lou_fine

Now, those definitely look like the type of oddball #1 titles which I was able to pick up from Hauser. Like you said, most likely not worth slabbing at all no matter how high they would have ended up grading at. So oddball, in fact, that the only book that I remembered from the bunch was Total War #1 since I absolutely loved that Total War / M.A.R.S. Patrol short-lived series.

Yes, I did get these directly from Hauser. I was a customer of Hauser and was even at his house a couple times. When I found out about this collection he got I was upset that he didn't contact me . Apparently Tom Brulato was taking just about all the Marvel Super Hero from him and there were only some non Super Hero stuff left. . He let me have fist shot at a short box of these non Super Hero Curators. I still have a few raws. They were mostly/all #1's, some cool esoteric stuff. I should have bought them all !!!! Any idea what kind of prices he was charging Tom for them and if it was for a premium or multiple to guide at the time? I am certainly glad you didn't buy all of them, otherwise I would have been able to pick up some of the #1 losers that were I assumed nobody else wanted even at only top of guide prices.

You wouldn’t need all of them or even close to all of them... just enough of the ones that have been getting flipped around. Dunno what percentage of the 9.8s are locked up in PCs, and you’d probably make more money by having hoarded the innumerable low grade copies and selling those off. Seems like it would be pretty easy for someone with the resources and patience. I don’t think it’s a tin foil hat worthy suspicion, and it borders on naïveté to think no one would dare manipulate a market like this. Ive heard reference to some historical effeorts of a few people to corner the market on a few SA keys in the 80s or 90s ... but I don’t recall the details. Maybe someone who knows about that could give a few details on the story. I would definitely agree with Matt here that it would be totally absurd for somebody to try to corner the IH 181 market. Just ask the Hunt brothers when they tried to corner the silver market back in 1979/80 and had to file for bankruptcy when they lost over a billion doing that. And back in 1980, you can bet a billion dollars really was a sh_tload of money back then. Just think about this for a minute. If you are the only one that's buying as you drive the price of a HG Hulk 181 from say $3,000 up to $20,000; who's going to be willing to pay you more money than that when you try to unload them. Especially when they were not even willing to pay a lot less than that before. For example, if I was not willing to pay you $5,000 for a Hulk 181 before, what makes you think that I would now be willing to pay you $25,000 for it just because you drove the price up to that level all on your own. Especially since comics are really much more of an unnecessary luxury as compared to something like silver which can be considered as a necessary commodity in a lot of cases. I don't think anybody was trying to corner the SA market back in the 80's. Especially since the Overstreet valuations for SA Marvels were actually on a downtrend through much of that decade until you got to the end of the 80's when they finally turned around and started to head back up the other way, and only after several years of going absolutely nowhere.

Well of course they will charge you. What does the original price of the comic have to do with anything? Action Comics 1 originally cost how much? And what is it really worth? I guess my simple rule of thumb is that since I feel that the true value of a collectible comic book should be the underlying comic book itself, I wouldn't really want to have to spend more money on having the book graded and what have you, as opposed to what I had originally spent on the comic book itself. Especially if the grading and additional services is going to be something like over 100 times what the book cost me in the first place. Okay, I will make an exception for your Action 1 example since I would be willing to spend more on having this particular book graded if you can find me a copy that would cost me less than what the grading fees would be.

Yes, I am sure they can and will gladly charge you a whole ton more money to slab a book that might have originally cost you only 25 cents when you purchased it from your LCS. And what's to stop the thieves from removing the book from their trackable slab and tossing it after they steal your books?

Yes, that's actually quite surprising since these are just reprinted books, are they not? What were their original prices and it's unbelievable that people would be paying $900 smackers for them. If this is the case, then wouldn't some of those first prints of the reprinted graphic novels also be worth a lot of money? Especially for those that were either popular or in demand enough to go back for subsequent multiple reprinted editions.

LOL, I don't think he squashed it if you look other copies on ebay or online this issue its all the exact same thing and even the cgc 9.8 slabs you can see that edge sticking out Well, how do you think they ALL managed to hit that magical optimal grade of CGC 9.8 then? I am just surprised some of them didn't make it all the way to CGC 9.9 or did you forget to check that?

You do realize you cannot truly tell anything about a book unless you actually have it in hand. If you suspect that some manipulative work has been done to artificially maximize the potential of the book, the only way you can really tell is by having before and after scans of the book, which you obviously do not. The seller was probably just trying to be considerate to you and did not want you to waste your valuable time looking for your copy of the Webster's Dictionary and decided to proactively squash the living daylights out of the book just for your benefit.

No worries. To tell you the truth, I have books which I cherry picked off the shelves of the LCS's from back in the mid to late 70's stored away like bricks of 5 or so in those old yellow poly bags. Surprisingly, they also still look as fresh and minty as the day I picked them off the shelves some 40+ years ago.

+1 Let's hope so for the sake of the owner of these books who spent so much time, love, and money putting this collection together.

All I can say is that for any collector who lists their collection into a open Registry for the entire world to see, including potential thieves: https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/01/09/1400000-batman-comics-stolen-storage-unit/?fbclid=IwAR1QMHQ5tOI1vMfCEjNWiGMEzTyVq97nrSVaJa9E98A9NbuGcRRXHOTGgvI be sure to follow it up with the second part of the equation and keep them all tucked safely away in a storage security locker which any common thief would be able to break into at their own leisure.

I think if you stacked all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, you might be getting somewhere. That plus the fact that you might just have to keep it there for the rest of your life just in order to save the $20 or whatever it costs to have a professional press job done on the book.

+1 My thoughts exactly. I have never been able to figure out why in the world would a collector go out and post to the entire world exactly what they have, especially if it's something of value. Totally boggles my mind sometimes why collectors would list their books in an open Registry where anybody could access the information, including potential thieves or anybody else who would love to get their hands on your books. Well that, plus the fact that a storage locker unit is most definitely not the safest place to store anything of value. Nevertheless, sincere best wishes that the owner will be able to catch the culprit and get back his collection intact, especially since he already has some idea of who it might be.

I most assuredly really feel for the owner as this must have been a life long project for him to attempt to put a collection of this quality together. The only positive I see here is that with a collection of this magnitude and quality, it will be virtually impossible for the thief to sell them for anywhere close to its value without it being flagged somewhere. Especially when these types of books would generally be sold through auction sites like Heritage and CC, and we know how sharp these guys are at identifying stolen goods. Remember the stolen Cage copy of Action Comics 1 that was found in some storage unit and then confirmed by Fishler as the stolen copy.

I wasn’t going to say anymore, then I read this as you put three books in one Mylar. This is bad idea. I bag and board all my books cheaply, even the drek. A basic comic bag and acid free backing board is about $0.12 per book when bought in 100pc packs. This is way better than packing books together in the best single Mylar. For flimsy and/or better-than-drek books I’ll double/triple board them. I also use silver age sz bags and boards on my bronze to current books. These basic bags will eventually ripple and yellow, but it’ll take about a decade in my experience and even then I’ve yet to see damage to the book appear. Definitely a good idea if the book was truly hard to find and had real value regardless of the grade it is in. But for a common book like ASM 361, as clearly evident by this previously posted picture from above: along with the fact that most dealers at the cons normally also have multiple copies of this supposedly valuable book sitting on their tables looking for a buyer, means that it's not really worth the time and money to switch them out. Well this, plus the fact that I have absolutely no idea where they would be since I just shoved it into one of the boxes when I got it, thinking they weren't really worth much since they came as a throw in with another deal.

There's only one big problem with this strategy here. When it comes to the latest hot MA books on the shelves of your LCS's, you do realize that 99% of them basically becomes worthless drek after a few short months as the speculators will have move onto the next hot book by then. Yes, you will get the very very rare winner every now and then, but you will also be left with hundreds of copies of other worthless drek issues of other once former hot books that nobody now would even want to touch with a 10-foot pole.

If I remember correctly, I have all 3 of them (i.e. ASM 361-363) stored in the same one used mylar facing the opposite direction with an old backing board separating the 361 from the other two. Didn't figure any of the books were valuable enough to get their own separate mylar / backing board and sounds as though they still aren't from what I am reading here. Any idea when this set started to gain some value? Just wondering since I picked up this set a few years at a local con as a throw in since I had just spent a few hundred dollars picking up some nice HG early first print TMNT books. Too bad the TMNT #1 was not a first print , although it was still a fantastic deal since it basically worked out to about half of guide for the Turtle books. I think the Spidey set came out to something like less than $20 just in order to round up the total to some even dollar amount.

I'd be a lot more concerned over the interior pages if they didn't stick out over the edge and had simply been trimmed off.

Well, if this is your criteria for a good deal, then I believe you are not buying the right type of books. Especially with these recent common hot books which are readily available in uber high grade condition and doesn't really command that much real value in anything lower than high grade. I simply don't see a Spidey 361 ever becoming something like a Hulk 181 whereby mid or lower grade copies were accelerating at a faster percentage clip relative to uber HG copies for awhile back there a couple of years ago.

I think he was transitioning into Disney cels & memorabilia back then as he talked about it to me. We was in his late 60's back then, I'm not sure if he's alive at this point. Good to know. How about a couple of the other big players back then like Pat Kochanek and Danny Kramer? Loved the articles that Kochanek wrote in the early issues of CBM about the Edgar Church collection, but sounds as though he might have shifted into original art or something else awhile back. I remember Kramer taking the marketplace by storm in the mid-90's trying to buy up everything, but like a flash in the pan was gone after that.

I've never owned a Timely yet. Fixed that for you since I thought an intelligent man like you would know by now that you should never say never. Especially when this book could be all yours for just the right price.

looks like 9-15 to me. Yes, that's what it looks like to me too. Must mean the store where Edgar brought his books received this copy of Marvel Comics 1 on September 15 which would line up perfectly with the November over printed date on the front cover of the book. Does seem a bit odd though since September 15th in 1939 falls on a Friday and I thought stores normally did not receive their books on a Friday. Or maybe it did in Denver?

Yes, indeed and congrats on a fantastic sales result!!! Looks like it sold for almost as much as the CGC 9.2 graded Atlantic City copy of Cap 1 managed to fetched a few yours prior to your copy.

Yes, I imagine it must take quite a bit longer to read through a whole omnibus as compared to a single comic book. Didn't take you that long to go through the ASM 361 to find out that Aunt May was apparently a fan of the Donald. Glad to see the seller is top notch and giving you a full refund for returning the book, but just can't figure if you should be paying a rental fee for reading through the entire book first before returning it?

Well, we are still waiting..............it shouldn't take that long for a book to arrive here from Hong Kong.