lou_fine

I don't believe CGC will grade IGB restored books. They most definitely would still be grading them if Matt was still working with the Meyers on perfecting their technique, instead of the happy threesome getting into a big lovers' spat with their relationship devolving very quickly into a rather nasty battle of shall we say, he said, they said. ............. .

I guess the real question is how long are they actually on display for because as far as I can tell, you can only see them while the current auction is going on? I believe you can no longer see them anymore pretty muchright after their auction comes to an end. Definitely not the case with either Heritage of CC where you have historical archives which you can go back to in order to check for past auction sales results.

I'll add it up for you this week. Let's see if the total gross sales figure is closer to $0.00 or $10,000,000. Ummmmmm.............it would have to be more than $10,000,000 dollars as tens of millions of dollars would mean something like $20,000,000 or $30,000,000, etc. As such, I am quite confident that the total gross sales figure for this big CL Auction is much closer to $0.00 than it is to even your suggested minimal $20,000,000 figure which is only the first plural of ten.

You really can't be serious here as even Heritage is unable to generate tens of millions of dollars of sales during their bif Signature Auctions. I was always under the impression that Josh only wanted select items from his auctions to be added into the GPA stats and he was told it would either be all or nothing at all. Actually, if Josh got his way in terms of only selected items being included into the GPA stats, then they would definitely be horribly skewed and totally misleading since we all know which sales Josh would want to include and for all of the others to be left out.

Well, if any of the protestors were comic book collectors and they were targeting the local comic shops, they probably would have taken all of their drek Image and Valiant books from their own personal collection and dumped it off at the shop once they managed to break through the doors and windows.

And now 16 years later.....if that add came out today......they have to change it to: CGC'd 9.8: $780 Heritage Auction number: 122022, Lot number: 11310, May 31, 2020 That's what investors would call "putting your money to work and watching it **ahem**............shall we say grow downwards".

How about eBay then since their open auction format works on the same concept? As a counter argument though, it's always up to you as the bidder on the item to only bid as much as you really want to spend for the particular item in question. I just don't like the fact that you are tempted to throw in a higher bid just in case somebody else comes in at the last secon if it's a certain item that you really want.

I take your point, and personally I do not buy from them. To tell you the honest truth, I actually have more of a problem with the CL auction format as opposed to either HA or CC's auction format since you will always know exactly what you have to pay in order to win the book. It is up to you and you alone and nobody else, if you want to bump the price up to the next bidding increment in order to win the book. With the CL or I guess the eBay open auction format, you never really know what the other competing bidders or snipe bidders might be throwing in at the last second, and hence you are much more tempted to toss in a unwarranted higher bid if you really want to win a certain book than you might otherwise do. In this type of auction format, you don't really know exactly what it would take to win a book and exactly how much you should really be bidding at the end. It's really much more like a shot in the dark with this type of auction format.

Can't remember exactly what the previous grades were on this copy here, as I believe it might have actually started out its certification life as a CGC 8.5 graded copy before morphing itself into a CGC 9.0 graded copy a couple of years later. There was most definitely a lot of discussion on the GA boards here at the time when this copy came back into the marketplace at the end of last year as the Windy City copy, but now as a CGC 9.4 graded copy. Unlike the FF Annual 1 here or other much more common books which gets their potential maximized and comes back to market a few short months later, it's much more difficult on a book like this copy of Marvel 1 which you are refrring to. Especially since its hard to tell what part of the increase is due to the true and real price appreciation over an extended period of time after a 15 to almost 20 year time period, as opposed to just the grade increase. Same kind of thing with the CGC 9.0 graded copy of Action 1 which sold for something like $3.2M dollars after it was hyped so much on that crock and bull video by Adams and Nelson, but somehow conveniently left out the part in their 5-minute diatribe where it had been upgraded over a period of time from its initial CGC 8.0 grade. Although I am 100% sure that the underlying value of the book itself would have increased substantially over the years and decades, I am also quite sure that the bump up in the grade also didn't hurt at all in the final price that the book was able to eventually managed to fetch in the end. The only thing that I will say is that it is quite evident that flippers will have a much more difficult time trying to play the CPR game with the GA books since collectors of these books tend to focus much more on just acquiring a copy of the underlying book itself, as opposed to paying for a certain grade of the book as they simply don't come to market that often. As we have seen with a number of the GA books that have been fliiped in a short period of time, the consignor have ended up losing money on the transaction after factoring in all of the fees and other ancillary charges even though the book has been bumped up in grade. Definitely not the same scenario with the much more common and not as easily identifiable SA and BA or more recent books where there are just so many copies that have been graded and subsequently placed into the marketplace since it's much more easier to launder these maniupulated books onto an unsuspecting collecting base. Especially if you are lucky enough to be able to manipulate it into a highest graded copy and place it onto CL which seems to be the venue of choice for the CGC label chasers or Registry points chasers. Heck, when you've got these big money players by their short hairs, they don't even care what the book was before because the only thing that matters to them is that big huge number on the top left hand corner of the slab. Not a problem from my point of view though, as it's really a case of to each, their own when it comes to buying books.

Absolutely no problem at all with the entire bidding process (except for the apparent random placement of the completed auctions) and their speedy updating of their historical archive is definitely much better than before. The only part that still continues to puzzle me is whether it's going to continue to encourage potential consignors to submit their books to an auction house that provides automatic links to all other competing copies of the same books that they also happen to have available for sale? If they actually think this is a good strategy for maximizing prices on behalf of their consignor's books, are they then going to complete the picture by providing automatic links to the same available books from other competing websites like Heritage and CL?

I guess this must mean that it's actually much more common than even Bat 1 or Cap 1 then.

Cgc color coding is a good thing. It’s transparent. Cbcs restored blue label is deceiving if presented from across the room you would think you had an unrestored book but on closer inspection... Definitely NOT as transparent as you may think and hope since as we all know, the CGC unrestored blue Universal label is actually already hiding a lot of books that have been artificially manipulated into higher grades.

In the ball park, but probably not necessarily the best use of their advertising dollars here from my point of view. To get the speculators and flippers to submit their books, it's sometimes much more effective to show the before and after dollars results.

I am not aware of any auction site, whether it be eBay, Heritage, CC, etc, that does not allow you to bid and buy without inpunity.

Which kind of reminds me of the ads in the old days when CGC first opened their doors and were trying to convince collectors to get their books graded and slabbed. I remember they would do things like run side by side pictures of say a raw Shadow #1 by Kaluta selling for $3 and then a CGC 9.8 graded copy or whatever it was selling for something like $2,500. Thought it was absolutely back in thise days, and now some 20 years later it seems to be doubly as it still only guides for $4 at top of guide and you could probably still find copies in your dollar or 25 cents quarter boxes without too much problems at all. So, it just might save CCS a lot of advertising dollars to openly disclose to the marketplace how pressed books can indeed result in big dollars for their customers.

NO, because any rational bidder who can read already clearly knows about the 20% BP and will not bid any more than what they would normally want to pay for the book on any other auction website by simply incorporating this 20% BP into their bid price from the get go. If anything at all, the BP is really an extra tariff on the seller beause he is the one that will actually be paying for this BP since he will not be receiving this portion of the payment as it will be taken by Heritage. Of course, this BP can apparently be negotiated away so that the consigner can keep it depending upon the quality of their consignments in conjunction with their negotiating skills.

I'm pretty sure they are tho They aren't. Have you never won an auction on Ebay? Of course they are. Have you never sold anything on eBay. Well, guess what.........if something sells for $1,000 on eBay as the final bid/BIN price, you as the seller will NOT be receiving $1,000 for your sale. That's because the $1,000 final bid/BIN price ALREADY INCLUDES the fees in there.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but if the seller hasn't done any negotiating, then Heritage is going to take way more than 20% of the final price of the book. It's become quite clear to me that some board members here should not be bidding for any books because they simply do not comprehend simple Grade 5 level arithmetic. Let's take a very simple example and say that a book hammers on Heritage for $1,000. Now, anybody that can read should clearly know that this really means they will be paying $1,200 (i.e. $1,000 plus 20%), because it very clearly tells you this right on the bidding page. Now, if you are the seller who has not bothered to negotiate, this DOES NOT mean that you will be receiving the $1,000 hammer price from Heritage. It actually means that you will be receiving only $850 from Heritage because you still have to take off the 15% Seller's Premium that Heritage will be charging you to sell your book for you, once again assuming you have not negotiated anything in advance with them. Now, you'll wish that you had to pay Heritage only 20%, because in actual fact, you really had to pay Heritage $350 (i.e. the $1,200 real price the book sold for less the $200 Buyer's Premium and then less a further $150 for the Seller's Premium) or 29.2% of the top line $1,200 which the book actually sold for.

So, was returning to comics a few years later after marriage an indication that you then needed an escape or to run away from the female persuasion?

Did anyone actually say that "nobody cares"? Of course there are people who care. Most of them are very vocal and are here on these very boards. Thing is, there clearly aren't ENOUGH people who care... at least not enough to influence the market downwards. The minority here (people who care) may be very vocal and the majority (people who don't) really don't say much but clearly the people who don't vastly outnumber the people who do. Which now brings us back to the chicken or egg argument. As you have clearly stated and a point to which I definitely agree, there are some collectors (along with speculators and flippers) who DO indeed care whether book has been pressed or not, which means that this critical piece of information should rightfully be disclosed if they as sellers are aware of this fact when they go to sell such a book. Yet, my bet is that the number of sales descriptions or auction descriptions which discloses the fact that a book has been pressed is a whole lot closer to zero than even a tiny fraction of the books that CCS has pressed over the past 20 years. The argument back then by the pressing cabal was that it was not necessary to disclose pressing since the only thing that mattered in the final determination of the price was the grade, and pressing didn't factored into the price. As a result, it was conveniently not necessary to disclose this fact because they claimed that they themselves as buyers would pay exactly the same price for equivalent graded books whether the book had been meticulously preserved and stored in that condition over the decades or whether it had been artificially improved to that same grade the previous week by a comic book doctor working in their basement lab. Clearly a argument which I found to be totally unbelieveable and totally if you actually gave it some thought.

I see. Pressing affects the market. So what's the argument for non-disclosure, again? How is it different from concealing any other kind of manipulation that will affect market prices? Are you telling me that you don't really buy CGC's and the pro-pressers' spin from way back in the day that there's no need for disclosure because nobody cares if a book has been presseed or not, as the only thing that matters is that big number on the top left hand corner of the slab. All I can say to that, is that there must be a whole lot of nobodies in this marketplace then because they sure do seem to care.

It sold for more as a CBCS 2.5 copy, same year https://www.comicconnect.com/item/758997 Almost $4K more or as I imagine what they would refer to in this marketplace as the value or the hidden advantage of the CBCS label. Definitely doesn't present very nice relative to its assigned CGC grade and possibly one of the main reasons why this copy here wasn't able to acheive its condition guide price on the last 2 go rounds as a CGC graded copy. Especially when previous copies have always sold for multiples of condition guide a few years ago, and then at a healthy premium to guide over the recent past as Overstreet is apparently slowly catching up to the marketplace on this particular book. On its third go round here this time, looks like it sold for even less on CL at only $12,916. If I was the money losing consignor here, I probably would have gone with CC because they seem to be the market maker out of all the auction houses when it comes to the pre-Robin 'Tec books. Now, if it was a highest graded copy for anything else, I would have no problem with CL since they seem to be the preferred venue of choice for the CGC label chasers.

Welcome to the boards as it looks like you just joined up about a week ago to partake in the fun and games here. All I can say is that you simply don't seem to understand that CCG is a business and as such, their business model is really geared towards maximizing both their top and bottom lines. In order to acheive this corporate objective, they have astutely fine tuned the old grading system (without disclosure of course) to ensure that they can make money on the same book multiple times through various kinds of additional revenue generating ancillary services and subsequent resubmissions, as opposed to simply making money on the same book only once.

Well, at least he puts in a huge qualifier in BIG Bold letters that grading is very subjective and he is not a professional grader or claims to be: Grade: NM Please Bidders View My High Definition Photos As I’m Not A Professional Grader Nor Claim To Be As Grading Is Very Subjective! Is it really any worse than CGC designing a grading system whereby you can take a CGC 9.0 graded book like this one here and if you use their ancillary services properly and pay for it over and over again, you will eventually be able to manipulate it into a CGC 9.8 graded copy:

Then again, what happens if it suffers one of these catastropic mistakes that a certain pressing company who shall remain nameless is known for at times?