lou_fine

Well, from my own personal point of view, that's when a comic book becomes a true vintage collectible is when it's able to sell for multiples to condition guide in all grades across the entire condition spectrum and not only in the uber 9.8 and 9.9 condition levels only.

Do you have a link for this auction listing here since I can't seem to find it in the CL auction website?

assuming the scan isnt tweaked... Well, since this is CL and not Heritage, I would very much highly doubt it.

Being a long time GA collector now makes me think that this comic book collecting world of ours must be turning upside down when you see books like New Mutants fetching $42K and Tomb of Dracula fetching $106,350; but the one that really confuses me to no end is this one here: https://www.comiclink.com/auctions/item.asp?back=%2FAUCTIONS%2FSEARCH.ASP%3FFocusedOnly%3D1%26where%3Dauctions%26title%3Dtransformers%26ItemType%3DCB%23Item_1452303&id=1452303&itemType=0 When I see books like this going for a mere $44,000 makes me think that it's really time that I should go though my closet and also check out the daily rates to rent a steamroller at the same time.

Looking at my etrade account over the past week (lovely red highlights all over) and was not a comic collector I would have some FOMO on good returns in the short term that comics are providing. Well, not sure what the bidding history was with respect to some of these sports card auctions, but it's probably a good idea to temper your enthusiasm if you believe this outlier of a result on the X-Men 94 reflects what is taking place in the overall vintage comic book marketplace. Since Heritage auctioned their CGC 9.6 graded copy off for only $7,800 last month and this one here on CL was sitting in the low $8K with less than 10 seconds left in the auction, I would most definitely not put much weight into this $20K+ figure that 2 irrational bidders decided to throw in with their automated computerized sniping programs in the last 6 or 7 seconds of the auction as being the new normal for X-Men 94.

160,000. Up 28,000 since 16 months ago. If the person who bought it then was the seller now, which most likely they were, I'd say they broke about even. If it was me I'd have held on to it a bit longer. Well, it's quite possible that the consignor thought the Wonder Woman 1984 would be another huge hit pushing the book further up in value. With all of the bad reviews and negative fan feedback, they probably figure it was probably better to cut bait before the book goes down any further once the economy reopens back up. If so, it looks like he managed to at least come out about $12K to the positive or just over a 9% rate of return over his original purchase price of $132,000 which is still better than a loss at least.

That's a book that I would love to have in my collection. Someone grabbed a 7.0 last May for 1450.00. Lucky them. If a lower graded one comes around again I think I'm going to try and grab it myself. If it does and you remember let me know so we don't bid each other through the ceiling, I'll back off so you can get it. Will do, but if you are looking for a lower graded copy and the CGC 7.0 graded copy is no longer available with its recent sale, I guess you are going to have to settle for the next lower copy a CGC 6.0 because there's only another 8 graded copies lower than the 7.0 copy.

Actually still has almost three hours to go? But it is currently at 1300. Well, looks like it ended up at $1,900 with a few bids in the last minute which jumped it from $1,300 right up to its eventual $1,900 finish.

Oh yes they do, if you take into consideration the fact that the two auction formats are completely different from one another. The Heritage auction format (similar to the CC 3-minute extended bidding format) keeps the auction going one bid at a time until there is an eventual winner. This clearly provides the bidder with some time to consider if they rstionally should take the bid up to the next bid increment or not. Especially in the case of the CC auction format which gives you an extended 3 minutes to decide which believe me, is a whole lot of time for you not to make any irrational bidding decisions. The CL auction format is much like the eBay format and as such, an auction ends right on the button according to its pre-designated scheduled time. As such, this will at times clearly work out to the advantage of the consignor when it comes to hot in-demand books as you will often get two potential bidders who decide that they want a particular book and each will end up throwing in a Hail Mary completely out of this universe bid on the assumption that nobody else would be that stupid to throw in a similar kind of bid. If you take a look at the bidding history of this particular X-Men 94 lot, it looks like the bidding was sitting at only the $8K range with less than 10 seconds to go before a couple of most likely automated computerized sniping programs jumped it right into the $20K+ range in the last 7 seconds of the auction which must have put the consignor into a big huge party mood. Clearly the case of a consignor's dream come true with this scenario, but for the lucky unlucky winner, it's really more of a self-induced nightmare and yet nobody to really blame but themselves. I'll most definitely , the money that is!!!

Wow, oh wow, you are exactly 106% right!!! I never in life expected that it would be able to hit that same $85K mark that it managed on the last go round here a couple of years ago. Looks like 3 big bids in the last 10 seconds of the auction took it right up from the $73K mark and straight into 6-figures territory. Maybe I really should look around to see where my copy of TOD 10 is since I clearly remember picking up a HG copy for some serious money at the time when I was in Toronto for work that time. Remember it came along with the supposedly scarce Vampi 113 which cost me more than the TOD 10, along with a few other books at the same time. Only problem is that I have absolutely no idea where that package of books is now since it was only a few hundred dollars at the time and hence not worth worrying about. Interesting and rather amazing how times have changed when they are really nothing but "throwaway" funny books.

Yeah, if I remember it was pretty much a real HG copy with a real nice squarebound spine which is not that easy to come by with these big books. Never really bothered me that much since I thought it was pretty much always available in HG and at the time it might have been going for less than an X-Men 94 due to its apparent abundance in grade. Well, at least he left me with one of the two X-Men 94's which I had in there. Thank God I picked up 2 copies of them at the same local con way back in the day when I thought that I had gotten ripped off buying the first copy for a whole dollar. As I was walking out the door, I saw this other dealer had his minty fresh copy at only 30 cents and since I figured the first dealer would never give me my dollar back, I better take the second copy also. My thinking at the time was that this would help lower my breakeven cost down to only 65 cents and that way not lose as much money if I was ever lucky enough to be able to find somebody to sell it to one day.

Well Rick, it looks like you was pretty much bang on with your prediction as the final price on the Planet 70 was just a bit past the upper end of your range with the final buzzer going off at $1,539. What kind of surprised me though was the other what I thought was the lower demand Planet 44 (albeit higher grade copy at CGC 8.0 with WP) coming in at a even higher $1,606 final amount: https://www.comiclink.com/auctions/item.asp?back=%2FAuctions%2Fdefault.asp%3FFocused%3D1%23Item_1457891&id=1457891&itemType=0

Yes, especially since I thought that this particualr book was pretty plentiful in HG as it was supposedly part of some big warehouse find back in the day. What really pisses me off is that I had a really super nice copy of this book which I left at my sister's basement for "safekeeping" and lo and behold, it along with one of my uber HG X-Men 94 was gone when I went looking for it decades later. Must have been my nephew who decided to cash it in to pay for some of his action figures which he was really into at the time.

I would assume that would be around the mid to latter part of the 80's whenever the signed and limited number edition of the Dark Knight book by Frank Miller came out. And if I remember correctly, that was also at a time when the TMNT had never yet hit the $300 mark and was in fact dropping down in value in the Overstreet guide in those early first several years. Like I said, being really more of a mainstream comic book collector, I was much more into the Miller Daredevil and Batman Year One books which I thought was simply amazing and also being the El Cheapo that I am, ended up ordering the Limited Edition of the Miller Dark Knight book for $40 big ones instead, and which I am sure is worth no more than that some 30+ long years later.

Well, you and @Artboy99 are certainly the spreader of good news here from a potential buyer's point of view. I guess since green has always been my favorite color, that's probably why both of these rather sharp looking Planets in tonight's CL auction looks pretty tempting, but probably beyond my price range by the final buzzer.

Well, I believe the other reason why there are far fewer copies of Cerebus graded is that the entire 2,000 print run was printed like with Sim personally going through the entire print run to pull out whatever nice copies that were in there for his own personal collection. This would definitely discourage collectors from sending them in for grading and slabbing because as we all know, submittors always tend to prefer sending in nicer copies of their books in order to get a bigger bang for their grading expenses. With respect to TMNT 1, I believe there is a much much higher proportion in uber high grade due to the fact that a good portion of them didn't go out through the regular distribution system and were held back by Eastman and Laird for subsequent sale direct from Mirage. I remember one of my LCS owners asking me back in the day if I was interested in ordering a TMNT 1 for $300 because he had just received one direct from Mirage for one of his customers. Needless to say, being a mainstream comic book collector, I was no fool and immediately handed the book back to him after seeing that fugly doggy doo doo artwork inside.

I do not. I’m even lazier than you, so asking me was a mistake Well, I just did a very quick check of GoCollect and they only list the one sale of a CGC 9.6 graded copy for $31,111 back in November of 2018 followed by the one sale of a CGC 9.8 graded copy for $31,000 in August of 2020. Nothing at all in there about 2 other sales of CGC 9.6 graded copies at any price according to their database.

Yes indeed, and if I remember correctly, wasn't 'Tec 9 listed as being the rarest out of all of the pre-Batman 'Tec books by Win in terms of his Windex scarcity rating system that he had in place for us here from quite a few years ago?

Well, that's definitely good to know then. Would you happen to have links to the other two >$30K CGC 9.6 sales handy since I am too lazy to do a search for them right now?

Personally, I've always preferred the later issues of Planets like Planet 61 and Planet 71myself, but unfortunately for me they always seem to be right up there in price. Noticed that they have the following Planet 70 in tonight's CL auction, except that it's already over $1K or at something like 5X condition guide value: https://www.comiclink.com/auctions/item.asp?back=%2FAUCTIONS%2FSEARCH.ASP%3FFocusedOnly%3D1%26where%3Dauctions%26title%3Dplanet%26ItemType%3DCB%26CGC%3DYES%26CBCS%3DYES%23Item_1459246&id=1459246&itemType=0 Is that the going condition guide multiples for Planets in these mid-grade condition range although I guess this copy here does seem to present nicely in terms of its strong bold colors and nice PQ? If that's the case, then I just might have to forget about adding any of these later Planets into my personal collection. Hopefully, unlike most other recent auctions, it's due more to the fact that there's only a lonely 2 Planets in this particular CL auction here tonight and both of them seem to present very nicely in terms of their strong colors and PQ.

Well, it's clear to me that you need to go back to elementary school since you must have failed your arithmetic class. Are you not aware that 9.9 is a much much higher number than 9.8, or are decimal points too hard to figure out here?

I guess it really depends on what you mean by comparable prices here? If you are talking about simply comparing the $29K+ result for this CGC 9.4 graded copy of Cerebus 1 to sales of CGC 9.4 graded copies of Albedo 2 and TMNT 1, then are you not really comparing apples to oranges in a sense here? Especially since this is 1 of 2 of the highest graded Universal copies of Cerebus 1 (save for 1 CGC 9.6 Signature copy), while there are 39 copies of Albedo 2 already slabbed in higher graded condition plus another 38 copies in equivalent 9.4 graded condition. Let's not even talk about TMNT 1 where there are 88 copies already slabbed in higher graded condition plus a further 88 copies in the same equivalent 9.4 graded condition. So, I would have to say although the Cerebus 1 at $29,130 would indeed seem like an astounding result at first glance, it might not necessarily be so if you think of it in terms of its relative ranking within the condition spectrum for all 3 books.

Well, not sure who won this contest here, but all I can say is that after tonight's CL auction result for MSH 13, I think the buyer of the $31,111 copy would be none too happy: Especially since tonight's equivalent CGC 9.6 graded copy sold for only $16,450 or for only about half of the price which they had paid for their copy back in November of 2018.

In so many words - this could be 2018's Bitcoin. Massive short term run up, followed by an equally precipitous fall. Well, with tonight's CGC 9.6 graded copy sale of MSH 13 on CL, I guess it's a lot closer to the 2018 version of Bitcoin as opposed to the 2021 version: https://www.comiclink.com/auctions/item.asp?back=%2FAuctions%2Fdefault.asp%3FFocused%3D1%26pg%3D38%26x%3D31%26y%3D15%23Item_1462167&id=1462167&itemType=0 Finished up at a price of only $16,450 or about only half of the $31,111 in the CL Auction back in November of 2018.

Well, it's quite obvious that you must still have your priorities all mixed up, because how many times have you been told repeatedly that you are only supposed to look at that big number on the top left hand corner of the slab and pay absolutely no attention to the actual comic book because what's inside the slab is totally irrelevant.