Buying Damaged Comic Books

[NZ_InFerno]

What is up gang? It's been a while since I've been on here. Happy New Year haha

I don't think I posted about this before but we had a nice earthquake here in NZ in November and my bookcase, and a bunch of my comics, reacted the same way I did and threw themselves across the room. My bookcase broke apart and quite a few of my books were damaged.

I have insurance, and they were only books, but it sure sucked to open the door to the spare room that night(the quake was just after midnight here).

Anyway here in NZ we have EQC which deals with earthquake insurance and I've had a loss adjuster here to look at the damage and get an idea of why the value of "comic books" is higher than the purchase price. I gave him a comics collecting 101 and now he wants a list of the current Market Value(which I'm just going to use Ebay completed listings) and what the value of a damaged book would be. They haven't really had this kind of claim before so he is looking for a benchmark to say, these values are representative of the cost of purchasing the book right now/its value to a collector and this is how much the damage affects it. As most of my collection is OOP, that is a bit tricky.

So after all that preamble, my question is what would you pay for a damaged Omnibus/Absolute/Colossal Conan :sniff:? Is there a price guide for Omnibuses etc?

Assume the books are in read once or twice, excellent condition for their Market value. Basically what you would be getting buying an OOP book on ebay. A damaged book could have spine damage, cover damage, scuffs/marks, gouges, slipcase ripped but most are still readable.

Would you pay a percentage of what you normally would for a book? Would you buy a damaged book at all? Does rarity matter, I know I would probably consider buying a rare book if it wasn't that badly damaged?

Example books of mine to think about: Colossal Conan, Hickman FF Omnibus, Big Damn Sin City, Ex Machina Deluxes, Marvel Omnibuses, DH Library Editions, DC Absolutes

Hope you guys can help me out, cheers

edit: updated with pics, literally the opposite of shelf porn