Sqeggs

Thanks for the info. Very helpful. Your misses are infrequent but two St John '50s series are particularly prone to them: Approved Comics and Blue Ribbon Comics. In both cases, St John splashed the title of the contents at the top of the cover where almost always you'd expect to find the title of the book. Presumably, he was using those series for tryouts as DC did the Showcase series.

Kind of steep as a minimum, but in my experience during the last few years they've really lapped the field as a selling venue. Their typical weekly auction has more primo books than do the typical off-month CLink and CC auctions. Their Signature Auctions usually knock it out of the park. Not too surprising that with the strong results they've been delivering, they've had a surge in consignments. I would guess that their upping the minimum value for consignments is an attempt to make sure that consignors don't end up having their books sit for six months before there's space to list them.

Of their '50s work, this cover might most closely resemble their early stuff. Simon drew variants of the figure of the Fly many times over the years. If you have to use a rope, are you really flying? If you can't actually fly, should you call yourself The Fly?

Just try and stop me! Just you try and stop me! The evening's young!

May be significant that the "Approved Comics" stands out on the Invisible Boy because it's in white print against a dark background. On the Flyboy and Daring Adventures, the Approved Comics is less visible because it's in black type against a dark background. Still, you'd think the graders would take greater care. The actual Flyboy 1 has a Saunders cover, was from a different publisher (Ziff-Davis, not St John), and was published three years earlier. Apart from that ...

It's better than Saunders, it's the sainted Matt Baker!

A book I've never seen. Nice score!

Irrelevant to the scanner discussion but it's interesting that Church copies have been a bit up and down over the years--or, at any rate, that's my impression. I'd guess that if both these books were auctioned now, the Church copy would hammer for more despite being a significantly lower grade. I think 10 years ago, the reverse would have been true. Similarly, not too long ago Okajimas didn't get much of a premium. Now, probably because of discussion on the boards, they get what may be the largest premium of any ped. The Promise books also commanded a significant premium, even though it seemed to me that more than a few of them were overgraded. I thought that may have been a passing mania but they seem to be doing pretty well when flipped.

"Picked up" as in somebody walked into the shop with them? If so, great to think that this still happens.

Now you tell me!

CGC continues to be hit or miss on properly labeling Approved Comics. The Approved 2 is correctly labeled, but the Approved 5 is incorrectly labeled Flyboy 1. Given the Approved 5 was graded last August, you'd think they'd be on top of this by now.

Been accumulating a few more Stormin' Norman books.

Whoa! One of his best.

Even worse, the writing is in pen! I hope you bargained for a bigger discount on that basis.

I'm guessing this will close at at least $5K. Without the ped, I'd guess it would be more like $2,500-$3,000.

Some Larson books have had the name erased. Now we know who did it!

I got the 3 in a Clink auction three years ago. Went for around $100, so I'm lucky you didn't notice the auction!

Maybe they were starting to feel a little guilt over publishing almost nothing but reprints.

Yeah, I think that was another bad decision by CGC. Presumably it was ignored, or largely so, because it was a production defect. This book doesn't have the eye appeal of a 7.0, imo.

One of his best. The "Re-issue of originals" disclaimer is unusual. Presumably it refers to the fact that only the cover was new; the stories being all reprints. Is this the only book on which that disclaimer appears?

Looks like Edgar had the whole SS run. I used to own the 1, CGC 9.8. Only the covers of the 4 and 6 appeal to me. I did eventually pick up a nice copy of the 5 (not the Church copy) but I think Baker struggles with profiles, and I don't much like that cover.

Just shows that you should never doubt @Dr. Love! Looking through Chuck's catalog--which, of course, I should have done before beginning to post about this--shows that there were a lot of Bakers in the Church collection. Looks like Chuck graded about two-thirds NM or so and the rest in the VG/FN range. The latter books Edgar presumably bought used. So, there may well be ungraded raw high-grade Church books or some of the high-grade slabbed Bakers may be unrecognized Church books or maybe some of both. Even more likely that some of the mid-grade books were slabbed without having the ped noted. The WTR 7 I posted earlier was graded NM by Chuck. Of course, it may have knocked about a bit before it was graded. He graded the Hawk 11 as a FN.

I only know this because I just looked it up!

After a break of six years, Charlton picked up the series. Ran for several issues but this cover for issue 6 is, I believe, the only S&K work in the Charlton run. Like many Charlton books from that era, very tough to find in decent shape. At least, that's been my experience.