CHICAGO — Tony Britton always thought of comic books as an investment.

"When I first started collecting as a kid, I thought long term, that maybe I could use them to send my kids to college," he said. Britton is 32, a native of Chicago's Hyde Park. He was behind on his car payments; creditors were knocking at his door. Then there is the student loan to pay, the child support. And so Britton is cashing in the remnants of his 20,000-piece comic-book collection.

His beloved Spider-Man comics.

His "X-Force" No. 1.

"The ones that are most dear to me," he said.

Lori Blazic is 46, lives in La Grange, Ill.

A single mom. There's a pronounced sadness in her voice when she talks about the 70 or so Beanie Babies she was trying to sell online. "My feelings are hurt. I had different intentions. I wanted my daughter to have some sort of family heirloom. It can't be that way right now." Her daughter is in college.

Blazic hoped that selling off the Beanie Babies collection would help with tuition, but she didn't expect to make more than $100.

"This is hard to talk about," she said. "I put money away, from her baptism on, but I took a beating, financially. So now I'm selling her Barbie doll collection. The Precious Moments are going next. At this point, I can't afford to hold on to any of those."

Across the country, collectors of pop-culture memorabilia — not just hard-core hoarders of comic books, baseball cards, toys and Beanie Babies, but the casual collectors, the people who set aside a few mementos for their kid's kids — are making a hard choice: Hold on to memories they swore they would never part with? Or sell for a quick jolt of cash?

"One can make the safe assumption that a lot of people are liquidating what they can get rid of, even if it is sentimental," said Jim Griffith, who manages seller relations for eBay. Last fall alone, the mammoth online auctioneer saw an 8 percent leap nationwide in new postings to its collectibles section. "Are we seeing more entire collections going up for sale? Yes, we are."

With each new layoff announcement, with saving accounts dwindling, the answer's been getting easier.

"These toys always felt like forever to me," said Gary Fecarotta, 39, of Barrington, Ill. He owns a power-washing company.

Fecarotta recently posted 25 of his favorite "Star Wars" toys on Craigslist — action figures, spaceships. "I had always wanted to keep that stuff. I was a big 'Star Wars' fan. But things have been trending down and down, and here was something I have that I don't really need right now."

He has five children, most of them girls. "And, you know, I'm going to do what it takes to feed my kids."

Comic book shops, used-record stores, buyers of vintage toys, Web sites such as Craigslist and eBay — lately, they've been hearing some heartbreaking tales. Or rather, they've been hearing far more than usual: Dr. Wax in Hyde Park said it had to stop buying used records for a while because more people were coming in to sell than shop; Powell's Books, the Oregon-based bookstore that has a large online used-book service, said it has seen a 15 percent spike in sellers since September, when the stock market began its plunge; and Craigslist said the number of postings to the collectibles section of its Chicago site increased nearly 100 percent during 2008.

But values for most back issues of comic books — particularly from the '80s and '90s — aren't very high, said Shane Wallace, manager of Graham Cracker Comics in Lincoln Park, Ill. "We usually offer 5 to 10 cents an issue for (comics from the '80s and '90s)," he said.

It's a classic buyer's market, said David Gutterman, owner of the Quake vintage toy shop in Lincoln Square.

He said he has spent "several thousand dollars" in recent months taking advantage, handpicking only the best stuff: "I've bought two large 'Star Wars' collections, a Hot Wheels collection, a He-Man collection. A truck driver who was just laid off sold me a good lunchbox collection." Chaim Schlezinger, laid off himself from Encyclopedia Britannica a few years ago, said he has done well lately buying and selling book collections.

An elderly couple recently approached him with 400 titles. They were living off Social Security and a crumbling nest egg. He wanted to cherry-pick the collection for valuable titles. They said take all or take nothing.

He gave them $600.

"My problem at the moment," he said, "is finding good stuff to sell."

According to dealers, more striking than the size of the collections coming in are the stories that accompany them: "(These sellers are) aware they could make more money if they sold their things at auction," said Leslie Hindman of the Chicago-based Leslie Hindman Auctioneers. "But they need to make a mortgage payment or something (urgent), and they want to know if we could give them money now." Another similarity is that many of these would-be sellers have never been serious collectors. Their collections, not in the best of condition, bear the marks of owners who have enjoyed what they owned, never realizing comics should be in airtight bags and vintage toys sealed in the original packaging.

They also bought what they loved, not what they hoped to resell. And so, again and again, these prospective sellers talk of appraisers, a box of collectibles at their feet, explaining that one's emotional bond doesn't necessarily translate into a big return.

Terry Grant, who owns Third Coast Comics in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood, said he has been seeing a lot of guys carrying in cartons of comics "worth considerably less than they banked on. They've had them 'since they were 5.' So I get to tell them they're not worth the paper they're printed on. They look at me with a face that says, 'This box was going to put my kid through college.' " There are tales of modest success: So far, for instance, Fecarotta has made at least $2,800 from his old "Star Wars" toys.

But Steve Mason, a 35-year old from Sheridan, Ill., has had less luck with comic books. He's been trying to sell a collection of 300 comics, mostly superhero titles he started gathering in the early '90s.

"You know," he said, "I'll be lucky to sell at all."