lou_fine

Well, a special treat and video for you and any other boardies here who haven't yet seen this Frazetta FF set owned by Ken Spencer:

Since we are parsing words here, I am still more than willing to take everybody's Promise Detective's for under $200. Would YOU happen to have any for me.

No, I was also a bit surprised at the $750 for the Cindy 37 when I saw it as that's even below the Overstreet guide valuation. This particular result might just be nothing more than an one-off which some lucky buyer was able to advantage of, but I guess only time will tell. From a cover image POV though, I personally would take a Suzie 51 over the Suzie 56 myself. If you are looking for a book with a cover image that's similar to Cindy 37 and one that's also really truly flying under the radar though, the one that I would go for would be this little beauty here: Only problem is that although they generally go at steal of a deal prices in the marketplace, you just might have to be a tad patient as they don't tend to come around very often. especially in light of the fact that the Junie Prom 5 has only a total of 7 graded copies while the others like Cindy 37, Suzie 51, and Suzie 56 have noticeably higher population census counts at 27 copies, 28 copies, and 20 copies respectively.

Big congrats to you on a nice pickup of a fantastic Fox Mystery Men book. Not sure about the grading and if both companies handle the tape defect the same way. I believe CGC grades what the defect would be if the tape was not there which would mean almost an entire spine split, while I am not sure about the other guys across the street?

Welcome to the boards here and a big congrats to you on your spectacular pick up here of a classic Frazetta cover. Hopefully, you already have a couple of the other books from this run or else it will surely end up costing you a pretty penny to complete it at this point in time?

No. Are you really trying to say NO to the Fonz.......................................I think he wants to see YOU in the back alley then:

Are you really trying to tell me you would not go back to the massage parlour for a repeat second treatment here:

The perception is that the Promise Collection as a whole was given the benefit of the doubt that books had they been submitted by either you, me, or Joe Schmo would never have received.

Based upon your above noted rationale for the collapsing prices upon resale, it should be pointed out that the Promise Collection consisted only of GA books and there were no BA, CA, or even SA books in the collection. Especially since the GA books which I am looking at seems to either be continuing their price movement upwards or at least holding their own for now. A more likely reason for the collapse in prices upon resale is that potential bidders brought into all of the overblown hype by Heritage which were reinforced by the CGC grades and simply way overpay for the books on their first go round. As such, it's really on the bidders themselves as nobody put a gun to their head to bid whatever amounts they did bid in the end.

Yes, a book cannot be accurately graded unless you actually have it in hand so that you can inspect the entire book in detail. A visual scan of the front and back covers will at times though allow you to determine that a book has been overgraded based solely upon the visual defects. The same visual scan, however, will not allow you determine to the same extent if a book has possibly been undergraded. And as such, it's quite possible there might actually be some undergraded books in the Promise Collection.

Well, I think we all need to understand that CCG is a business entity and as such, the goal of every business entity is to maximize value (i.e. the top and bottom lines) for their ownership or shareholders. One of the methods to obtain value is through mergers and/or acquisitions and the driving force for them is the hope for subsequent realization of business synergies. In a vertically integrated business environment like what we have here with CCG and their umbrella of subsidiary companies, sometimes business synergies can be obtained by coming up with a business plan to maximize customer returns. Especially if you can devise some method to convince them to return and pay you and/or your associated companies for the exact same product multiple times. Other times, business synergies can also be obtained by simply maximizing top dollar for your customer, especially if you have a relationship with that particular customer, whether it be indirect or direct. Of course, business is often very complex and grey and not just simple black and white. As such, for the life of me, I just can't figure out which one of these business synergy plans they are leaning more towards when it comes to the Promise Collection books.

You mean that you have not seen the chart that @MasterChief have been providing us with respect to the reselling of the Promise books: Even more telling than the sea of red ink here is the fact that virtually not a single one of these resellers have even dare to send their book back in for either pressing and/or regrading, especially considering the rampant CPR focused marketplace environment which we are currently in. Hopefully you was not the purchaser of either the Terry-Toons 38 which dropped from $60K down to only$16,800 upon resale for a -72% return or the Saddle Justice 6 which went from $21K and fell off from its saddle and landed at only $6,600 for a -69% return. I guess we'll find out a lot more when the next 90 lots get resold in the March Signature Auction, but all I will say for now is this so far

Exactly. Most of the books were accurately graded. There were several that were egregiously overgraded, but taken as a whole the reputation that "all promise books are overgraded" is just wrong. Yes, the motto of "Buy the book, not the label" should always apply in the case of all books, not just the Promise Collection books. As I have also often stated here, an book cannot be accurately graded from just a visual scan and you actually need to have it in hand to grade it properly. Sure, a visual scan that allows you to see the visual defects on a book will identify overgraded books, but won't help to identify possible undergraded books. Who knows, the graders might have also made errors the other way and there might also be a number of undergraded books in the collection, although I would probably be laughed at for thinking this based upon the current reputation of the collection. The sad part about this whole thing is that the Promise Collection is without a doubt an absolutely amazing and generational collection, and as such, deserved absolute top notch grading from the gang at CGC. Unfortunately, based upon so many of the overgraded books which we have seen here, they for some unexplained reason failed to do this, and as a result, have seriously damaged or disdained the reputation of a historic pedigree collection going forward.

See my post from Friday which is on the previous page:

Most likely NOT the big SA keys which you most of us would think of and probably also the ones that you looked at. Especially since he said that his SA index was based upon the Top 100 SA books based upon a volume quantity count. As a result, you would probably expect to see a greater number of sales of the semi-keys or even non-key SA books due to the simple fact that the big SA keys are too expensive to ever outsell a cheaper SA key when it comes to a strict volume quantity count. Then again, I don't know how useful his index really is if in fact it does end up missing out on the bellwether big SA books. Coupled with the fact that his pricing is based only upon the final sale price for each once of the books for that month, as opposed to some kind of average to eliminate any possible skewing caused by just using one sales result only.

It's too bad you don't have anything for the Golden Age marketplace because significant portions of that market is still holding firm, if not continuing to power upwards. I guess that's due to the relative scarcity and hence lack of repeat sales when it comes to the GA books making it much harder to conduct reliable trend analysis.

The other video that I liked from Terry and one that I saw several years ago was his take on the first Overstreet Price Guide: I guess it's not really that surprising, but still rather interesting to note how many of the most valuable books in the First Edition of the Overstreet Price Guide were the very early strip reprint books like Feature Book and the books published by Eastern Color before the boys who wear their spandex underwear on the outside took over the comic book marketplace. A perfect example of this would be a book like Four Color 10 with the Flash Gordon reprints from Alex Raymond which came in tied in the #9 position with a Good valuation of $85 back in 1970. I guess it must be quite clear by now that Overstreet went totally ballistics with his price increases for this year's guide as in just this one single year alone, he doubled the valuation increase for this book that he had done in the previous 51 years combined. In other words, he bumped the Good valuation For Four Color 10 up by another $4 from $89 up to $93 since it took him 51 years to bumped it up from $85 in 1970 all the way up to $89 in 2021.

$2.5 M if on major auction site...(CC/Ha) It just takes two bidders! I would lean well on the other side of the $2M mark because you have to remember that they couldn't find 2 bidders for the book back in September of 2021 and Goldin had to step in to buy the book himself at the $1.44M mark in order. On top of that, Rally couldn't even sell a sizable chunk of the shares at the $1.8M mark and they also had to step in to buy up the remaining unsold 30% of the shares. So, based upon these numbers here, I would doubt that a copy of Bat 1 in CGC 8.0 condition would now be worth $2.5M in an open auction.

I can afford all the Promise Detectives over 200. Not sure about your number here, but if you are referring to dollars, I'll take all of the ones for under 200 then.

Still no Funnies on Parade which is the big old great granddaddy of them all, but interesting to note that this is the second Sunday in a row that Heritage has had a small run of the early historic Famous Funnies books which usually don't tend to come around too often. This one here appears to be a run from FF 2 to FF 5 and from visual appearance only, looks to be in nicer shape than the copies last week: https://comics.ha.com/itm/platinum-age-1897-1937-/famous-funnies-2-eastern-color-1934-cgc-vg-45-off-white-to-white-pages/a/122307-13257.s?ic16=ViewItem-BrowseTabs-Auction-Open-SearchResults-120115&lotPosition=0|0 https://comics.ha.com/itm/platinum-age-1897-1937-/miscellaneous/famous-funnies-3-eastern-color-1934-condition-gd-/a/122307-13258.s?ic16=ViewItem-BrowseTabs-Auction-Open-ThisAuction-120115 https://comics.ha.com/itm/platinum-age-1897-1937-/miscellaneous/famous-funnies-4-eastern-color-1934-condition-vg-/a/122307-13259.s?ic16=ViewItem-BrowseTabs-Auction-Open-ThisAuction-120115 https://comics.ha.com/itm/platinum-age-1897-1937-/miscellaneous/famous-funnies-5-eastern-color-1934-condition-vg-/a/122307-13260.s?ic16=ViewItem-BrowseTabs-Auction-Open-ThisAuction-120115 Still all at very very attractive price points for now, and will definitely be interesting to see where the Famous Funnies 3 with the first appearance of Buck Roger does by the time it's all said and done. Especially considering that a raw Fair copy of FF 3 sold last Sunday for $1,200 while this raw Good+ copy is still at a hammer price of only $125 for now that is.

Well, somebody must have bumped it up then because when I made my post last night, it was sitting with a hammer bid of only $2,700. Well, you can try for the other two then since both of them were still sitting at only a few hundred dollars, although I am 100% sure they'll go a lot higher by the time it's all said and done tomorrow night.

For those of you who missed out on @Ricksneatstuff's copies of the Frazetta Famous Funnies, it looks like you've got another shot at a few of them, if you don't mind mid-grade copies that is: https://comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/famous-funnies-214-eastern-color-1954-cgc-vg-fn-50-cream-to-off-white-pages/a/122307-13261.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515 https://comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/famous-funnies-215-eastern-color-1955-cgc-vg-fn-50-cream-to-off-white-pages/a/122307-13262.s?ic16=ViewItem-BrowseTabs-Auction-Open-SearchResults-120115&lotPosition=5|0 https://comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/famous-funnies-216-eastern-color-1955-cgc-vg-45-cream-to-off-white-pages/a/122307-13263.s?ic16=ViewItem-BrowseTabs-Auction-Open-SearchResults-120115&lotPosition=6|0 All available in this weekend's HA Sunday Auction and it will certainly be interesting to see where the Famous Funnies 214 finished up at.

Now, I initially thought this was rather super impressive for the SINGLE LOWEST GRADED copy of this Baker classic cover at $4,560: https://comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/romance/cinderella-love-25-st-john-1954-cgc-fr-gd-15-off-white-pages/a/40216-81046.s?ic16=ViewItem-BrowseTabs-Auction-Archive-ThisAuction-120115 That is, until I scrolled a bit further down to see that this exact same copy had sold for $6K in a Heritage Signature Auction only back in August of 2022. To each their own, but being a longer term collector I've never quite understood the rationale for reselling a book so quickly because the chances are high that you are going to lose money, as opposed to making money on the book.

I thought in my head that was crazy, but held my tongue because I figured it would put my ignorance on full display Probably sold to "John" who's having withdrawal symptoms and desperate now after his spouse won't let him have the real thing anymore.

Talking about impressive results, this one here certainly seem like a very shockingly strong result, especially for a more recent DC book: https://comics.ha.com/itm/silver-age-1956-1969-/romance/falling-in-love-99-dc-1968-cgc-nm-94-off-white-to-white-pages/a/40216-81093.s?ic16=ViewItem-BrowseTabs-Auction-Archive-ThisAuction-120115 Sold for a rather stunning $2,400 and for a copy that's only the 3rd highest graded copy and with also another two copies in equivalent 9.4 graded condition.