lou_fine

Well, how about a 9.0 and a 9.8 then?

Well, given that grading is still more of an art (i.e. a so-called "professional" opinion at a particular point in time), as opposed to an actual science, wouldn't it make much more sense to simply sub books that will still have value whether it comes back as CGC 9.4, CGC 9.6, or CGC 9.8, instead of only subbing books that have value in CGC 9.8 and above. Even more so when you have to take in CGC's probable margin of error when it comes to grading. To each their own, but wouldn't it make more sense to sub a book that has actual value regardless of the grade within reason, as opposed to subbing for a grade when the underlying book doesn't have any worthwhile value if it doesn't hit that grade. I guess it's really a case of if you are truly collecting comic books or are you really only collecting graded labels.

What gives you the idea that CGC is trying to reduce the volume of books that customers are submitting to them? Especially when CGC is a business and like any other business, their goal is to come up with different strategies to increase both their top and bottom lines. Just take a look at all of the different scams schemes they are coming up with and it's pretty clear that they are trying to get increased submissions from their customers, not less submissions from their customers. If they really wanted to reduce the volume of books that's heading their way, they can simply say no books accepted unless they are at least 25 years old, because seriously, anything more recent than that is probably 99.9% worthless drek from a true vintage collectible point of view. Or they could shut down their whole pressing and CPR game as that would surely reduce the volumes of books heading their way. So, from what they are actually doing, they are clearly trying to increase the volume of books heading their way, not to reduce it.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/florida-minimum-wage-to-increase#:~:text=Effective January 1%2C 2021%2C Florida's,hour to %248.65 per hour. $8.65 an hour. If they're paying their graders $15 to start I'd be more on board From my point of view, it really depends on the number of books a grader is expected to grade on a per hour basis. For a mid-range value Standard tier book, if they are expected to grade 10 of them per hour (okay, they would probably get fired ) that means they would be responsible for generating a top line revenue of $750 (i.e. $75 X 10 books). As a result, I would certainly hope they are getting more than an egregious $8.65 per hour as compared to what they are bringing. Of course, there are a lot of other associated support costs such as receiving, encapsulating, shipping, admin., accounting, etc., but if you look at the top line revenue that's a whole ton of money to be left to pay for all of the other costs. Especially when you consider the fact that the graders are most likely expected to grade many more than 10 books per hour. All I will say, is that based upon the top line revenue that I am seeing here, somebody is sure making a ton of bottom line profits off this whole grading game here.

Are you trying to suggest that the only legitimate sales that takes place in the comic book world are public auction sales and any other type of sales transactions are not legit. Certainly not the real worl where almost all business transactions are conducted in a non-auction format between a buyer and a seller.

Exactly, as it would appear that a lot of the complaints on this thread seems to be with the pre-screen fee being raised from $5 up to $8. Probably because this must be easy low hanging fruit and hence a big big cash cow for the boys at CGC to pluck in order to keep their CCG ownership happy. Just imagine coming up with a scam whereby you can convince submittors to happily line up for months on end to bring in what are basically worthless books with the virtual equivalent value of smelly doggie poo poo if they happen to grade any lower than a certain gade and yet they are willing to pay $8 a pop to have somebody tell them this. I am sure it's really a case of to each their own, but wouldn't it make a lot more sense to send in only truly collectible books which would have value in all grades across the entire condition spectrum, as opposed to sending in books that seemingly have artificial graded value only in CGC 9.8 and above and a big money loser for anything else below that.

Phew. But yeah the reject increase is annoying. Personally, not sure how this whole pre-screen process works? Does it mean that your book is guaranteed to have a grade of at least CGC 9.8 upon eventual grading if it passes the initial 9.8 pre-screen test? Or do they place a note in there to let the graders know, otherwise they could end up grading a lot lower when they go through the official grading process. After all, how many times have we seen the same books come back with varying grades ranging all the way from CGC 9.0 right through to CGC 9.8. Almost seems like a craap shoot at times when you see this.

Looks like that must have been a fun couple of days back on July 18/19 of 2002 when all of those big books in Cage's collection got graded. From the CGC serial numbers, it would appear that a total of 14 of them was graded on those 2 days and pretty much all came right off the top of the charts in terms of Overstreet's Top 20 or so GA books. Although we all knew about the HG copy of Action 1 which was stolen from Cage, I never realize that he also must have had a second a second copy that was slabbed as a CGC 4.5 graded copy. I also remember being at Metro for the first time way back in '94 when I met up with Kramer and Fishler was about to ship out the Church copies of Cap 1 and Adventure 40 and he asked me to take a look at both of them to see if I could spot what was wrong with them. I pointed out the area where I thought there was a slight bit of work done and he confirmed that both books sadly had a touch of glue and a bit of color touch work done on them, but that the buyer still wanted them nonetheless because of the Church pedigree.

They most certainly did as I personally think that Venus 17 is the best or the most horriffic out of the three covers here.

Umm....................I believe all rational bidders who know simple grade 5 arithmetic would do this before placing their bids on a HA lot. Then again, I guess they are hoping that some bidders might just get lost in the moment and bid without thinking like that. That's why I love the 3-minute extended bidding seesions that CC has because that 3 minutes is sure a long long time when you are waiting for the clock to wind down to zero if you have the leading bid and yet gives you a lot of time to rationalize everything in your mind if you are behind and thinking whether you should bump iot up to the next bid increment or not.

Was it any better for them financially than this new 15% BP system that they now seem to have instituted for some of their consignments. Seems that this 15% BP thing has drawn a lot of negative flak from the collectors and board members here and I guess they can't really hype that they are an auction house without a Buyer's Premium anymore.

I don't think you are wrong at all here on this point of yours. The only qualifier that I have is that I must admit CL seems to have an rather overwhelming number of seemingly never ending consecutive (or are they overlapping ) auctions and it's rather easy to get lost, to the point that I tend to ignore some of them after awhile.

Well, I assume you must have had a large high dollar value consignment or some headline grabbing promotion quality book(s) in order to get a special discount below their standard 10% seller's consignment fee.

It should be pointed out that the Buyer's Premium for Heritage is completely different from the Buyer's Premium in the case of ComicConnect. Unless you are able to successfully negotiate some of your fees away, you as the consignor will be paying both the Buyer's Premium and the Seller's Premium as both of these fees are kept by Heritage. The Buyer's Premium which is actually 15% BTW is actually kept by the consignor and really more of an enticement simply because they can squeeze just that little bit more out from the auction house's cut, as per this post from Gator here:

Well, I am not that sure about the $5K price point since that is not actually so much in today's crypto crazed FOMO like marketplace of ours. Now, if it was a book that was valued at $50K or more, then I would definitely put HA in the lead-off spot since they have more eyeballs on their website with the deeper pockets. Besides that, an amount of $50K or more would then provide me with some negotiating leverage with Heritage in terms of getting the fees back down to a more reasonable and competitive level with the both CL and CC.

I believe you probably got hosed by CC once again as I selected this option here which was even a heck of a lot cheaper:

You mean that you went with their FedEx Economy instead of their USPS parcel shipping options?

If you are referring to Publisher Ace with titles like Our Flag, there can really be no hotter or near impossible to find book than Our Flag 5. It must indeed be a super rare book because both HA and CC don't show any historical sales for this book in their auction archives, although I do believe that CL might have had one in one of their previous Featured Auctions, and if so, a link to this listing would be greatly appreciated.

Was actually searching for something else when I came across this old post here and decided to check to see if the story had a happy or a sad ending: https://www.comicconnect.com/item/756711 It's a bit too bad he didn't followed up to let us know the goods since I guess he really didn't have much to complain about in the end as his copy which was seemingly stuck at a price point of only $3K ended up selling for $13,200 by the time it was all said and done.

I was referring to the Publisher Ace. (Super Mystery, Lightning, Our Flag ect.) But, yeah, I've seen Ace #11 bring some serious dough. Always surprises me as I kind of assume The Phantom is kind of a dead character outside of those who covet his books Definitely my bad here as I thought you was referring to Ace Comics and not the Publisher Ace. My mind flashed back almost immediately to that late run of Ace Comics with the Phantom covers when a few of the later issues at long last finally came up for auction and they all still managed to fetch relatively strong prices even though they were only in mid-grade, especially this final issue here: https://comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/ace-comics-151-david-mckay-publications-1949-cgc-fn-65-cream-to-off-white-pages/a/122009-11004.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515 A nice bright HTF Phantom cover that sold for a rather surprising $900 or at a price point that was something like 27X condition guide price.

As far as you know, any of the early Fox books like Mystery Men, Wonderworld, Science, etc. or later Centaurs, and if so, I imagine they would not be high grade because of the earlier time period?

Dave Anderson has one he picked up in California. That certainly does sound like Dave to me. I remember talking to Dave back in 2006 or 2007 when he all of a sudden he inquired about the Chinatown collection and asked me to contact the owner on his behalf because he was interested in purchasing the entire collection lock, stock, and barrel. He said that he was planning to keep the collection intact, but would be willing to let me have access to 2 or 3 of the books if I was able to help him to acquire the collection. Knowing Pat the owner, I told Dave the chance of him acquiring even one quality book from the collection, let along the entire collection would be virtually zero. This was the case even though Pat had given me permission to share the disc which had scans of the large majority of the collection to whomever I thought would be appropriate either for potential resale (that'll be the day ) or most of all, to help him to initiate the pedigree status process. I remember sending the copy of the disc to Dave which certainly didn't dampened his intentions to purchase the entire collection after he saw them. Being an old time collector though, like me, he definitely was not as interested after I mentioned that the overwhelming portion of the collection was currently in the process of being graded and that I could send him the list of the grades once the books had all been graded and slabbed. I imagine the thought of some 800 odd slabbed books taking up all that storage space and yet not being able to fully enjoy them was a bit too harrowing for even him to think about. It didn't matter anyways because I already knew that Pat had zero interest in selling the collection and to this day, I don't believe he has sold any of the books from this Chinatown pedigree collection, save for the few raw odd funny animals or some of the later raw low demand books from the mid-50's that he had been more than willing and happy to sell right from the get go.

Sadly, looks seems to be one of the most important criteria for whether you make it in the Asian movie biz or not, and especially even moreso in the case of the female actresses where it's all about nothing more than their exterior looks and beauty in most cases. Another perfect example here is to just take a look at the flight attendents on virtually all of the Asian airlines where if you are past the age of 25 or so, you are considered to be an old timer by then.

Yes, I of the very few books that I hoarded and ended up with something like 5 HG copies because I like the Gulacy artwork in the series. I figured I couldn't go wrong with picking up the first issue in the run for a couple dollars or less every time they showed up in HG, before I realized I probably had way too many copies and would most likely never be able to sell them in the future.

I believe the same thing also applied to Giant-Size X-Men 1 and Fantastic Four 48 and it doesn't seem to have hurt their price movement upwards longer term.