lou_fine

Reminds me of the time I was in the Dubai Mall the other year, which is supposedly the largest shopping mall in the world. They had a comic book display right in the center of the mall. Although Dubai is often known for having by far the grandest and most luxurious for most items in the world, their comic books certainly left a lot to be desired.

Wait for it. We all know it's the last day and live auction when things go gaga. Well, I can certainly see this book going back up into the $50K+ range, but I think it's going to be a bit of a stretch for it to hit its breakeven point of $70K+. I guess we'll just have to wait a few more days to find out our answer here.

Have no idea but most likely a whole lot of money it is the highest graded I doubt there will ever be another 9.6 that will be graded by CGC. I thought it was agreed by many board members here already that the book actually looked better in its former incarnation as a CGC 9.2 copy when it sold for just over $50K on one of CC's Event Auctions a couple of years ago. Well, looks like this book is still sitting at only $28K with only 3+ days left to go until the final hammer hits. Still a long ways away from the $70K+ in theory which the consignor will need in order to break even on this book.

I actually find that to be the case for a lot of the Miller story lines. His stories tend to start out so well that you can't wait for the next issue to come out, but usually not so much towards the end of his story lines.

Well, if that's the case then I really should get around to finding one of my copies and getting it graded before it's too late.

+1 I believe it's the same scenario with a lot of the final issues for many of these MA or CA runs.

Based upon personal experience, going from strict memory is not necessarily a good idea in the long run. Especially since I've been collecting for decades and you end up picking up duplicate HG copies of what were common books such as Batman 232, Thor 165, Marvel Premiere #3, etc. that you were chasing after once before. Of course, if you wait long enough, some of these purchasing mistakes like the ones above could turn into winners if you are lucky enough. Seem to have no problem remembering my GA books probably because they were more expensive and so much tougher to find, but when it came to the cheaper and common BA and CA books for only a few dollars a piece back then, very easy to lose track of what you have and don't have.

It is on the GPA but it was talked about in this forum and there was speculation at the time - it may be unfounded but the chatter was there. I'm not saying it's true - just pointing it out +1 Not sure if GPA has the time or is even set up to do a detailed analysis for each individual sale. Probably done on more of an exception basis if they hear something or if a particular sales result is flagged to them. So, I believe it's quite possible that it might have been a cash and trade deal that possibly could have slipped through the cracks.

Yes, collectors will probably find much better deals here than down at the much larger and overhyped Emerald City Con down in Seattle the following week.

Not sure about everybody else here, but I find that the first portion of the AMF run to be far superior from a cover point of view, as compared to the last portion of this run. Bring on the next run here!

Same lack of grade guarantee issue with an encapsulated book, although to a lesser extent. After all, have you not heard of SCS yet?

What's the juice? Does the book come with some hooch? The juice is the 19.5% Buyer's Premium which is charged to the winning bidder by Heritage? Not sure what happened to your earlier question about the grading of the book? I actually had no problem with the original 8.5 grading which was given to the book by the other company. It's just that a lot of other board members stated at the time that the book was clearly overgraded and implied that it would only be somewhere in the 7.0 to 8.0 condition range if the book had been graded by CGC. Looks like they were clearly wrong in the end.

+1 Totally with you on this positive change 100%. Hated that part of the old boards since you could never keep track of your read and unread posts if you left your computer for more than half a hour or whatever time frame it was.

I expect that you will receive your answer in 6 days from now as the current CGC 8.5 graded copy of AF 15 is already sitting at over $131K with the juice included. Guess the consignor of this particular copy did not do so bad after a lot of board members here opined that he had over paid for what was clearly an overgraded copy of this book when he paid $77K for it only a few months in the summer Heritage auction.

I am not so sure about that. There are a whole lot more color breaking stresses and larger ones at that, on the spine of the 7.5 graded copy as opposed to the few small ones on the spine of the 8.5 graded copy. Sure, the top of the front cover on the 8.5 does not look that amazing, but the spine is sure a heck of a lot nicer than the spine on the 7.5 copy.

I believe the real luck has a lot more to do with the movie and TV hype phenomenon that has swept the comic book marketplace the past few years. Especially in the case of Wonder Woman with her recent and upcoming appearances in the DC movie universe. Looks like your original purchase took place back in early 2012 when Wonder Woman was still mired in the midst of a multi-decades slump when even high grade pedigree copies of her key books would often sell for less than guide. Definitely goes to show that comic books goes in cycles and if you are the long-term collector that doesn't mind holding onto a book, you are bound to win out in the long run.

+1 Unfortunately yes, indeed! The amount of time I spend on these new boards here is probably a single digit fraction of the time that I used to spend on the old boards.

It's not that everybody is ignoring the new postings of the Centaur books from Gator. I believe it's all to do with the new and NOT improved boards which we now have here. For the old-time GA board members here, we hate change and especially when the changes are quite drastic and not necessarily for the better. As you can tell from my board ID, I am still waiting for the merging of my accounts. All of this white space and less clarity in the separation of the posts also makes it a lot harder to go through the threads here. I assume this is all a matter of time and getting used to the new boards, but it has certainly dampen my interest in spending time on the boards here.

+1 Yes, indeed! If it wasn't for the Church runs of the Hits and the Blue Ribbon books, there really would not be much in this auction here. Definitely looks like Heritage is becoming more and more about comic book related Original Art as opposed to the underlying comic books themselves.

Certainly did and thanks for sharing! Sincere congrats on an absolutely amazing collecting accomplishment. Very well done!!!

That is not a lot. And the same logic is applied to hulk 181, ASM 129 etc yet those books and other Bronze Age books continue to climb You can't compare Wolverine... with...... erm! whats her name? The only comparison that really comes to mind is that both of their key first appearances were in an issue 180. Well, if you are talking about scarcity, issue 180, and first appearances, then we should probably be comparing them to Four Color 180. Only a total of 5 graded copies of this book, with the highest graded copy being only a CGC 9.2 copy and with Four Color 180 featuring the first appearance (not just a cameo) of the famous Ozark Ike.

If that should ever happen, I believe there would be a ton of HG copies of these common books popping out of the woodwork. Especially since Starlin was such a hot artist back then and all of his books were carefully collected and put away by the collectors of that time. Heck, even I have duplicate HG copies of all of these books and multiples of a few of them. And that must say something about how common these books are since I was never really a fan of buying more than 1 copy of a particular book.

Nice! I love sensation #26. It should be a "classic" cover. It probably should have been, except that Action 13 with virtually the exact same cover image had already came out years earlier. Although the Wonder Woman image on this cover is definitely much better than the tiny Superman image on Action 13.

I remember being down at one of the SD Con's back in the early 90's and Pat Kochanek was raving about the Church copy of this book. Apparently he thought the red, blue, and green color combination really brought the cover image to life. He stated that he always looked for these brighter colors in his comic book covers.

Which Fantastic books are you referring to and are you talking about John Veryzl here? I think he means "Jon". Ah....that makes a lot more sense then! So, if the speculation is correct, then the Church Peps in the last HA Auction came from Dave's personal collection and these latest Hits and the Blue Ribbons came from Jon's personal collection. That is very interesting to say the least.