lou_fine

I'd love to see this one. Looks like this one was listed as a NM+ in Chuck's MH Catalogue, although I thought this was one of the few books that Chuck had kept for himself.

Makes zero sense. Makes perfect sense if a certain auction house with a less than reputable Pedigree is the one that's winning all of these outlier auctions, only to have them reappear again a few short months later.......

Well, since it's a Pedigree Auction, I am quite sure that most of these books didn't start out as highest graded copies.

Now, this list looks to be much closer to the order which I would go for.

+1 Yes indeed! Reminds me of many of the articles written in the early pages of the CBM magazine when Gary Carter first put it out back in the 90's.

Out of all of the price guides that he does, I am 100% sure that Bob cares for the comic book price guide the most and is very meticulous about it. Seriously though, this must take up an almost insurmountable amount of his time. Especially when he also has his price guide on the Indian Arrowheads which he has been doing for a long time. Now, he has also added ones for original art, movie posters, concert posters, video games, tabletop games, and what have you. He must have other people doing the bulk of the work on these other guides.

That’s old school. I don’t think (admittedly haven’t analyzed ) that formula works these days in general, does it? Well, if you take a look at all of the CC auction listing descriptions which are good enough to warrant an Overstreet guide valuation, that's exactly how they determine the guide values for all of the intermediate grades.

+1 Most definitely so as I have already stated on many occasions.

As far as I know, price per point for GA is generally talked about for books ranging in grade from 2.0 Good up to 6.0 Fine only. Especially for keys or classic HTF covers, where entry levels can sometimes go for nosebleed level prices. Of course, we all know what the higher grade copies for these books would go for if they ever do show up in the marketplace. So yes, the price per point does seem to apply, but within a much narrower grade range than what you seem to be thinking in terms of.

Didn't Danny Boy have a whole row of them including the other GA keys in that classic Fantazia ad photo that he used to run in the pages of CBG back in the late 80's and early 90's?

I remember being at one of my first SD Conventions in the early 90's when Jon had a small table selling off some of his comic books. It was the same year when the first Wizard Magazine came out and I remember that he was laughing about the magazine and how it would never ever last. Yet ironically, it was the Overstreet Update that didn't last and I believe that Jon actually ended up working with Wizard in charge of the pricing guide portion of their hugely successful monthly magazine.

That would be my guess. they are going to sell as best they can, and this seems like the best they're going to be able to do in this particular case. +2 This would definitely be my guess also, as the auction house really has to go with what the consignor wants to do.

Why....not only are you a hoarder, but also a teaser at the same time. This reminds me of the pics you had last year for you Pep 34's and AF 15's. Whatever happened to those copies or are you still holding onto them?

Yes, would definitely agree with you here about Cap 3. Maybe somebody should get around to telling Bob this since I've been waiting for years now to see him move Cap 3 ahead of Cap 2 in his price guide.

Regardless of the washed out colours, I am a little bit surprised this book is going up in one of their Monthly Auctions only, instead of one of their Event Auctions which tends to draw more eyeballs. Definitely eyeballs attached to deeper pocketed collectors, many of whom probably don't even bother looking at their non-Event auctions. After all, this is a copy of Action 13 that we are talking about which is highly desirable in any condition level.

Well, if you apply a combination of muscle and something else non-restorative to scrubbed out all of the color and stain at the same time, you just might be able to get a higher technical grade from CGC.

Not to brag, but I'm guessing you're referring to an article I wrote way back when. I think it was in the quarterly #6. But I also remember Sean's articles. He was huge on B&B 34, enough to convince me! Then I most definitely have you to thank for pointing out those two relatively undervalued books to me. I clearly remember having that last issue of the Quarterly #6 with me and referring to your article when I was fortunate enough to find a copy of Jackpot 4 inside one of the boxes in the Diamond vault.

The answer is that it will be going for a lot less than this equivalent graded VG 4.0 copy on Heritage that was point out to us by Gator: https://comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/action-comics-13-dc-1939-cgc-vg-40-off-white-to-white-pages/p/7187-110001.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515# To me, it's an absolute no-brainer as to which one would grade higher and would command more money in the marketplace.

+1 After seeing a totally washed out almost colorless cover like this as compared to some of the covers with eye-popping colors that almost appear like they are dripping off the page, it makes me wonder why CGC doesn't really factor in color saturation when coming up with their final grade determination. Yes, although this copy might grade out to a VG 4.0 from a strict CGC technical point of view only, the loss of color sure makes it appear to be much less than a VG 4.0 from a visual point of view. Especially when I am quite sure this loss of color was not due to the production process.

Although that may have been the mistaken perception that many of us had, it definitely did not reflect the actual reality. Being a long weekend, I dug back into my old Overstreet's to take a look at what actually took place. It looked like the change from NM 9.4 being replaced by NM 9.2 as top of guide was done in the 2004 edition. This was based entirely on the thought that prices in the uber high grades were far too volatile to report on accurately, especially since CGC had been in place for quite a few years by then and speculators were paying ridiculous prices for uber HG books. Being collectors and wishful dreamers, it would appear that many of us (myself definitely included here) tend to focus in on the top of guide price when we look for the valuation of a book. In actual fact, we should be looking at the bottom of guide because that is what the valuations in the price guide are based upon. What actually took place is that Overstreet basically not only kept the same 1:3 spread in place for Good to Fine, but also kept the prices exactly the same for the bottom 4 condition levels for most of the books listed in the guide. He then placed a higher price (i.e. increase the spread from Good valuation) for both the VF/NM 9.0 and NM- 9.2 condition levels to reflect the increase prices being paid for higher graded books at the time. So yes, in relationship to the higher top of guide prices, there was definitely a drop in the percentage valuation of Fine condition books. Yet, no actual change in the relationship to the bottom of guide prices as that 1:3 ratio from Good to Fine remained exactly the same, even up to the current edition of the guide. So, the guide valuation in Fine condition for virtually all books did not fall when Overstreet cut his top of guide listing down to NM- 9.2. The only exceptions to this would be the odd out of favor titles that he cut the valuations for across all condition levels, but definitely a lot more such as the SA Marvels where he continued with the increases for all of the condition levels (including Fine) across the entire condition spectrum. Interesting to note that the first copy of the Overstreet guide generally had ratios of either 1/1.25/1.50 or 1/1.50/2.0 for Good, Fine, and Mint grade levels. As you'll note, Overstreet continued to increase this spread in the higher grade levels over the coming years to reflect the higher prices that were being paid for the higher grade books as time went on. With the past few guides though, he seems to be going the other way in order to reflect the recent phenomenon of record prices being paid for entry level or low grade copies of certain GA keys and/or HTF classic covers. For example, Overstreet has increased the bottom of guide Good valuation for 'Tec 31 by over 92% for the past 2 years while increasing the top of guide NM- valuation by only 28%. Similarly, we see the same thing with a book like Flash 86 which has increased by a whopping 377% in the bottom of guide Good valuation, while increasing by 172% in top of guide NM- valuation over the past 2 years. So, although many collectors claim that Overstreet is out of touch with the real marketplace, it looks like he is aware of the trends and does try to reflect them in his price guide valuations.

In a way, I would tend to disagree with your statement here. I always kind of thought of the total dollar value of the Overstreet Top 100 GA Comics as being similar to the Dow 30. Both of them are definitely imperfect since they look at only the top books/stocks in their field and rotate out the ones that fall by the wayside over time. Similarly, the bigger books/stocks also tend to have a bigger impact on the overall index/value, with the smaller ones accounting for less. Maybe it's just me, but I see both of them as an imperfect, but relative indicator or measure of the value for both markets over a period of time.

Cityduck covers it above pretty good. I tried finding an article about this but came up empty. I believe it was a guy who had perpetuated some large scale corporate fraud and he bought a number of issues from the first Heritage Billy Wright Auction. Then he got caught and I believe they became the property of the company or group he had scammed, and they put them back up for auction with Heritage about a year later. I just checked some Heritage records and notable books that sold twice in a year and went for less were Adventure 40, Cap 2, Batman 2, and Detective 18. However I also noticed the Action 1 was resold and it went for $100K more, so apparently it wasn't always true on the resale. I believe you guys are talking about this case here: https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/22/8870089/texas-comic-book-heist-anthony-chiofalo-tadano Definitely a long story to read through, but one which has been discussed here in the before. Yes, who else would pay $200K for a CGC 8.5 graded copy of All-Star #3, almost $6K for a CGC 6.5 graded copy of Subby 17, etc.

Keith = Keith Contarino? If so, a very sad end. Yes, that is the Keith I had in mind. Sorry to hear about the sad end, but is there any details that you can share with us or is it really more of a private matter.

Sean, do you have a copy of the article? Even if it didn't see publication, it would be really interesting to read today. I really enjoyed your articles also, they were some of the very best in CBM. +1 It would indeed be interesting to see how your Top 20 in 20 managed to fare after some 20+ years. BTW: I also enjoyed reading Keith's column as it was sure to make you feel good about your collection, no matter how down you might have been on a particular day. Not sure if he was a pump and dump kind of dealer, but he sure knew how to pump those SA books up like they were worth a million bucks. Guess we all should have listened to him, especially with respect to the high end SA Marvels. Any idea if he is still dealing in comics since I haven't heard anything about him for years now?

Is there any truth to the rumors that you will be coming out with a high-end royalty version of the price guide to perfectly complement Overstreet's much more pedestrian price guide? I believe that yours will start with a bottom grade of NM 9.4 and then have 8 different grade levels going right past a Gem Mint 10.0 and then topping out at a tth2 11.0.