BLUECHIPCOLLECTIBLES

In Spider-man #1, the Chameleon was a "commie"

Little known fact: some of the North Vietnamese soldiers were part Apache

I did not know those pages were listed or I might have bid against you

I thought the price was in line with other Fury splashes. This is a bit unusual with the Vietnam setting and the direct reference to date of publication

Marie Severin did the Daredevil and Thor covers. Not sure who did the ASM 96 prelim. For some reason there were two prelims made of that issue. One def by Kane and the other by Severin or maybe Romita? That one has a pasted on piece with prelim drawings of spiders and the Goblin's head by Stan Lee

I'd pay two million if it was Tony Stark's personal copy with notes in the margins about the arc reactor

Since I follow sales intermittently, I see sale figures now and then that make me go "wow. that's really gone up in value," only to hear that it previously sold for way more and the price that impressed me is considered a crash

I remember when the pence copies were considered far less valuable and sold my fairly decent pence AF15 for mid to high three figures

I thought this was a good price valued at what it should be (and more than I thought some people would say). But that was before I discovered here that it had sold for 270K previously. I'd still say it's a proper price at 156 and that it looks bad only when compared to that stupid 270 price.

Detective 36 is an underappreciated book. Scarer than most in the run and one of the few times that Batman deliberately killed people. Changes to his costume. Drug smuggling story. And the first recurring super-villain* that was written to be a recurring villain -- complete with a last panel in jail vowing revenge on the Batman. *second recurring villain in DC, after the Ultra-humanite in Action Comics (and before the Joker or Lex Luthor. ("Dr. Death" had appeared in two issues but it was one two-party story and he died for good** at the end. **although I would not be surprised if somebody tells me DC resurrected him decades later.

Buyers may be more aware than they have been that highest graded means more in GA than SA. Of course there can never be 100% certainty, even with Golden Age books. But if this was a 9.8 Action 1 people would feel pretty confident it is likely to remain the highest graded copy. If people felt the same level of confidence about the future and ongoing uniqueness of a 9.8 TOS 39, then $2 million might seem more reasonable or even a bargain.

This beatnik/hippie surfer is by Joe Simon ("Sick" magazine) in 1966 prior to Kirby's Silver Surfer. Prototype? Rip-off? Coincidence? None of the above?

We have apparently decided that the operative rule is not Occam's Razor but Owner's Razor: Whatever answer explains all the variables and concludes that my book is not a second printing or second state first printing, that is the correct answer. For Superman 1 owners, try this: If your book has the Action 14 "now on sale" ad -- it was printed before the books with ads saying "on sale June 2nd" because they originally thought the books would be on sale at the same time, hence the words "now on sale" When the book was printed , they realized the Action comic was not on sale yet, stopped the presses and changed the ad to read "on sale June 2" ,

So which are these -- and the one below -- examples of?

I have some intact comic packs which contain books that I know would almost certainly be worth more than the pack itself, but I cannot bring myself to cut the packs apart since they're artifacts of cultural history.

Marvel did the same thing -- offering a whopping 1 cent discount on four comics when you probably want less than all four.

I'm well acquainted with them all. Occam's razor, for example, essentially states the simplest answer that explains all the questions is the most likely answer. It's why I say that in this case one mistake, imperfectly corrected, early in the print run explains everything better and more simply than the suggestion that there was a lesser mistake that went uncorrected until late in the print run and was considered important enough to correct late in the print run, but was then "fixed" with an even worse mistake. This so much more fun than trying to figure out why people seem to want to propel mankind to its doom.

I would agree that the dot and no dot are part of the same printing. That the dot would be deliberately removed relies on the supposition that a sitcom-level stewpid guy was told he must stop the print run because the dot was the wrong place, and "fixed it" by removing the dot. I totally get why people who own a Bat 1 might want to work backward from that conclusion and why they will never back down from it, or simply switch to another just as unlikely reason. I am not expecting to change any minds. But I am curious about how people argue and why and when people abuse or ignore logic to make conclusions and sway others. And, at least on this issue the fate of mankind isn't hanging in the balance.

If the misplaced dot had been replaced with a properly placed dot, then Occam's razor would clearly support the idea that misplaced dot came first. But occam's razor does not support the idea that someone would notice a dot is misplaced and go to the trouble of removing the dot without then putting the dot in the correct place. The simplest explanation is that as they ran off covers of Batman 1 somebody noticed early on that the dot was missing and it looked like it said "no one" instead of "number one" and they added a dot. Somebody was clearly told to "fix it". And then they made cover proofs with the change. All of which likely occurred within the same day, within minutes. So, which makes more sense? That somebody fixed it by putting a dot after the "No" (and incidentally put it a bit further to the right than they should have)? Or that somebody "fixed it" by removing the dot? Calling the latter more likely flies in the face of occam's razor. And paints an image of a production person who behaves like a "dumb guy" in a bad sitcom

"Earthquake"? Shouldn't he be calling it a Kryptonquake?

Soon enough, 9.9 will be the new 9.8

I never worked in book publishing but I did work for a company that printed its own newspapers and magazines. It was not uncommon to run off hundreds of copies before a pause to correct things. And if a minor error was found and corrected, the copies with the minor error would go out along with the corrected copies. Only if something was especially egregious or factually erroneous would they take the step of meticulously separating out and trashing the imperfect copies. I would imagine it was somewhat the same in the comics magazine business.

Your final paragraph is the one suggestion that makes the most sense. The vast majority of copies have the period in that "wrong place". So the idea that some production person would, very late in the process, see it's in the "wrong place" and halt production so he could remove the dot completely -- rather than put it in the "right place" -- that makes no sense at all, no matter how many people say it. The dot is clearly a correction, even if it's still not a perfect correction because it's in the "wrong place". But you are probably right in suggesting that all copies in the first printing, with or without the dot, likely hit the newsstands on the same day

This ad appeared before the book was on the stands, but it was not necessarily printed before the cover itself had been printed. House ads were not always created with a stat of the actual, final cover, very many of them show differences between the ad and the published cover, especially in the logos and blurbs. Sometimes the differences are huge: a house ad prior to Captain America #1 release shows him without wings on his head. And a house ad for an early Timely comic had Stalin partnered with Hitler, while the published book removed Uncle Joe because in the small window between ad and publication, Russia had become our ally. There may have been copies printed with the original cover, but destroyed. And this ad for Batman 1 has the number and date in blue, whereas in all published copies (dot or no dot) the number and date were clearly part of the red plate. So it's definitely not a version of the cover that was published.