KirbyTown

it's cheating because most have a binder

Unfortunately many tapes from many manufacturers also suffer from sticky-shed and require a bake to be usable. ⏲

I've seen enough reasons to convince me that the pandemic-based irrational exuberance is on its way out and that last years prices were apogee. I think the periodic movie speculation bumps will continue for as long as super-heroes are on the menu, but those gains and losses are amongst Fools. There is over-supply for the non-speculative demand, and Joe Blow is starting to realize that he didn't hit the big time with those three garage sale longboxes of Rai and the Future Force...and that rumors of hidden fortunes in speculative forced mini-keys are unfounded as he finally receives last year's hot book submission that is now worth less than the slab cost. Inflation is real, and the inventory glut that has surfaced will continue to increase as Fools bow out. Heritage movement is essentially noise in regard to street value, but those high dollar numbers have always served as justification for (and at the beginning of a bubble, the impetus for) ridiculous speculation. Nothing's going to stop big money and its myriad reasons for flowing though, legitimate or otherwise. and... Anything Is A Horrible Investment When You Buy At The Top (Not investment advice, past performance not relevant to future results, investing involves risk of loss, etc)

Here's a novel I just wrote (that nobody asked for) about Lone Star grading from one seller's perspective. You can find Lone Star's official guidelines here: https://www.mycomicshop.com/help/grading To be extra clear, this is my personal opinion and approach to reconciling Lone Star grading and is not any kind of official anything in regard to Lone Star policy nor in regard to their reasoning. I'm just a long-time fan of the place and want to help fellow collectors. The toughest part of the MCS selling process for new sellers to accept, and probably what turns many of them away, is having to embrace Lone Star's grading system. In the case of multi-thousand dollar comic books, yes, they should always go straight to CGC for the highest assignment possible. CGC doesn't deal in comics, doesn't have to justify their reasoning, and does have an incentive to make you happy by overgrading. If your grading experience is based on CGC's esoteric scale rather than Overstreet's 2nd Edition, then Lone Star's assessments will be eye-opening. The Overstreet scale is weighted towards the reality of collectibles, that is, the understanding that most "collectibles" aren't collectible. The scale exists for the benefit of cautious collectors who want to make their own grading assessment independent of what the typical shady seller is usually pushing: an overgraded book for maximum revenue. With the majority of extant books being low grade, the collectible ones require extra scrutiny to clarify just how collectible they are, and those determinations must be able to "show their work". Practically speaking, buyers don't like to be bamboozled and a comic shop would prefer not to have disappointed customers nor deal with returns. This reasoning supports Lone Star's decision to follow the weighted Overstreet scale. If you search the MCS database for raw consignments in fantasy grades, you'll find that 9.8s are nearly non-existent and that 9.6s are there, but maybe only in the hundreds. CGC can easily assign these grades because they have no accountability (and if anyone still requires proof of CGC's...flexibility...they need only examine the Promise pedigree recently created and slabbed by Heritage.) If a place like MCS wants to continue to sell on the kind of scale they're at and maintain the stellar reputation they have, then they have to be able to justify their grading. For consignor expectation purposes, the MCS 9.4 will become the practical top of your grading scale, but it's not going to be easy, and anything over 8.0 will really have to justify itself. This is the reality of consistent grading within the realm of vast comic inventories and it has to be accepted in order to participate. What's cool is that because of this, when Lone Star says a comic is high-grade then it really is without a doubt high-grade. That's why raw Lone Star grades can sometimes command higher prices than slabbed books...there's a possibility that submission to CGC will earn it an even higher grade. Consignment books at MCS follow their own grading track and I believe go through two sets of hands for proper assessment and QC. The place is basically one step away from being a truly accurate grading company. The only time I've personally received a raw 9.6 grade from MCS is when the books I sent in were ultra moderns and were generally uncirculated except for my sending them in. A decent way to become familiar with the MCS grading scale is to submit a variety of comics through their buying system and learn the shorthand of what I call the "highest grade of agreement". The MCS buying system is essentially the four-step division of G VG F VF (2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0). My agreement concept for quick grading is that if your book is good enough to be a 6.0, but that attempting to assign the next highest level (an 8.0) would cause a grading debate amongst your collecting friends, then your book is probably going to be assessed the highest grade that your group can agree upon: one level down at a 6.0. Once you're familiar with the buy system grading then you'll know what to expect of your consignments (though they'll obviously be subject to higher scrutiny and use of the full-range grading scale.) Apply this knowledge to your consignment submissions and give them the grades you'd want to see if you were buying them.

Speedcake, you should definitely send in some books, but you're going to get hooked. What other business situation exists where for a 10% cut the absolute market leader will allow me to piggyback on their success while they shoulder all of the work and risk of running a world-class business as I sit around and collect a check every week? Anyone who sells on Bay while MCS exists is just doing it wrong. I'm so outspokenly Team Lone Star because if MCS doesn't exist then I simply stop doing comic books...and I don't want to stop.

Can you clarify if you're talking about best offers in particular? Thanks

This ratio is limited to your best offer experiences I hope?

I should add that in my single experience where someone bought a consignment of mine that they couldn't pay for, the book returned to my dashboard with the pricing available to freshly set as if it had just been added. I would assume that would be the case for you too if your buyer doesn't come through.

from https://www.mycomicshop.com/help/bestoffer What happens if your offer is accepted If the seller accepts your offer, the item is reserved for you at the agreed upon price. Please visit your shopping cart and go through checkout to complete your purchase of the item within 7 days. If you have still not placed your order 7 days after your offer was accepted, your offer will be canceled and you will lose the ability to make offers on other items.

The only time I know of that a buyer would have anything in their cart that they secured but didn't yet purchase would be any auction wins they haven't paid for yet. Bidders obviously have to pay for what they win, but if for some reason you don't then obviously MCS can keep you out of auctions (amongst other things that you've agreed to in advance, see below.) That being said, Conan's shop is probably the most flexible and accommodating you'll find, you just need to communicate potential issues as far in advance as possible. Also, you have two weeks to pay for the auction you win today. That gives you a chance to ship three sets of auction wins together. Furthermore, if you happen to want to buy something else from the store at some point after you win an auction but before you've paid for the auction wins, you can move the auction wins to the "save for later" section of the cart and bring them back when you're ready to pay. Here's the agreement they ask you to sign before you can bid: https://www.mycomicshop.com/auctions/bidderagreement

I don't know if it's insight, but I can offer some basic information and bias... 😜 While I have no idea how to judge total demand for collectible back-issues, nor how to count the number of fools and greater fools involved in the current comic book bubble, I'm confident that the supply of collectible issues available on the secondary market is higher than ever and that the glut will continue to grow. Consider that CGC has slabbed nearly 8 million comics. Over the past 12 months they slabbed 1.5 million comics. Every year, they slab about 1,200 copies of the most popular single issue in existence. The other company has their own lower quantities, but they're not insignificant. Slabbing at the slowest rate currently takes a little over half a year. If you assume that a good chunk of slabs will make it to market, that's a huge number of books constantly entering CGC, disappearing for six months, then exiting to market every day (with daily market arrivals guaranteed to continue at least six months out from the latest customer's submission.) The other company has a similar turnaround time. If you add pressing, the slowest CGC press + grade takes over a year and at the other place it takes TWO years. Consider now that the historically popular comic book titles were printed in the hundreds of thousands of copies, sometimes a million, PER ISSUE. There are around 250,000 (I think...) individual comic issues in existence, each with their own print run. This means that only a sliver of extant comic books have been slabbed, and countless numbers of raw collections have never seen the light of day, let alone made it to the secondary market. The current interest in buying collections for flipping is unprecedented and the amount of money being spent on collections full of utter garbage is high. So too are the percentages of fair market value that reputable dealers have become willing to bid at in their battles with other dealers over desirable collections (nobody is going to beat out Lone Star at this point.) There has always been healthy demand for certain key issues regardless of the market climate, but the current pricing is not normal (especially based on the increased number of circulating copies) nor is the sudden surge in pricing normal. Bubbles show identical traits regardless of what's being traded and this comic bubble has all of the hallmarks. It's not exactly crypto-level of bubble bs since there is probably intrinsic value of some kind in collectibles, but the back issue market is certainly getting swept up in the exuberant breeze. Supply is growing, but the regular (non-speculative) demand is not nearly as high as it's being made by speculators to seem. Whether you want to play in the current game of greater fools depends on your risk tolerance and your reason for buying comics in the first place. Best of luck!

9.8s are even two whole levels down from 10! My interpretation has been that a 9.8 is the best assessment one can reasonably expect of a handled comic book. Considering that most comic books have been handled, then any occurrence of a 9.9 or 10 becomes both scarce and unaffordable to the average person. In the case of uncirculated ultra-moderns that go straight to grading, the 9.9 can become the "9.8" of that issue, and 9.8 pricing becomes akin to a "9.6".

I didn't mean to make a separate post on this, but regarding quick adjustment to market are you considering a way to more quickly update minimum consignment grades in the future? I understand that we can submit individual requests using comps, but seeking out those copypaste links for each book that hasn't yet been updated can be a slog. Also, with raw consignment submissions, is there any reason the approvers would reject a book that already meets the minimum? I'm asking because the new system for auto-submitting slabs is brilliant and means I can put out a shipment to you same-day, but on raws I still have to wait for next morning's approval even when I do meet grade. I'm sure you have a good reason for this but I'm just mentioning it. Thanks

I would hope the shipping solution he proposed would fix this for you as tying up books without paying for them doesn't seem viable on any level when other people are ready to purchase...

This would significantly increase the amount of money I spend at your shop, especially towards stale/esoteric inventory and less-expensive items in general. I imagine that the flood of untapped revenue will be stunning. Thanks for the information!

Conan, I have a few questions that will eventually relate to combined shipping by the end of this post. 😜 When I check the new listings page and see various MCS inventory books scattered throughout the day that were purchased within 1 minute of being listed, am I seeing the result of purchasing bots or are they humans with an auto-refresh who can click through the payment process extremely quickly? Is it possible to tell the difference on your end? Bot or not, is it the same account(s) performing this behavior throughout the week, week after week, month after month, and if so do you consider it a problem? As for the relation to combined shipping...are these intra-day buyers of moderately-priced single issues really paying full shipping on multiple shipments of single books throughout the day/week/month as they pop up? Thanks for taking the time

...Imagine that you received from CGC a freshly graded Marvel Comics Presents #72 with a 9.8. However, you think that the book looks like a 9.6 because of one spine tick... The purpose of an expert opinion is to remove doubt and ambiguity for all involved, but all involved have to be willing to accept the expert's opinion. I would argue that with comic books most people do accept the expert opinion, but OP may have a misunderstanding of the allowable defects in a Near Mint / Mint book and believes that others share in that misunderstanding, which may be true. Regardless, OP can alleviate their concern by consigning the book rather than selling on the bay. I highly recommend MCS since they charge the same fee but handle all the work (and Este is the best and now they have Borock too.) 👍

I can understand that if there's only one or two guys handling inventory then they probably take a LOT of shortcuts in order to get through the day and that's just part of the cost, though that would seem precluded when it's not your inventory and your job is to maximize someone else's value. In contrast, I know that MCS / Lone Star has two tracks to separate their own inventory from consignment because they process both differently. On a different note, the lack of self awareness by flexing in cluttered workspaces and with questionable practices makes the whole thing reek of desperation. It's not even your stuff and people definitely don't associate you with the uniqueness of the comics; people do literally mail that stuff in. In contrast again, if you ever lurked Borock's thread while he was at the other place, he would show a book he was doing but it would feature just the book on an immaculate desk and definitely not include him in the pic. Even if everything not in the frame was your standard workplace mess, he didn't flaunt it as admirable. Of course he already has max cred in the comic world. also... ***Who knows how much higher these record-setting books might have graded if they'd been treated appropriately?***

I can't search at the moment but these look like good solve candidates:

Let Not Volume Lead Thee Into Complacency!

Bottom edge underhang matches on left book and right bottom corner on other probably. And don't be concerned, guy implemented Extra Protection Measures by leaving a board under each (in the stack)

This is ostensibly all other people's stuff that has been entrusted to a what's supposed to be a legitimate organization, and this guy is treating it all like a joke. No pretense of respect or privacy, and the lack of professionalism is eye opening. If it weren't for the whole showing it off thing then there'd be nothing to know to gripe about, but this guy made the decision to go public so it's fair game to call it out. Wait, I'm not taking into account that they're only the tHiRd largest auction house in the world; not like a Christie's or something. Who am I kidding, Sotheby's surely keeps filled water bottles around their clients' paper emphemera. 🤦‍♂️

The way all of their social media is presented is really cringy. There doesn't appear to be much self-awareness and it's extra "fellow kids" when you do it on teh 'gram.

Red Guardian a few under too, and 55, makes sense

A sharpie on the cover is enough to call ❌, but it's cool that the silver metallic betrays the vertical stroke of the K being performed after the limbs. On a double cover too 😭 From auction site: