What's your take on flipping comics?

I thought this would be an interesting story to share with my New Registry Family About 7 years ago give or take a year, while on one of my regular visits to the local outdoor swapmeet I happened upon a box of comics from one of the regular vendor's.

Now this guy was also one of my competitor's for buying storage units at auction. He was a well seasoned buyer and dealer to say the least. So when I searched through his box of comics on his table I never expected to find anything of tremendous value, but from time to time I find a gem.

Well it's the middle of summer and if you know Vegas on a normal day it's well over 105 degree's so i'm ready to high tail it out of there. I start making my way towards the exit and make a stop by this guys table to see what he might have in this small box of about 40 comics on his table.

Well at first glance I can see he has a few magazine sized comics near the back of the box but I take my time and go through the rest of the books first. When I get to the larger books I find that they are copies of TMNT #1. Ok I'm thinking that they are all 3rd prints since I already had a couple of copies and could tell the difference by looking at them. But there was another copy that looked slightly different. I ask Tony what he was getting for the books and he says 25 cents each.

Ok, you don't have to be a genius to realize even if they are all 3rd printings you will still make a lot more than a quarter a piece. So I buy them all and the rest of the books in the box.

Not paying much attention or mind for that matter I get the heck out of there and head home. I didn't research the books right away because I was late for taking the wife to breakfast so they had to wait. 2-3 hours later after we return home and settle down I finally get the chance to open up and check what print runs they are actually from.

Holy ! One of the TMNT books is actually a first print and the other 2 copies are 3 prints. Well now I am really excited because I really didn't collect that title anyway and could see $$$$$$$ and a profit on my 25 cent investment.

What follows next is documented somewhere within my many sales records on E-bay.

I package up the book and ship it to CGC for express service so I can have it back in a week. They get the book and it comes out with a grade of 8.5. Ok now we are really talking some serious cash for the 25 cents I spent. It was well worth the $85 for the slabbing that I paid. I get the book back and list it with a starting price of $2250.00 knowing that I would get

offers of much less I wanted to at least not under price this little gem.

So offers start coming in, the first was $1400 (nice) I wait and another comes in $1100 considering my investment and total cost this was also a nice offer but it's the first day and I think there's more to come. The next offer is $100 yep that's right one hundred dollars. Never the less I inform the guy that I was blocking him form ever bidding on any of my items for making such a ridiculous offer. He apologized and I didn't block him. Later that evening I received what I thought was a great offer of $1700 and accepted the offer hoping the guy would honor and pay for it. And yes within 24 hours the sale was completed and the book was shipped.

So within a little over a week I managed to flip a TMNT that I picked up at the local swap meet for 25 cents and pay the $85 for rush service at CGC and make a profit of well over $1600.

The books are out there guys, but you do have to look under every rock to find them sometimes and it's true the early bird gets the worm. But in this case I was actually late and quite a number of people had already gone through the box of comics from what Tony told me. (I never told Tony about the flip)

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