lou_fine

Well, looks like this copy of Action 13 sold for $156,000: Not a bad price, but I thought it might have gone for a bit more than that. Especially considering that the Atlantic City 9.2 graded copy managed to fetch $185,000 seven years ago way back in 2011.

That's a mighty big loss! Well, nothing compared to the CGC 9.9 graded copy of Hulk 181 which sold for something like $140K or was it $160K, but ended up with a severe case of SCS damage and would be lucky to grade back out in the low 9's now.

No business selling at that price in the first place. If I remember correctly it doesn't have a 1st appearance or was ever considered a key book. Yes, but when it sold for $15K back in 2016, it was the single highest and only CGC 9.8 graded copy in the "entire universe". To each their own, as I hope the buyer must have realized that he was paying for the CGC label, as opposed to the underlying comic book itself which doesn't really have much value anywhere below uber high grade. And as I have mentioned many times before any premium paid for a so-called "highest graded copy" only has transitory value as there are bound to be other copies that will eventually come into the marketplace, especially for these what would be common books in anything below uber higher grade.

Maybe more like 65% less after a couple of years.

Definitely not worth a fraction of that price, but then again I am a comic book collector as opposed to a CGC label collector. Reminds me of the $15,000 that was paid for this copy of Iron Man 30: Needless to say, subsequent CGC 9.8 graded copies of this same book are going for nowhere close to this price at all.

I always thought that Heritage, ComicConnect, and ComicLink were the 3 big auction houses, with Pedigree trailing far behind this group. Curious as to which of the big 3 you would drop into 4th place behind Pedigree?

(in my best Indigo Montoya voice) I do not think "kicked in the teeth" and "telling me to get bent" mean what you think it means. +1 In complete agreement with you here. Not sure if it's my faltering eyesight in my old age or my lack of reading comprehension, but I really think Baba needs to go back into that correspondence he received from the VP and highlight to us the exact part where he felt that he was "kicked in the teeth" and also "got bent".

And I assume you would know this because you have every single issue of both Action and Detective Comics from issue #1 right through to current times, and you just went through every single one of them to find out this little tidbit for us.

I don't think anyone would dispute that the book has been red-hot over the past year or so. However, the idea that each and every sale is going to be a home run is ridiculous. ( if you research the data this is true even with the holiest of grails Action 1 & Tec 27). I would also note that after buying and selling on eBay for 18 yrs I have found your rolling the dice each and every time you put a big ticket book up at auction, there are just so many variables positives and negative either way but overall I have found BIN prices tend to be higher than auction on not only comics but most items sold on eBay. Of course BIN prices would be normally be higher than true auction prices because most sellers tend to monitor GPA to see what books are going for and then add a small incremental amount to their BIN price on the assumption that they would not like to sell their book at what they think is lower than market price. At the same time, if you really want your book to sell at auction, the sell through rate for books auctioned off on the bid format is usually 100% as evident by what we see on the various auction sites like Hedritage, CL, CC, and eBay. Any bets that the sell through rates on books done using the BIN format and priced at GPA levels are a mere fraction of this and you would be lucky if your book manages to find a buyer in the same amount of time as a bid auction format.

This is the problem with a "hot" high census book in mid grades. Sellers rush to auction them off only to end up with a lousy final bid. In that case it's always going to be a bidder's market since mid graded 181s are auctioned relatively often. All a bidder has to do is wait a little while for the next auction. Imo the only grade that would make some sense to auction off at all is a 9.8 in a high profile auction house other than eBay! Otherwise just have some patience and put a "buy it now" price on it with best offers. Seems like sellers are allergic to patience these days I actually believe the classic auction format is a much better reflection of the actual value for a comic book. Especially since I believe the BIN format inherently tends to skew the price upwards as you don't know how long the book had to sit there before getting that final price. More importantly, although it does take that one completed sale into account, it doesn't take into account all of the other countless non-sales that doesn't take place since they couldn't find a buyer even though these other equivalent graded copies might have been listed either at exactly the same price or possibly even at a slightly lower price.

You're onto something here. A Church of Comics is in order. Don't religious organizations have all kinds of exemptions? Yes, I totally agree with you and concur that all Church pedigree copies of books should be exempt from this sales tax.

+1 From a strict cover to cover content point of view, Bat 1 is better than Cap 1 and is probably the top GA book out there from a pure content point of view.

John Verzyl was a big buyer of Church books from HA. It's not unlikely that these are from his inventory. Yeah, got a few PMs after my posts, suggesting the books were sales by his estate. I think his estate is going to take a few hits. There are a lot of books that sold within the past year that were purchased at nosebleed prices. I only posted about a few, because I ran out of energy. Not sure if the timeline would work out for some of these books to be from John's Heritage buys. After all, the ones that were won from 5 months ago all took place in late May which seems rather unlikely to be from Verly's bidding since he passed away around the first week of March. I don't believe the heritage lots are normally opened for bidding so early prior to an auction and I don't believe Heritage would be placing absentee bids on John's prior instructions knowing that he had already passed away.

I don't know, Peter. It does bring a lot of books to market whether flipped or not. I don't buy and flip myself but I don't have a problem with it. Folks sometimes do better but sometimes do worse on flipping even in a short amount of time. Kind of fun to watch for me. Well, if I was flipping, it would not be the best idea to go right back to the same venue to try to resell your book. Unless it's been upgraded through a resubmit, it would be a much better idea to try a different venue in hopes of getting different eyeballs on the book. For example, although this copy of Wonderworld 7 sold for a healthy multiple of over 3.5X condition guide at $16,730 in Heritage's 2017 summer auction: it was able to resell for over $22,500 about 7 short months later in this ComicConnect Event Auction just this past March. I would assume a different venue possibly meant a different clientele with a different set of eyeballs on the same book.

Allan; Glad to hear that you had yourself a good show in terms of your sales. Didn't make it to the last show since I was on a Baltic cruise then, but this one definitely seem to have fewer attendees than some of the previous shows. Still seem to be quite a bit of buying though which I found rather surprising since most of the other dealers there all seem to have the same so-called "hot books" for sale in raw condition, but at what appeared to be at full grade prices.

Was that not Emma Frost several years ago in the X-men: First Class movie with Sebastian Shaw? Can't remember if movie mentioned 1960s Hellfire Club by name. Well, I guess this copy never ever did sell for the almost $15K asking price that it was hoping to get. Would have stood a much better chance if it was asking only $1,500 and a sure fire sale if it was asking only $150. Not sure about the X-Men First Class movie, but they definitely do have the sexy Frost sisters and the Hellfire Club on Marvel's The Gifted TV show.

Now, that's certainly a pretty sharp and nice looking copy that you was lucky and also astute enough to pick up once you saw it.

I simply love the fact that most people treat resto books like the plague. Especially when it's just color touch, or a little glue. You're telling me because some company (which clearly never makes mistakes) puts a different color label on something, it's worth a fraction of the same book that looks way worse? I hope that mentality continues. Well, I think those days are long gone as buyers now seem much more willing to pay up for affordable copies of either high dollar books or HTF books, just in order to acquire a copy that they otherwise would not be able to. I still remember picking up a nicely presenting slightly restored copy of Science Comics #1 at a huge discount to guide, figuring that I better do so since I would never be able to afford one in unrestored condition. Should have picked up more of these restored books at the time since it looks like a lot of these are now going for well over condition guide prices. Go figure that.

Well, no real surprise as it looks like my then high bid the other day for this book didn't hold up for very long: Any bets that this copy is going to go for huge dollars and could end up being one of the highlights of the auction here. The last time they have a nice copy of this truly HTF book up for auction was the Atlantic City Copy in the 2011 CC Auction when a CGC 9.2 graded copy sold for over 6X top of guide ($30K at the timer) when it sold for something like $185K. Don't think this copy will fetch the same kind of multiple since the top of guide price 7 years later has now moved up to the $180K mark, although this copy here does appear to have a brighter cover as compared to the Atlantic City Copy. Any guesses as to what this gorgeous copy will end up going for?

Not a real surprise since it would appear that GA books are seemingly the hottest part of the comic book auction marketplace right now.

Wow, from this week's edition of Scoop, it looks like Metro just sold this Church copy of a HTF Jumbo 11 for $24K: What an absolutely gorgeous copy with eye-popping colors and the next highest graded copy being a VF 8.0. Never could understand why Overstreet still hasn't gotten around to breaking this issue out from the run as it is definitely another one of these classic Fine covers from my own personal point of view. Probably one of the reasons why you hardly ever see one in the marketplace as it is a definite keeper if you are lucky enough to have one in your personal collection.

Allan; Great pics of the con which you posted for all of us here. Since you seem to know a bit about OA, any idea what the original artwork for HOS 92 would be worth in today's marketplace?

Well, it would appear that Harshen is indeed a gentleman and likes to be politically correct here. But maybe we should call a spade a spade when we see it. It must be the cheapo Vancouverite collectors like me who kept them so busy last year, they seem to have ample time to stamp out cobwebs at their booth, let along the fact that they were already basically shut down and gone by noontime on Sunday. Well, let's hope they give the Vancouver Fan Expo a second chance a second chance somewhere down the line.

And from what I've been told by one person who does the CPR game, it's best to turn the book in fully intact in its original slab. Especially if you are doing this as a pre-screen for pressing as it kind of sets the floor on the grade and then almost guarantees a higher grade as it's kind of hard for them to justify charging you for something if it doesn't end up giving you any benefits. Sad to say, but it looks like it has come down to money for everybody along the line as long as you play the game in the way they want you to play it.

Fishler's, I think. Well, at least Steve has enough confidence in his own auction website to auction his own personal collection of books there. Unlike somebody like Schmell who took all of his uber HG SA Marvels to Heritage when it came time for him to auction off his own books. Boy, if the owner operator of a supposedly high end comic book auction website doesn't have enough confidence in his own website to auction off his own books, then why in the world should anybody else consign their books to him for auction?