lou_fine

Based upon rumours over the past several years, it apparently has a relatively severe case of SCS, especially for a copy graded in CGC 9.9 condition. Not sure how much truth there are to these rumours though.

Well, from all of the apparent rumours on this book, I believe the owner is really caught between a rock and a hard place if he wants to recover his money here . Can't really sell the book in its current condition, and yet can't really take the chance on cracking it out to be worked on and still hope for the same unique one and only uber HG label.

From looking at the pricing in Overstreet's guides over the years, including the last almost 25 years since he disposed of his collection, I would tend to lean on the side that it was more of a coiincidence than anything else. Or it could also have been a bit of sour grapes on the dealer's part after seeing the prices go up (as they probably would have anyways) after selling the books to Overstreet. I think Sean had a good answer to this long held rumour from his post above:

I believe you are giving Overstreet more credit here than he actually deserves as I think it's really more like a 5-year weighted moving average. Wasn't one of his main rationale for this was his concern that the guide would have simply gotten too big if he broke everything out. Didn't make much sense to me when you see so many unnecessary breakouts or much less significant breakouts in many of the more recent BA and CA books. For example, should More Fun 41 through 50 still be lumped together as per his usual standard groupings of 10, or should there be a breakout for the seemingly more highly desired More Fun 47 with the classic Guardineer African theme cover or the More Gun 48 with the classic Flessel dinosaur cover? Although it ook Overstreet the longest while before he finally broke Archie 50 out of that standard Archie 41 through 50 grouping, truth be told, there are probably still a couple of other hidden gems within that remaining 9-book grouping that really should be broken out. Not sure if this should just apply to Timely as a whole since there have also been a few of the lesser Timely runs that have not been particularly hot in the marketplace. Personally, I feel that Overstreet just needs to up his game a bit more with respect to particular in-demand issues within a particular run and be a little more aggressive with these more obvious undervalued (in his guide at least) books relative to the real marketplace. At least, that's my take on the situation here.

From my previous post, you can see that I agree with Sean's thinking that Overstreet's slow and steady approach to comic book valuations are clearly deliberate to help ensure continuing growth in the comic book marketplace. As for your second question with respect to suddenly valuing books at their true market values, we need only to think back to the big GA hot period of 1995 and the classic case of Mystery Men #1. This was a time when the market heat had cycled through to the GA books after the big runup in prices on the SA books and the silliness in the Modern Valiant and Image books had come crashing back down. You can tell when a market is hot when even dealers are offering ridiculous multiples of guide for books at the time, which was certainly the case with GA books back then for a couple of years. It was clear during that time that the early Fox books were red hot with Mystery Men #1 leading the pack and one of the poster childs at the time. After a few significant sales of this book, including Bob's own 2 copies (Church and supposedly the Denver) followed by significantly higher follow through sales by the big East Coast dealers at the time, it was expected that a valuation increase would be fully warranted for Mystery Men #1. To everyone's surprise though, Overstreet jumped the valuation up from a mere $2,100 in his previous guide all the way up to $8,500 in the 1996 guide for an astounding percentage increase of 305%. Sad to say, but instead of continuing to sell at multiples to guide with prices soaring into the stratosphere, the once red hot demand for this book immediately softened and cooled right off to the point that the book seemingly lost its mojo for years, if not almost 2 decades after that. Being one of the flagship books for the Fox line, it also seem (at least frommy point of view) to dampened the interest in most of the other early Fox books for several years after that, with only a few exceptions. Of course, the overall market had cooled off by then, so the Fox books might have cooled off on their own anyways. My rationale for what happened there with the huge drop in interest for Mystery Men #1 after that huge guide increase is that it's all about the pyschology of any collector or investor. Similar to investors in the stock market, they all want to buy or invest in something when they perceive it to be undervalued and lose interest in it when they perceive it to be fully valued or near fully valued. For what it's worth, Overstreet's valuations still counts for something in the marketplace and when he had Mystery Men #1 at only $2,100 in the guide, it was perceived to be a hugely undervalued book with collectors chasing it to the point that they were happiely willing to pay multiples of guide to acquire a copy. Jack it up to $8,500 which was just so un-Overstreet like and all of a sudden, the entire sentiment seem to change on the book as it was now deemed to be fully valued with possibly not much further upside left on it for the foreseeable future. At least, that was my take on the whole Mystery Men #1 debacle and probably only helped to reinforce in Overstreet's mind that the slow and steady approach was the right path to continue to take.

Sean; Being a long time collector and/or dealer which you are, I believe you already answered your own question with your last statement above. In fact, I actually believe this slow and steady approach was in there right from his first price guie back in 1970, even though others at the time tended to disagree by referring to it as the Overprice Guide. As we all know, Bob grew up being a comic book collector and sincerely loved this hobby of ours. I believe he took this slow and steady approach as his best strategy to help the market to grow over an extended period of time. You certainly can't argue with this strategy as the comic book market has definitely continued to move steadily upwards without abatement in terms of valuation for a near 50 years period of time now. Of course, this slow and steady approach also does tend to mask some ups and downs in different parts of the market which tends to work itself out over time as the guide valuations continues to creep upwards with the occasional surges and pauses being the exception rather than the rule. As we all know, he absolutely hates to ever show a valuation decrease in his guide, and this slow and steady approach helps him to avoid having to do this in most cases. You definitely won't find Bob taking the Wizard approach to comic book valuation because that is simply not in his makeup after almost 50 years of porducing the guide. I think he sincerely believes that constant gyrations in valuations to try to react to every single movement in the real life market would actually hurt the market over time. Hard to argue with him on this point if we just take a look at where so many of the books that Wizard once had on their Hot List are now at, after using their approach in terms of valuing books at their top dollar if not more. Being a long term collector myself, although I certainly don't mind Bob's approach since there has been constant and steady growth in the comic book marketplace over the decades, I also wouldn't mind if he did pick up his pace a bit on some of the HTF and classic cover books. Although he has gotten a lot better with this in the past few years, a simple way is to break out more books from some of his groupings because he is still behind the play in this aspect of the market. This would then allow him to continue with his slow and steady approach to the overall market, and yet at the same time, recognize the books that have clearly broken out from the pack to a much greater degree.

Not allowed to talk politics here! It's worth a warning from the Mods just to find out if you was posting to us from the clinker or not.

People posting online about "First World" problems? I've kind of overcome the food and shelter and working conditions issues, so there's not a whole lot left for me to complain about. I thought you would have been busy joining all of the protestors or locked up in jail already, instead of thinking about us all the way over here.

Hope your World's Finest hit your mark because those early 50's DC's are real toughies as they simply don't come around too often.

Seriously CC/Metro, chill the F out. If you want to invoice your customers so quickly, don't hold a 5-day auction! Are you sure it's 5 days only? Probably closer to 5 weeks if you include the time they open the lots for bidding.

No...the guy got ripped off! CGC 9.0 oww (# 1449688001) re-graded to CGC 9.2 oww (# 1223893001) WTF, don't you realize these are the CGC boards we are on here. It's got absolutely nothing at all to do with the book. It's all about THE LABEL and nothing else matters.

Don't remember anything at all about the copy that your had sold as I assume it must have gone under the radar here. maybe we need a bit of a reminder. Seriously though, the comic book market has always tended to move in cycles over time. The Spidey market was definitely hot a couple of years ago and since that time, the heat seems to have move back to the Fantastic Four market which had been in the deep freeze for the longest while. It will eventually cycle back to Spidey once the FF's and some of the other Marvel books does a little bit of catch up to Spidey's rocker like performance over the past few years. As for the nervous economy and collectors not buying right now. Definitely not the case here if you look at some of the astounding prices that somce of the HTF GA books and classic covers are fetching in today's marketplace. Needless to say, the records just keeps on coming for these types of books across the entire condition spectrum.

It went for $7,701 which one other boardie me was lower than expected as some thought it was going to fetch $9K to $10K. Maybe if it didn't have the bad wrap, it just might have.

Sorry for the digression, but back to the topic on hand: Anybody else here think the purchaser made an astute and very timely purchase here at $598K while the AF 15 market is a tad soft and this purchase will look like a steal once the heat of the market cycles back to the Spidey books?

If I recall that's a super scarce issue. People are going to take what they can get! Yes, quite a few of those early Startling's are not that easy to come by. Just take a look at Startling 10 which doesn't actually come to market that often as compared to other keys. Explained in part by the fact that it has relatively few copies graded considering that it is a key book which normally tends to generate more submissions.

Hmmmm.............Day 1 is it? Congrats on your AF 15 purchase for only $598K.

Serious? Absolutely no surprise as the LCS's cater to a completely different type of clientale and its the ones who generally are not interested in purchasing slabbed books. Although I have seen slabs in my LCS, I have never seen anybody asked to look at one, let alone actually buy one. Same thing with the smaller local conventions where it's completely dominated by raw books and nobody is really interested at all in purchasing slabbed books. Personally I am interested in being able to actually touch and check out a book in those types of venues, especially since they deal in the latest hot books which everybody else has and definitely not worth paying for a slabbed copy. The only real place where I would be interested in slabbed books would be with the major auction houses since they deal in vintage collectible books where it is beneficial to have a resto check and 3rd party independent grading.

Yup Any idea how far back it goes with respect to the auction results?

Didn't CGC basically tried to leave the impression with the collecting base that they were grading by the standards of the day back then. Like you said though and to which I fully agree with, they never ever did go into any of the specific details so that they could not be held to anything per se. Of course not in terms of the current grading regime and today's unpublished grading standards where it would be almost absurb for a submittor to not at least consider a pre-screen for pressing if they are planning to have their books graded. By reading some of the threads here though, just make sure you don't send it to CCS because many of the boardies here makes it sounds as though you could get back damaged books in return. The comment I was making was referring back to the days before CGC whereby the comic book doctors were taking books apart and then putting them back together before selling them to an unsuspecting collecting base without any disclosure at all. I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on this point since you think all of that stuff was good to go back in those days. Definitely not accusing you of trimming because that's the kind of thing done by Dupchak and it clearly destorys the value of a book as it can be detected with virtual certainty. I was referring more to micro-trimming which is something completely different and if done properly, cannot be detected with 100% certainty unless you have before and after scans of the book. It's probably actually being done by some of the comic book doctors in today's marketplace, but something that we just can't detect when it's done properly. Of course, this is just my personal opinion although CGC wants everybody to believe they can detect it 100% of the time. Actually, the only reason why I was comparing pressing and micro-trimming is that I thought your rationale to support pressing was rather silly. Your 2 points for saying that pressing was alright was that: 1) it was economically viable to do due to the increased value of books in today's marketplace; and 2) it was done in the past prior to CGC opening their doors. Well, the exact same 2 factors would also apply to micro-trimming, but this does not make it a valid practice in the hobby. Now, your current point about quantitative changes to the book is definitely a much more valid argument for pressing vis-a-vis micro-trimming and something which I could agree with.

Science 2 has been in demand since the 1980s. Always considered a classic. 1 holds more sway in OSPG, but nowhere else. Well, I guess that's like how Cap 2 holds sway over Cap 3 in the OSPG , but absolutely nowhere else that I am aware of.

Would it also include the auction results from the CL auctions which everybody here finds virtually impossible to retrieve?

I loved this book. Glad it’s going to a good home With all of the current love and subsequent demand for Science 2, it almost makes me wonder if it's moved ahead of Science 1 in terms of valuation?

Another Seven Seas 6 that went a bit too high for my rather shallow pocket: Thought the bad wrap on this copy would help to keep the price down, a tad, but with how much these Seven Seas 6 are going for nowadays, I doubt I'll ever be able to complete my set.

Anybody here lucky enough to have grab this copy of Science 2 in the just completed CC Auction:

Well, did you managed to get this one here then as it was the only book that fit your criteria: Looks like this is the third go round for this exact same copy of the book here. Looks like it sold for close to $200 less than the first time on Heritage back in 2017, but still about $50 more than what it got on Heritage last year.