Those 50 Supermans constitute a huge fraction of the available market though. No matter how slowly you trickled them out, people would claim you are "dumping" them and price declines would definitely happen. Look at the Dracula 1-sheet. Even though they were spaced out by 3 years (almost to the day) the price still dropped more than 50%. And that was one of less than a handful known.
If Bruce auctions a Pulp Fiction regular every week for 5 years straight, those 250 posters still probably only make up a 0.5% of the original printing (wild ass guess 50,000?). Even of the copies still in existence -- maybe 5-10,000? -- those 250 are still just a drop in the bucket. If Bruce was obliged to space them out more you could never sell all of them in 10 lifetimes.
I can understand why you would be upset at him selling PFs that consistently, Rich. However, I can also imagine his consignors being happy to get what they can.
incorrect Harry to some extent on the Supes #1 and I don't believe PF has been sold faster than people can buy them. There are dozens of titles, if not more that have been ruined. Go back and look for my comments on Fire Trap (1935) or the Mexican Orpheus (1949) poster (I was the first buyer) in previous threads here on APF
on the Supes #1. I have no doubt the market could sustain 5 copies being sold in the first year considering the hypothetical grade they would be in (near mint or better other than the outside copies).
The comic book hobby is 100 times the size of the poster hobby. Maybe 1000 times. Absorption rate for the Supes #1 would be greater than the absorption rate for any similar movie poster.
But at some point, maybe around the 3rd copy, price would start to tumble, so it is an economic issue combined with angst by the hobby. To avoid these issues, you slow your sales. It keeps everyone happy from top to bottom.
To be sure, this philosophy is practiced by the government of all nations concerning certain food products that farmers produce, like for instance, milk and eggs.
Farmers are paid to sometimes not produce as much milk as they could for very good reasons, with the biggest reason being that the government has an interest in preventing the giant farmers from destroying the small operators as well as preventing a deterioration of price which by itself could bankrupt a vast portion of the dairy business
here's the math (without government intervention): one company decides to dump twice as much milk into the economic stream as normal in order to drive their competitors out of business. The price of milk drops 30% and many farmers go bankrupt because they can't produce at a low enough price to support the business anymore, and these farmers disappear. Then the following season the lone producer standing can't produce enough milk to compensate for all the farmers they drove out of business, the cost of milk goes through the roof and consumers now are paying double for milk and other sectors of the economy suffer and it causes a recession. It's called cause and effect.
Our solar panel industry has been rocked by Chinese manufacturers dumping in the USA. The us Government responded to this by putting safeguards in place, but it happened a little too late and Solyndra (for instance. they're just one) goes bankrupt owing the American people half a billion dollars footed by tax payers
Now it would hard for any dealer in posters to create that exact situation, but that doesn't mean you can't affect other dealers or collectors negatively by not proactively paying attention to a certain rulebook. Anytime you sell or try to sell something where a market can't successfully absorb the material, the price structure is going to deteriorate. I fail to see why anyone in any market cannot adhere to certain rules of common courtesy or even common decency, but it requires a certain moral compass as well as an
altruistic perspective taking others into account and how your actions may affect them.
