cheetah

My latest.

Yeah, all from the same seller. There were a few more that I didn't win and now I wish I'd tried harder. Stunning cover gloss and color on everyone. One is a Crippen D copy and another is from the Lost Valley collection. Way better quality than what I paid.

Just got these back from an eBay purchase. My scans don't do them justice. I think they are my best non-slabbed purchase ever off of ebay.

Those are really incredible covers. Amazing condition. This is my one and only Church/Mile High.

Now the 35 centers.

Craig/canickus was kind enough to help me out with some good data on some price variants in my Avengers set. I thought I would post them here, too.

Korvac Saga, I was going through Dale's thread thinking, 'these'd look really good with my raw set.' But never even had the chance to pull the trigger. You'd already bought them! Excellent acquisitions at reasonable prices, too.

I thought so, too. I don't think anyone else even looked at them when they were on eBay. #91 is so fresh looking its hard to believe it was printed 63 years ago.

I picked these up recently from Graham Cracker Comics and eBay.

I sent one to Garry/gaz973 in January. A month later, he still hadn't gotten. One day, he walks into his shed and finds the postman had delivered it a couple of weeks early but just left it in the shed when Garry wasn't there. No note, nothing. Maybe you should check your shed.

Marc Wolfe did the same thing to me through the boards here. Total pain in the . I was only out $55 but I did get the guy put on the forum Probation List.

There was that nagging issue about cash.

I think a lot of the HG TOS came from the same collection as mine. It was a box of books held over from a small shop in Covington, KY. It closed down around 1960 and the books just got left in the box for forty or so years. The JLA 1-3 that sold for over $100k was from the same collection. I don't know which issues had multiple copies but there are multiple issues with multiple copies. I think I got most of the best copies but the Thorr issue has a 9.6 that Comic Book World still has.

Here are a couple of the sweet ones.

I don't really know what I'm waiting for. I don't really need the money so I don't really need to sell them. They are stored carefully so won't get damaged unless something terrible happens. I have debated whether I should get them pressed to take out any waviness on the top edge of the front cover. I guess those three reasons have just kept them safely in their box.

I am puzzled at what you mean by " ... during WWII ..." You seem, but do not express clearly, to think that it would be difficult to distribute nationally back in the '40's from a central location. I'd argue that it probably was easier for 2 reasons: 1) the national distributors had strong established networks for distribution because they carried so much news and magazine products that their distribution costs were low once spread over so much material, i.e., on a "per issue" basis, the cost was small enough to turn an easy profit per magazine (including comics) and 2) the rail system as we know it is only a shadow of its former self. Rail must have provided a very useful, efficient and geographically widespread way to get material cross country until local shippers loaded them on trucks. Once you combine the two, printing in one location and distributing nationally seems like the best economical way to do business for the publisher since the distributor did the heavy lifting to get the product on the stands. Also, recall that it was not uncommon for publisher to also be distributors. Heck, Charlton went even one further by being all 3: publisher, printer and distributor. Talk about keeping most of the profit pie World War II = WWII, just a time reference for a period when resources were scarce. I admit I've got no idea how the printing industry operated during that period. Seems interesting, though, and I'd think it would have had a significant influence on comic distribution and availability at the time. The railroad makes a lot of sense and puts some good perspective on the whole issue. I guess this generally means that there probably are issues where color quality is poor throughout. Makes it more interesting to see if you can find well-colored copies of all the issues.

Were these books just distributed regionally? Seems pretty inefficient during WWII to print something in New York and then ship it to Los Angeles. I know these are really ignorant questions but a guy's got to start learning somewhere!

Don't want to sound like a total noob on GA but I am assuming that print runs in the 1940's were done at print shops around the nation and that there are copies of pretty much every issue with good color still around. Are there any issues that are known to only have faded copies?

That is an interesting observation about variation within a pedigree. It would seem to discount such factor as heat or sunlight being the cause. The difference in the look of some of these books that have good red hues compared to those that don't is dramatic. It runs through all of the FH titles?

What is it that makes the red pigments fade so badly on some of these books? Just a poor pigment?

These are some books I picked up in the recent flurry of auctions.

Did you see the price for the #2 in Pedigree's auction? $13,500. The same book was for sale for over a month at World Wide for $8,500 with no takers. Makes you scratch your head. But a lot of the 9.6 SA Avengers went for well under their GPA. A number of 9.8 issues in the 170-190 range went for around $100 on eBay tonight, too. Not sure if the market is saturated, people are out of cash, or if people are saving up for the CLink auction.