lou_fine

Well, not so sure if this one would qualify yet. After all, your copy here only has the cover being cleaned. Maybe you need to throw some more money Halperin's way by sending it in to seal up any tears or splits and also do some reinforcing on both the interior and exterior of the book. Especially when I don't see a CVA sticker on your copy, unlike this beautifully Conserved copy which went all out in terms of the work done:

Now isn’t that a name associated with some controversy? Now come on, you guys really need to be more positive, forward thinking, and be able to read between the lines here. With Halperin having his hands in both CGC and Heritage, this simply means that the ever changing definition of restoration has now been revised once again to now exclude wet cleaning and this will eventually be disclosed to the collecting base only after somebody catches them and flags it to the rest of us. Ever ready to stay ahead of the marketplace, I've already got all of my books lined up in front of the washing machine and dryer ready to go, plus my red hot iron set at maximum to press out any wrinkles and creases afterwards. No need to pay a middle man like Mark to do this when you can take care of it yourself. Now, when Heritage gets around to hiring Jason Ewert as a Consignment Director, that'll be another sure sign that the definition of Universal, like the universe itself is ever expanding and engulfing everything in its path.

Bingo. Yes, I guess our hosts here just couldn't stomach the fact that even a measly 1 out of the 14 books were graded by the other guys.

Yeah... which is why I didn’t go to FEV this year, as I need to submit my books thru CGC. Thus the reason I go to ECCC instead. Only problem with the ECCC option is that U.S. Customs will have to stamp "To Be Returned To Canada" in big bold letters on the front cover of every book. Seriously though, it's probably a big big hassle to fill out all of the proper paperwork to bring your books across the border.

I am flattered someone would think I could do that sort of work. I didn't do it and I can't remember who did it. The procedure is actually pretty common place now. I have a super nice Batman 40 that I am sure will go through the process once it gets on the market. Well, if you can't remember who did this magnificent work on the book, there's a high probability that your Batman 40 won't come out as sharp when you get it done. Knowing my luck, if I ever tried something like that, the entire right edge of the whole book would be scraped right off.

I don't think too many boardies are comfortable with that amount of manipulation. I know I am not. Well, unfortunately it really doesn't matter what you or I or anybody else is comfortable with anymore, as we've already gone way too far down the dark road to ever go back. I think anybody with any common sense should have known that once the barn doors were opened a bit by CGC, it would not be long before they would be blown wide open as more and more activities would be given a green light over time.

Yes, that's the approach I used to take back in the day when it came to bidding on those perfect looking uber HG books from Jason Ewert way back in the day. The only problem is that I never ever came close to winning one of those books since I just could not compete with those lucky unlucky winners with the real deep pockets.

I was sitting down when I typed that. Yes, the old Al Bundy reading library and meditation room. You better not get too comfortable in there or your better half might start whining about the toilet seat ring around your butt.

Sad to say that Dan Bennett is unfortunately no longer with us as he was a true collector and lover of the Timely books.

You CBCSers sure do whine a lot. Boy, look at all of the fun I've been missing the past few weeks while I've been away. Probably really nothing more than just a "prissing" match between the CBCSers and the CCS/CGC acolytes. Sad to see between 2 real stand up guys on the boards here.

Yes, unfortunately we did lose a number of collectors who did decide to step away from the hobby after this whole fiasco about what was being done to books first came to light. At the same time though, it was also unfortunate that even more flippers and speculators probably came into the marketplace as they saw this to be the perfect opportunity to manipulate and launder the books to make fast money on unsuspecting collectors.

Wow, from the boardies who responded here, it looks like Masterchief is still patrolling the boards here. It's been years since I last saw a post from him and well over a decade since he did a lot of the grunt research work to dig up what was really going on behind the scenes and blew open the whole CPR game that was going on here before anybody else here knew what was going on.

I would have to say NO since it doesn't appear to be on their Calendar of Events: https://www.cgccomics.com/events/ Of course, I am not completely sure if that list from CGC is up-to-date and accurate.

Well, let's certainly hope this doesn't happen to those beautiful looking Centaurs in the upcoming CC auction that just started this week and scheduled to wrap up in the middle of March.

+1 Especially since the story is that Dave went through the entire 2,000 print run so that he could personally cherry picked the best copies for himself. It must have been a quite upsetting to Dave that the entire print run (save a few copies) had those nasty looking spine ticks running down the cover as the book was apparently poorly printed and bound together. The LCS owner which I knew at the time stated that every single one of the Cerebus #1's which he got into the store had the spine ticks on them. Not sure why CGC slams these production spine ticks so hard when they are present on almost every single copy of the book, and yet give the horrid looking Marvel chipping a pass when a substantially lower percentage of the early Marvel books had this chipping problem.

There were other folks interested in the book, even in the low to mid 20s... Yes, the "silent" bidders who don't bother to bid unless it's coming down to the end and they think they have a real shot at getting the book. And exactly why I said the 75% downside risk on the buyer was probably a bit overstated.

That was what kept me from going higher. It's not highest graded and the Church and Penn copies are out there. I thought $30k was a bit unreasonable, but I could stomach it. I don't know that you could reasonably get 75% of that back if you needed to. I would tend to agree with you here, especially in the situation here where it's really only 2 bidders that are bidding the book past the $16K mark. The only thing I would say is that your estimate of a possible 75% drop seems a tad high to me, as the other bidders most likely dropped out somewhere around the 50 percentile mark.

I am not so sure about that, as it looks like it sort of depends where the book was placed in the catalogue. All of the Supes books that were in the Platinum Session seems ti have done noticeably better than the ones that were left in the regular session.

Congrats on the pickup of a book that has really moved right up there in terms of the demand factor. Well deserved and long overdue as this book had seemingly fallen off the radar and relatively under appreciated for the longest while when compared to some of the other hot GA #1 first appearance books.

Well, all I can say is that's definitely a GREAT price on the great 3. Especially for a CGC 8.0 graded copy that's got 2 other copies in slightly higher grades. Definitely no softness here when it comes to this particular book.

Since I cannot see the video for some reason , all I can say is that the auctioneer must be quite patient and trying to milk the lots for as much as they can get. I was watching the Famous Funnies 209 cover OA and it looked like it sat at the pre-live auction bid of $350K for the longest time before they finally gave it the Fair Warning sign. After that it appeared to be a fight between a very hesitant bidder and a very quick to the draw bidder as the hammer price finally came down at $460K for a final price of $552K including the juice.

Is it just me or is their Live Auction portion of their site not working as well as it has in previous auctions? It seems that I can't see the video or even hear the auctioneer this time. Plus every time I jump into another tab, it send me back to the previous page instead of putting me right back into the Live Auction page and I have to go in all over again and then disable the Live Bidding function in order to avoid hitting the wrong button. Strange since I have't change any of the setting on my computer.

+1 I was also surprised at how low the Baker Seven Seas #5 OA cover sold for, relative to some of the other much higher prices that much more recent interior pages have been fetching so far.

Well, looks like I just got back from a 3-week all sunny 😎 vacation in time for the closing of this Heritage Auction here. From looking at some of the interim bids last night, is it just me or do they appear to be a tad on the soft side RIGHT NOW? I guess we will just have to wait until the hammer comes down on these lots in the next couple of days.

Gene; So, I guess you are saying that this particular CGC 9.9 graded copy was probably over graded during possibly one of their soft grading time periods. Either that or it caught the graders, and most especially the finalizer, in a happy and generous mood that day. I guess that's why our wallet says that we should really be following the mantra of: "Buy the book and not the label". Clearly, if what you are saying is true, then the purchaser followed the other manta which is to: "Buy the label and not the book". All I can say is more power to him then if he was willing to spend something like $140K more just to get that extra 0.1 increment in the CGC label.