lou_fine

Any idea what he walked out the door with, since it sounds as though he's the big comic spender type if he was willing to fork over life-changing money for an Action 1?

I have heard similar rumours as well nothing ever verified or proven.. Well, I guess it's a good thing I don't really bif on CL auctions anymore then. I don't really care much for their auction format since it tends to encourage snipe bidding if you really want to win something. I prefer auction formats whereby you know exactly what you have to bid in order to win something. Then again, it's really a case of to each , their own as I know many bidders who also prefer the CL format over the HA or CC auction format.

I would say yes and yes. It was always bad in my world, and in the 80's and 90's I remember that I was rigorously inspecting potential purchases to avoid it. Yes, restoration was already definitely seen as a bad thing in the hobby by the late 80's and 90's. If you go back a bit further into the late 70's and early 80's though, professional restoration was seen as a positive and something which actually ADDED value to your unrestored book and even stated as such in the Overstreet guide at the time. Similar to what's been happening in today's marketplace, whereby certain activities such as artifical pressing, dry cleaning, etc., of a book in order to maximize its potential is seen by many as a positive that also ADDS value to a book. Since sentiment always change in the comic book hobby and marketplace, it almost makes me wonder what collectors will think about all of these "fully potentialized" books another 30 years from now if technology allows a cheap, easy, and effective method to detect these kinds of artifical improvements made on a book?

Agree 100% Well, one contributing factor to this is that it appears the official Covid-19 stats that everybody is using from the WHO has a start date of January 22nd. By then, the virus was already percolating in the epicenter city of Wuhan and its surrounding region for about 2 whole months. Definitely not much of a secret though since apparently 5 million of the city's 11 million citizens had apparently already left Wuhan by the time the lockdown was announced on January 23rd. Seems that the U.S.Military was also aware of the virus as far back as November, although the powers that be didn't want to pay attention to them or to the scientists and medical experts. To the point that some people would even continue to praise China for weeks on end about their apparent transparency on this whole issue. As a result, although some nations took immediate pre-emptive action once they heard rumours of the virus back in November and December and managed to minimize the Covid-19 cases and associated deaths while avoiding the massive lockdowns, other nations decided to largely ignore the issue until it was way too late by using what I would call the deadly 5-D approach to the problem, namely: 1) Deflect / divert / distract; 2) Downplay; 3) Dismiss; 4) Delay; and 5) Deaths Sadly, it now looks like the nations that used this so-called 5-D approach will now be faced with a sixth D, namely Depression from an economic point of view. Hopefully, it doesn't work out this way and we are lucky enough to find a vaccine sooner rather than later so we can return to near normal, but then I guess it's only a matter of time before we see what happens.

Definitely not a place I would want to be right now, although I was on the deadly Diamond Princess for about 10 days cruising around Japan back only in October of this past year. Absolutely loved the Japanese style toilets they had on the ship as they certainly kept you clean down there. No, I think I'll try to ride this out in the original epicenter for this virus in Canada (i.e. namely B.C.) as it seems much safer with the curve for new cases seemingly flattening out between 20 to 45 new cases per day now for the past dozen days or so, with a total of 1,490 cases to date and something like 69 deaths in total. Definitely a lot more free time to check out the comic book auctions, but haven't really seen too much out there that gets my trigger finger going yet, as compared to previous auctions during the past few years. I guess I'll just have to be a bit more patient toi see what comes along because Mitch keeps telling all of us here that there's going to be a ton of quality books coming out due to this current economic downfall we are experiencing.

What does that mean exactly? He withdrew from the sale? Well, I just checked the HA archives and it still shows the auction sale going through for $795K which is NOT the hammer price as already includes the BP juice: https://comics.ha.com/itm/silver-age-1956-1969-/amazing-fantasy-15-marvel-1962-cgc-nm-94-off-white-to-white-pages/a/7224-91050.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515 Doesn't appear that any offer was made to the new owner through Heritage as the Make Offer to Owner is still active and open on this book here.

Now, now, now............let's not give the money head honchos at CCG any bright ideas here or else they'll have the boys at CGC grading and slabbing "valuable" toilet paper in this Covid-19 focused environment, especially since it's considered to be an essential item.

Yes, I believe so when they first started up this crossover service, but I am not sure if this discount is still in place or not anymore.

Was this Make Offer to Owner option a feature that you specifically requested to be set up for you from Heritage or just an option that's automatically given to all buyers? Yes, a return of 47.8% for just over a year sure sounds good, but definitely not as good as this one here for the Billy Wright copy of All-Star 3: https://comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/all-star-comics-3-billy-wright-pedigree-dc-1940-cgc-vf-85-off-white-to-white-pages/a/7054-91043.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515 Brought by the buyer for $49K+ back in 2012 and then sold a fast and short week later for $200K to our comic book embezzler at Tadano America Corporation. the money, that is!!!

Again the real question is at what point will the economic lives be worse than the cost of saving CV lives. Not a fun topic, but still the truth none the less. Well, highly doubt that the death count will be as high as 100K to 250K since every model that I have seen, whether it be for another country or another province in Canada always seems to assume the worst and the numbers look so high that they are almost unbelieveable. On second thought, 100,000 deaths might just be possible for the U.S. by the time it's all said and done based upon the rate it's going, but I certainly hope not. Not sure how accurate the counts are from the WHO database since they only started capturing cases and deaths starting from January 20th or thereabouts which was well after the virus had long already started. Nevertheless, I certainly wished the Western countries had responded to the virus as fast as some of China's neighbouring densely populated countries since some of their WHO reported death counts are still only in the low single digits as they reacted immediately with mandatory masking of their population, testing for travellers coming from China, and contact tracing as soon as they first heard rumours of this virus back in December. I guess past practice also helped here since they've definitely had previous bad experiences with viruses coming out from China in the past before, so kudos to them for knowing what to do right away instead of wasting countless months and still arguing about the pros and cons of masking. The best part about this proactive strategy is that they don't have to suffer through the massive and widespread kind of lockdown which we now have to endure whereby we can't even go to our favorite LCS or attend our usual comic convention to hunt for our books. I assume knowledge of this virus must have been out there late last year and it really just depended upon how each nation or jurisdiction responded to the news and how long they waited before deciding to take action to address it. I was watching the news on the weekend and it looked like the province of Alberta was definitely on the ball as they apparently started ordering PPE supplies way back in late November and early December when they first heard the rumours of the virus. Definitely a proactive move on their part which is going to help the rest of the country out as they are now sitting there with 9 massive warehouses stuffed full of PPE supplies which they are just about to ship in the millions to provinces like Ontario and Quebec as they appear to be the epicenter for Canada. I guess it's always good to share with your fellow citizens to save lives across the entire country, especilly when your province has weeks of excess supplies and yet has somehere in the range of only 50 Covid-19 hospitalization cases with only 13 of these being ICU cases. Now, that's called being well-prepared!!!

No doubt they will when they do eventually put them out for sale since quality books like these will most certainly get slabbed. Just that when these particular copies were purchased it was years, if not decades before CGC even came into existence. No real point to get them slabbed now since they aren't for sale yet, and they can still peruse and enjoy them in their raw condition in the meantime.

Yes, my bad as I clearly know who Lance Armstrong is. When I saw your post, the first name that came to my mind was actually Lance Washington (a comic collector from back then) for some odd reason.

Now, that's a name I seem to recognize from quite awhile ago. Is he still in the hobby or is he pretty much done and gone with the hobby nowadays, like so many of these collectors from back in the day? Since I have never dealt with him before, are you implying that he is like the Dentist with some of his dealings or that he probably got taken by the Dentist?

Did you actually provide feedback then? Yes, it was in one of the CBM issues back in the day, either in the 20's or 30's. I remember Gary Carter actually sent me a copy of Jerry Weist's Comic Art Price Guide as the winner of the draw for the readers that sent in their Top 5 covers.

Yes, @Primetime. Things were simpler back then. I had a Tec 31 and 33 then, but at the time they weren’t held in the same regard they are today. Especially in the case of 'Tec31 which finished right at the top of the pack in a survey of the top GA covers in a Heritage Auctions survey done back in 2016. Definitely different from the CBM survey done back in the mid-90's where I was the only respondent to have it in my list of Top 5 GA covers of all time.

Well, I heard that Steve Geppi was trying to get a Diamond Foil Edition going for rather obvious reasons.

Lou, I am buying. I think you are too. So, instead of taking your own advice to sell now and buy back in at a lower price point, you are going to just hang onto those Action 1's and Cap 1's and take them with you to that big comic shop in the sky when they come calling for you.

The other 9.8 (just graded) is up on eBay for $2,495 now https://www.ebay.com/itm/PRIMO-NINTENDO-Comics-System-SNEAK-PREVIEW-NM-MT-9-8-CGC-HIGHEST-1990-Valiant/333572718887?hash=item4daa7bc127:g:Gy4AAOSwoTJekliD Got all excited when I saw your post and link here. Then I click onto the link only to find out that they incorrectly placed the decimal point 2 places to the right when it would have been much more tempting if it was 2 places to the left and in between the "4" and the "9".

Hey Mitch; Sounds as though you are still trying to convince yourself here to finally sell off your doubles and possibly even triples of Action 1's and Cap 1's after holding onto them for so many long decades. Yes, about right now would definitely be a good time for you to finally MANNUP and do it.

Well, that's probably because a sizeable portion of the CGC generation of collectors who tend to buy these kinds of relatively common books (except for the uber HG CGC label) might just no longer have a job which they can depend upon in this current Covid-19 situation.

Sorry to hear that you lost your job over this whole Covid-19 fiasco.............hope it's just temporary and you'll get hired back once everything opens back up. Although you will not be selling given even your current employment (or lack of it ) situation, I imagine you will ,ost likely not be bidding to buy as many (or even any at all) books as you have before in the past. If so, and since this is a comic book marketplace that's affected by supply and demand in the determination of prices, it should be noted that demand would definitely be going down in this case if you and others who are also now sadly joining the unemployment rolls decide to pull back from their usual bidding on books.

Stocks are inflated by QE and money printing. Almost everything is being thrown at it to keep from sinking. It's not a market I trust frankly. It reacts to any bit of news that frankly isn't news. Yes, just wait until the quarterlies come out along with the real bad negative guidance going forward for the coming quarters considering that most buisnesses are still shuttered down with still no real light at the end of the tunnel for when they will be opened back up again. Although I would love to be wrong here, I definitely don't see a quick V-shaped bottom like what the current stock market valuations seem to be hinting at.

So, from your comment and surprise here, I guess you've never participated in a CC Event Auction before then. With most of their auction lots, the real action doesn't start until the last few seconds and then the bids for hot items such as the HTF books or classic cover books usually goes into overdrive from that point on with the 3-minute extended bidding time periods kicking in until there's no more bids coming in.

You are most definitely correct here in terms of trying to build a GA collection in today's marketplace, as compared to doing it in the distant past. As Jon Berk himself posted here many times before in the past..............he would have never been able to compile the collection he did or even come close to it if he had to do it in today's hyper red hot marketplace for GA books.

Unlike some up and comers at the time like the dentist who supposedly funded a portion of his Church purchases by maxing out his credit cards as he was coming out of dental school, I must be a real old dinosaur as I waited until my house was virtually fully paid off before deciding to make the move into GA collecting. Definitely should have done it a few years earlier when all those books were availble at a much lower price point, instead of waiting until I had the money to pay for everything in full. Well, no worries here as my better half has a bad habit of buying things like toilet paper whenever they are on sale (and they ALWAYS are, even nowadays), I must have enough in my garage to last me quite a few years. As for foods, we also have a large freezer in our garage so I've have yet found the need to hit any of the supermarkets yet as we have an ample supply of frozen meats and other goodies in there to last us a few months. Especiallysince my better half is really not much of a meat eater, so we just have to wandered out to the streets every now and then to pick up some fresh veggies and fruits. Finally, a chance to go through and clear out all of that stuff from the freezer instead of constantly adding to it since we can't eat it that fast.