I would say it's good to look at comparisons but that you shouldn't read too much into it.

One thing that I think does carry over in the comparison is that when you start marketing an item as a "collector's item" it is less likely to be valuable. The true collectors items are usually things that nobody thought to collect, so they were destroyed, and it's hard to find original ones in good shape. Fabricated rarity never seems to have quite the same appeal.

Yeah, the baseball cards and comics in the 80s and 90s, did some of the same things the pins are doing now. They were marketed as "collectors items", limited editions, mulitiple covers ("buy them all!"), etc. etc. My theory on it is that fabricated rarity doesn't create long term value. The problem with fabricated rarity is that the end consumer is almost always a collector that's going to treat the item with great care. So, as opposed to the pre-collector era where 5% of a run may retain near mint condition, now you have 95% of the run retaining near mint condition. In the short term it seems like the fabricated rarity drives up the price but in the long term the fabricated rarity almost never pans out the same as true rarity.

Seems to me like the comic resurgence is with newer titles though, right? I've been reading Walking Dead, Fables, Kick Ass, Planetary, stuff like that. I like to buy the volumes instead of the single issues. I almost feel like its reverted back to people buying them to read them insead of a buch of hard core "collectors" who buy a copy to read, a copy to hold, all the different covers, etc. That menatilty of pushing "limited" versions to collectors always bothered me. It's just a marketing ploy. I don't like it with pins either. Jersey Jack sort of went that route by making the LE differences pretty much negligable.

I get what you meant, but LOL!

In those limited situations you're right, a reprint of some ultra-rare, iconic comic book is not going to devalue the original because almost everybody collecting that comic is in it for the rarity and the intangible factor of owning something like that. It's not for the story. Its not for the substantive content. With a pinball machine far more people are in it for the substantive content. A good deal of Midevil Madness's value is in the fact that people want to play it, not just have it. In fact, I'd venture to say most of the value is that people want to play it. When you increase the availability it almost certainly devalues the original because now people who value the playability more than the collectablility have another option. It doesn't, however, obliterate the value of the original. The original is always going to be worth more as long as it's in nice shape. That being said, less people are going to plunk down $15K for a NM original when they can have a brand new one for $8K. There are LOTS of people who will not pay much more than $8K for a Midevil Madness now and that necessarily devalues the originals to an extent. It doesn't destroy the value, just dents it.