lou_fine

Yes, in absolute full agreement with you here. Sadly, although CGC has most definitely done a lot of good for both this hobby and marketplace, there are some shall we say unfortunate policies or business decisions which they have taken that are not really benefitting the purists or long term comic book collectors who are more interested in the collecting aspect of the hobby, as opposed to the monetary aspect of the marketplace.

Most definitely my bad here in terms of the incorrect spelling of the word. Yes, you would be mistaken here as both CGC and CCS are owned by CCG (i.e. Certified Collectibles Group) which also owns a whole slew of other authentication, grading, and conservation companies in the other collectibles fields and has been around long before CGC first opened their doors. Sounds as though you and I both view the collecting of comic books as a hobby to be enjoyed. From a corporate point of view though and which I do understand, CCG views the collecting of comic books more from a business point of view where what rerally matters is both the top line and the bottom line. As such, I would much rather prefer a grading system whereby a book needs to be graded only once and done forever more. From CCG's point of view though, they need to come up with various machinations through twists and turns in their grading systems over time whether it be changes to their grading standards, restoration definitions, labelling changes, pedigree designations, etc. along with creating other additional revenue streams such as CPR, unrestoring of books, restoring of books, signatures, etc. such that collectors will continue to resubmit the exact same book back to them multiple times on a hopefully never ending continuous basis. As others had said here in the past, we need only have taken a look at what they had done previously in the other collectibles field to have seen what was coming in terms of conflict of interest when they brought out Matt's Classics Incorporated to form CCS. Like you correctly stated above, none of these decisions are made in a vacuum.

Yes, so many comics from the 80s to today never really gained in value. A few months ago, I went through my collection and separated out everything that actually had value. (My criterion was anything that I was certain I could sell for at least $50 after grading.) It turns out that 5% of my collection has 90% of the value. And that doesn't include TMNT. Sadly, this is actually no surprise at all and probably what most long term comic book collectors will also discover to their chagrin when they start to go through their boxes and boxes of hopeful treasures. Especially when it comes to books from the 70's and 80's going forward because there are really just so many copies of them around that most of them don't carry much actual value unless they are pass a relatively high condition threshold level. I find that it's much easier with the older books whereby it's not all about the big number on the top left hand corner of the slab and the underlying books themselves carry value in all grades across the entire condition spectrum. That's why it's good to see books like the Hulk 181's, Spidey 129's, Cerebus 1's, TMNT 1's become what I call vintage collectible comic books as collectors start to pay good money for them at all condition levels, as opposed to only when they are in CGC 9.8 or 9.6 and really nothing much below that. I find the best books to own though are the ones that sell at multiples to condition guide not only in the lower grades, but also at multiples to unrestored guide even when they are restored.

Ask and ye shall receive as this must be your lucky day then, because at the 45-second mark of his latest video below, he says that he is looking for one single lucky buyer(s) such as the two of you who would buy the entire collection all in one shot now that you do know about it:

Ummmm...........after checking out some of the valuations in his price guide, you do realize that this is Bob Overstreet that we are talking about.

Most definitely and even with some of the female career books such as Millie the Model, Nellie the Nurse, Tillie, the Toiler, etc. whereby copies are going for huge multiples to condition guide across the entire condition spectrum. So, maybe we should not give up on the old Westerns just yet and if more keys like Rifleman 10, Rawhide Kid 17, Tomahawk 116, etc. become hot in the marketplace, it just might bring some of the long overdue popularity back into the Western comic book marketplace.

Well, since they appear to be virtually all SA and BA books, I would definitely lean much more towards CL since this is more down their alley in terms of target customers. Now, if it was GA books and not high end ones at that, I would lean more towards CC and only with HA if you have high 5-figure or 6-figure books.

It is right near the front of the guide on Page 10. It states that: "Efforts have been made to present accurate information, but the possibility of error exists. Readers who believe (they) that have discovered an error are invited to mail corrective information to the author, Robert M. Overstreet, at Gemstone Publishing, 10150 York Rd., Suite 300 Hubt Valley , MD 2030. Verified corrections will be incorporated into future editions of this book." Hopefully, you won't be sending him a list of current prices on books because I believe he will file that one in his round filing cabinet without even looking at it.

In my opinion this is the worst policy decision CGC has made, and the full negative effects of this decision won't be seen for years as more and more books are destroyed. Not sure what you mean here as I believe CGC did not make a specific policy decision with respect to the scrapping of books in order to remove color touch? Based upon both current and past (i.e. prior to CGC) grading standards, I believe that any part of a book where the color is no longer showing, whether intentionally scrapped away or simply worn out naturally over time, is treated as a defect and downgraded accordingly. Are you suggesting that the CGC graders should be making an arbitrary decision to try to determine if the loss of color from a book was done intentionally or not, and if it is concluded to be the former, than the loss of color defect should be much greater than the same loss of color defect if it was concluded as having taken place naturally over time? Or are you suggesting that if it is concluded that the loss of color was due to intentional scrapping done by somebody, then they should refuse to grade the book, similar to what they have done with those extensively restored books from IGB? I believe this would not work because CGC would have a hard time determining with 100% confidence the cause of the color loss and as we all know, CGC does not like to guess. The incorrect policy decision that CGC actually made which is encouraging the destruction of books was made some 20+ plus ago when they came up with the hairbrained idea of implementing a multi-color label system. As Borock himself said when he tried to eliminate this system back in 2005, although this was initially done with all good intentions to allow collectors to more easily identify the restored books from the unrestored books, it had unfortuantely resulted in the unintended consequences of severly stigmatizing the restored books. Instead of actually paying attention to the type and extent of the restoration work that had been done to a book as hoped for, collectors simply saw them all through the same dreaded PLOD lenses and shunned them all because that was just so much easier to do. My personal belief is that if CGC had gone with the uni-color label system while incorporating both the current 10-point condition grading system in conjunction with a 10-point restoration rating sytem as some collectors were asking for at the time, there would be a whole lot less destruction of books and gaming of the system that seems to be so prevalent nowadays.

Umm.......I hope you do realize that there are some female board members here who might not appreciate YOU talking about the fairer sex in this manner.

Well, I guess you don't own a copy of Hopalong Cassidy #1 then since Overstreet dropped this book here by $1,600 or by 35% as his top of guide price went from $4,600 all the way down to only $3,000. Definitely very un-Overstreet like to put in such a large decrease, but then this was one of only two books to show a decrease out of all of his various Top chart listings which comprises a total of 280 books all told. The other was Little Nemo 1906 which dropped by $100 from $5,300 down to $5,200 so I guess these two would be his token decreases for the year so readers can't complain that prices only always go up in his guide.

Now, this should definitely be rather interesting for the early Overstreet collectors as we had a bit of a discussion on the boards here and were unable to come to much of a conclusion on the various versions that seem to be out there.

After watching the video again, I somehow got the impression that the books with the price tags on them were actually the ones priced out by Alex himself.

It hasn't been offered been offered for sale as this copy of Planet 46 is from Pat's Chinatown Collection which was recently designated as CGC's newest pedigree:

I have always found it to be more of the former than the latter in terms of restored books generally presenting much nicer from a strict visula point of view as compared to their assigned grade. Then again, this might be due to the fact that we don't have the actual book in hand and the graders probably still tend to view the part of the book with the restored work as a defect when it comes to the actual grade which is something which they should probably not be doing since the PLOD label is already there to account for the restoration. From a pyschological rationalization point of view, graders are probably more tempted to select the lower grade if they are trying to decide between 2 condition levels on a restored book. On the other hand, graders are probably more tempted to select the higher graded if they are trying to decide between 2 condition levels on a pedigree book, especially if it's a Church copy. After all, grading is really still more of a subjective art, as opposed to an exact science.

Although this is definitely true for certain books, the sad part about this in terms of books that I had cherry picked off the shelves of the LCS's back in the 70's and the 80's is that you now have to spend probably 100X to 200X times the cover price which you had paid for the book in the first place in order to get them prepped for sale in an auction before you can hope to even make some money on them. As a result, with your typical 70's and 80's comic book collection, even though they might already be in high grade, it's still not really worth going through all of the trouble to get them graded and slabbed for sale, except for the odd key book. I am just so glad that I started to shift my interest into more vintage GA collectible comic books towards the end of the 80s and the start of the 90's as I can't think of a single book in this portion of my collection that would not be worth to have graded and slabbed when it comes time to sell them.

The part that I found unbeliveable (about 1:00 minute in) and possibly disingenuous while watching the video was when he mentiond that he had only looked into a couple of the boxes and then did the math on it based upon a dollar a book in order to come up with his $10K figure. Sounds as though he didn't even know what he had in there but figured if it was even Archie's, he would still be able to sell them for a few dollars each. Although it would appear that the boxes were clearly marked, wouldn't most prospective buyers still least do a quick check to see if there were some valuable books in there like complete GA runs of your DC and/or Timely super-hero books. He makes it sound as though he didn't even have any real idea what were in the rest of the boxes except for the two that he took a look at.

When I see absolutely irrationally exuberant auction results like these, it makes me wish that I was the lucky owner of the CGC 9.4 highest graded copy of this book. Especially when there are obviously some very deep pocketed bidders out there with bottomless pockets who have absolutely no sense at all about the value of money and are more than happy to throw as much of it your way as possible.

This. Considering that it is an easily recognizable Church copy of Mask 1, how confident are you guys that it would actually sell for more than $45K if sitting in a much lower graded blue slab with the amateur color touched area(s) now clearly and visibly scrapped away? After all, have we forgotten about the Church copy of Boy Comics 17 which started out as a CGC 4.0 graded blue copy which then morphed itself into a CGC 7.5 graded blue copy, before making its final transformation into a CGC 9.0 graded blue copy at which point it became unsellable and had to be pulled from the auction due to its heightened and very public notoriety.

My guess is that it turned out to be quite a bit substantially less than his original hoped for asking price of $60,000?

Very true, but probably also a whole lot of very bulky and glacier like slow moving dead weight that would take virtually forever to sell off.

Definitely a bit blurry here and really can't see that much from these 2 photos. Easy fix though if you simply email your family members and ask them to tear that book out from that horrid looking holder and take a picture of the real goods for us.

I'm with you but some really don't like it they are just weird Well, I guess it's really a case of to each their own then. Whenever I see a copy of Contact 12, I almost immediately think of the triple set of Captain Aero 26, Captain Flight 11, and Contact 12 because they all seem to have the same artistic style with the L.B. Cole classic si-fi cover artwork. Now, if you are referring to Contact 12 more specifically on its own, I personally would much rather have a copy of Amazing Mystery Funnies Vol 2 #1 since it is a much earlier Centaur and also a much much rarer book to boot with a grand total of only a meagre 5 copies graded and slabbed to date so far:

+1 In definite agreement with you here as I would certainly not want to disfigure and destroy an absolutely gorgeous and beautiful looking copy of this book here.

I've got a copy of this reproduction here, but unfortunately it includes mostly only the current publishers that were still around at the time like DC and Marvel. As a result, it is not a true reproduction as many of the publishers who had their books listed in the original 1970 version were not included in this later edition here.