartridges. Oh, there's death in the family. Oh my god, you know, yeah, where was I when that happened? It was it's it's pretty cool. Matt what I'm curious. I think I know what Matt's gonna say about his favorite, uh his what he collects.

Matt DeVoe 1:00:12

Uh I mean, I I don't know. I'm like, I'm all over the place. There's I I am, I would say, definitely nostalgia driven. So I do love a lot of um things I loved in the 80s and the 90s, right? So uh you know surprisingly, a lot of it's video game driven, especially NES like DuckTales. I have had like uh a San Diego Comic-Con DuckTales cover that I love. But like to your point, I love Street Fighter covers, I love Mega Man covers. Like a lot of that stuff. Like there's this one that was impossible to find. There was um I mean, I forget what year it was, but I want to say it was like 2012-ish, 2013, maybe 2014, something around there. Uh it wasn't, man, I can't, I'm blanking even who the publisher was at the time. I want to say it was IDW. Um they did this, no, it was Arching, sorry, Arching. They did a uh 12-part Mega Man Sonic uh wearing it on it. That's how nostalgia-driven ended. They did this World Collide uh. And there was a variant for so, and it was flip-flop between uh Sonic Universe, um Sonic Boom, which was another Sonic title, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mega Man, um, and it would just crisscross between all those those four titles, I think, and then another standalone issue. And there was a variant cover that they did for it where between 12 issues, then if you put all 12 issues together, it can made one connected image. And it's it's like I had to, I had to, I put when I finally got it together, I had to put it on a table, get on a ladder to take a picture of it because it was it was so big.

Badr Milligan 1:02:00

That's something that you get like shadow box. That to me is like the perfect use case for a shadow box.

Matt DeVoe 1:02:05

100%. My goal is to actually get it graded and then have a 9.8 set, then shadow box together as a giant graded set. Yeah, like okay. But but I mean it's stuff like that that I love, you know. To your point, when you're talking like, oh, there's all these nuances to it. This market's hard to get everything. Sure. Um, if you look at absolute Batman, it's it's you can't afford to buy everything. So it's nice to have something to chase like very specific. Like, I'm looking, I like Mega Man covers. I'm gonna get all the Mega Man covers. There's there's something obtainable there, right? It might be hard to do, but it's not impossible. Um it's not impossible financially. There's going to be some that are going to be really hard and very expensive, but at least you know that when you get there's like a level of feeling.

Badr Milligan 1:02:56

There's a journey there, yeah. There's a journey there that might be a multi-year or whatever how long it may be. But I think those are sometimes the the funnest part of collecting is are those issues like I speaking about Street Fighter, there is one issue in particular where I don't have the cover, and I've had an eBay alert set up for like the past. I mean, and eBay alerts sometimes are so hit or miss. You're like, you idiots. I'm not asking for that, you dummies. But you know, I I would not have known I was missing that unless I had taken the time to catalog, which I I recommend everyone that has a significant collection to just pull the trigger and just just do the work of catalog. Whether you regardless of what app you do, I think I think so. This was a big commercial for well, you know. Well, I'm saying just from uh just having the knowledge, just the data, I think is so was so helpful for me in terms of downsizing and feeling confident about letting books go. And it was something I had been putting off so long. And then I got was like the modern time. And I guess it was like a corner that I never had really looked into. But now that I'm like using these apps, I'm like, wow, this is really cool to see that as someone that uh that calls himself a techie, it was kind of I was ashamed like how far behind I was with like modern tools. And I think a lot of uh, you know, comic collectors that I know aren't using modern tools. You know, some are still using X, which is no issue of X. I literally use XL every single day at work. But, you know, like I think it's impressive to see that comics has also adapted with the times, that there is technology that is worthwhile like checking out and and you know, using to enhance your um your enjoyment as a collector. You know, whether you're you want to be serious about it or and all of that, like, you know, that's up to you. But I I think it is refreshing to know that you know there are great tools out there.

Matt DeVoe 1:04:45

It it's it goes back to, you know, a lot we get a lot of people who will respond back and say, I just use, I look up eBay prices. And it's great, right? If you're doing that for the handful of books, like as collectors, you'll focus on your favorite books, right? Books that you know that have value and books that you maybe paid a premium for or you got graded, or you just know that these are these are your most special books. You're only focused on that. And for me, like if I have 10,000 books, I probably do, but like I I'm only paying attention to maybe about 50 of them. Yeah, right. So the whole point is once these are all in your system, you're able to pay attention to everything and then and then see like it. We've seen this happen multiple times. Well, what we have something called the Shaker Show every Thursday where we go through the all-time high sales. Someone will say, Oh my god, I have one of those. It now moves from their box to their wall.

Badr Milligan 1:05:44

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt DeVoe 1:05:45

Because they thought it was a a a dollar book, a nothing book, and like, oh no, it's worth five hundred dollars. It now becomes their most valuable book. So you know, you know, potentially. Who knows? But it changes their The way they look at that book, and it changes the way that they treat that book. And it and that's the whole point of to of using us to find those things you're not paying attention to. And then it goes back to the cycle of this is the one, one of those industries. If you want to call it a hobby, I hate calling it a hobby because it's so not anymore to us. But like this is like, you know, when you go golfing, you play for a round of golf, you have golf clubs, you pay for things, but they don't get money back from that, you know, that game. This is a space where you can buy a copy of Absolute Batman. And if you want, it's now worth substantially more. You can sell that and now buy more comics with that money. At its best, if you do it in the right way, you can selectively sell things in your collection that you don't care about to help fund the things you do care about. Matt. And that's that's ideal, the ideal way to do it.

Badr Milligan 1:06:56

Matt, I'm gonna clip that and just play that on repeat every time I have to justify some of my purchases. My wife, when I go to the shop, I love that. That's a great way to put it.

Matt DeVoe 1:07:04

Okay, I got I mean, there there was 15 years of this. Um, my my wife said, Don't ever spend any of our money on comics, and I did it. I it was all self-funded by the time.

Badr Milligan 1:08:07

All right. I've got two more questions I I'd like to wrap up with. Uh, going back to San Diego Comic Con, you know, you guys have obviously we we talked about the panel that you guys are doing on Saturday, July 25th with Carla Cohen and Lucio Porella. But uh one other thing I wanted to make note of that I think is a going to be a tremendous help to anyone going to San Diego Comic-Con or just, you know, watching the event uh uh, you know, from the comfort of home is that you guys are taking on this Herculean level effort of making a comprehensive list of all of the San Diego Comic-Con uh exclusives. So things like exclusive covers, uh, you know, San Diego Comic-Con comics that you can only get there, which I've personally have never seen. I've been, like I said, to New York Comic-Con a few times. I have tried finding like a comprehensive list for that level of event and have always failed. But it seems like you guys might be the first ones to actually uh figure out a way to list everything. Can you talk a little bit more about this San Diego Comic Con exclusive list that you guys are compiling on the website? And is it safe to call it the most comprehensive list available out there?

John Sulaitis 1:09:20

So the the gathering of this information last year for San Diego took us the team about 250 hours of effort. Right. So these lists cost us us thousands of dollars to make um in terms of our time and effort, which is a lot of manual research and like oh wow.

Badr Milligan 1:09:37

Yeah.

John Sulaitis 1:09:37

Oh, all right. So the it's interesting. Matt kind of alluded to this, like the the state of the union in terms of comic book creators and tracking and stuff is wishy-washy. It is it is like so the new market is all about making their money off of the thing they put out and then going to the next thing. Our whole business is aftermarket sales, and it's the glue that connects everything. It's like these comics are out there still. What's happening with them? And that's kind of what we track. So yeah, I don't know. It it's I think with with the San Diego last year, we had about 1500.

Matt DeVoe 1:10:09

I I could specify if you if you like. So this is a good understanding of like the shape of the market, um, just for for comparisons. In 2024, there were 552 exclusives offered at San Diego Comic Con 2024. Um, in 2025, there was 1120.

Badr Milligan 1:10:33

Wow.

Matt DeVoe 1:10:33

Um, as of right now, our team has compiled their it's at 757 um with things rolling in. So it will likely uh my based on this, I'm guessing will probably be about 12 to 1300, most likely.

Badr Milligan 1:10:51

And we're talking uh and you guys are tracking uh comics, uh, I'm assuming like uh toys and and then that no, no, this is all only comics. Strictly comics?

John Sulaitis 1:11:00

Holy thing is this. I just we went to like read pop and uh Comic-Con International. We said, hey, we're doing this work. We'd like to put it on your website. We'd like, I mean, this benefits you guys. And they were like, oh, you know, we're not interested. We have a we have a website where they can submit their own, and no one does it. No retailer, or most of them, don't submit the all these things. So, what our team does is we've built algorithms that actually scrape Instagram, scrape all the social media platforms, pulling out content. Then our team manually reviews that. We reach out to the retailer and we say, Listen, we s we send them an email going, here's a submission form to cover prices list, because we've been doing it for years now. So if you're a retailer listening, listening to this, get on that list so we you can send us your comics so we can get them into the site so people can find them. So, but it it really does take a team of about five people, 250 hours for every con to really track this stuff down, communicate, make sure it's there. We put the booth number, we put if it's gonna be at a panel, the price that it's selling for. And the coolest thing is there's already pre-market pre-release sales for these things. So we're tracking the aftermarket sales. So you can filter the whole thing, it's a dynamic list. You can filter the whole thing, you know, and see what's trending right now before you even go to Comic Con. And you can add it to your wish list. So you have a punch list when you go to the con. When you're walking through, you'll be like, oh my booth 734, KRS or whatever. Let me let me pick up this, this, this, and this. Boom, and you check it off. You're you're talking about like modernizing your collecting style, for example. One thing we love about cover price is that it really is just a helpful resource for comic collectors when you're in the heat of the moment needing it. You know, it's really, it's really there.

Matt DeVoe 1:12:33

I mean, even for myself, I build a shopping list of like, here's what I want to get. And then you have to think over okay, are these people next to each other? Because that's San Diego, it's literally if you want to walk from one side to the next, it will take you an hour to do it, right? So, so you need to really schedule, like if one's lot dropping in an hour and you know you you're like only a half hour, you're you know, you're you're half hour away, or I guess you won't make it in time.

Badr Milligan 1:13:01

Which goes back to what the advice you you gave me in the beginning. I gotta come prepared. All right, so and I want to go ahead and say too, I'm gonna have a link to this exclusive San Diego Comic-Con list in the show notes. Uh, we're recording July 16th, which means I have to wait one whole day to look at this list and get my planning going.

Matt DeVoe 1:13:18

Just a few hours, just like 12 hours.

Badr Milligan 1:13:20

Okay, yeah, which is uh 12 hours too long. But for listeners, you can get this uh list immediately, which is cool. All right, uh John, Matt, one last question to wrap us up. This has been uh amazing so far, but I I want to know what's next for cover price? Like, what's the next big update or milestone that you guys that that you guys are chasing?

John Sulaitis 1:13:38

Butter, thank you first of all for just having us on. And it's always fun. It's it's really rare to be able to talk about something that you love doing. And one thing Matt and I keep saying is like, hey, when are we gonna stop? Like, what's and he's like I I asked Matt, like, you know, is there an end game here? And he's like, I want to do this forever. There's there's no end. So it's really fun to work with Matt and our team who just love love comics. But next up, it's OnlyFans.

Matt DeVoe 1:14:00

Yeah, Matt. So that's next up for us, man. We think it's gonna be pretty good.

John Sulaitis 1:14:06

Ah, it's the um watch me unslab.

Matt DeVoe 1:14:14

Do you want me graded or ungraded? No, raw, baby.

John Sulaitis 1:14:21

Thanks for taking us there, Matt.

Matt DeVoe 1:14:24

Yeah.

John Sulaitis 1:14:25

We um we're relaunching the comic book detail page. Um, that's gonna be done in about maybe a month or two from today. Um, that is gonna be an insanely cool page because we're adding so much more data. We're gonna actually add where we're getting our comic data from, the sources. We're gonna let you go through and see all the variants and sort all the variants by value and what's trending in a dynamic way. And we're adding graphs that are gonna allow you to see what a comic book has sold for for the last like 15 to 20 years. So you'll be able to see like like actual changing. Um, and it's crazy because it's like, oh, here's the hype and here's what happened. And so it creates a lot more understanding of the market. One thing we promised our members is that we're gonna have an app, and that is officially Oh, oh yeah.

Badr Milligan 1:15:08

I've been waiting on that news.

John Sulaitis 1:15:10

Yeah. Um, I I can't give the the date because even though we have one, I these things always change and stuff. Sure. But we do have a team working on that. And I was just going through the designs and working with that team this week. And I have to say, it's it's it makes our site look bad. It's so good. It looks, it's, it's, it's gonna be really the uh the crown jewel of like I think what we're trying to do with cover price. And we finally, you know, 10 years later are able to accomplish this amazing, amazing.

Matt DeVoe 1:15:35

And then we have features that I can't wait for because there are there are features that no one's doing that that doesn't exist in the space currently. You know, everything that we're do d building is is intended to be community focused to get you the book that you're looking for, right? Not only to track your collection, but help you find the book that you want to get, and to try to like pull resources into one place because everyone's sent all over the place and it's hard to know um when things are dropping, when things are hitting, you know, FOC, new releases, whatever it is, it's we're trying to create um one place to go for everything. Yeah.

John Sulaitis 1:16:14

And and if you're if you're if you're the anyone who's listening, if you aren't uh trying cover price, free trial, five days, uh, see if you like it. Um you'll I think you'll love it. So sign up and and give it a shot and see if it's uh a fit for you.

Matt DeVoe 1:16:28

And if you don't come back in six months, then you will definitely like when the app button is doing.

Badr Milligan 1:16:35

I love it. I'm looking forward to that. And I think with that being said, ladies and gents, this is the Shortbox Podcast. And we just finished talking to John Truleitis and Matt DeVoe about a little bit of everything. We talked about cover price, obviously. We talked about San Diego Comic-Con. We talked about fair market value. I bet you never thought you'd hear me say that word on the podcast. We talked about holy grails, uh, we talked a little bit about everything when it comes to the comic collecting side of the house. Uh, if you're gonna be at San Diego Comic-Con, I highly implore you to stop by and check out their panel that's taking place Saturday, July 25th with special guests Carla Cohen and Lucio Perella. Uh, once again, that'll be at San Diego Comic Con. I'll have a link definitely to the San Diego Comic-Con exclusive list that we've been talking about. I think that'll come in handy. And you know what? Little shameless plug at the end. If you want to try a cover price for one dollar for one month, I got a special promo code in this episode show notes. Because, like I said, I'm not only a champion of the app, but also a client myself. Check it out. Uh, John, Matt, you guys have been great. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you at San Diego. Yeah, thanks for having us on the