RCheli

It's always astonishing when you see 75-year-old books that look this nice. Great comic!

Will do!

It did.

Miss America #53 VG -- $25 Taking a page out of 80s Harvey comics, this one stars off with an ad page! Crazy. Cover detached at bottom staple.

Patsy and Hedy #11 VG -- $25 I have nothing witty to say about this one. Sorry. Nice book with great cover gloss. A solid Golden Age VG.

Patsy and Her Pals #2 GD/VG -- $22 Hellcat? Bah! She's Patsy to me! Nice book, with a 1" spine split from the bottom and a 1" tear on the back cover.

Archie's Pals 'n' Gals #3 GD -- $18 I love the big-toothed Archie the best. Some of the squarebound spine has come off (about 2 inches from the bottom). Still otherwise complete and a great giant!

Jughead #20 VG+ -- $22 I don't get the joke on the cover. Please.. someone explain it to me. Nice book with no significant problems.

Patsy Walker #31 VG -- $25 I don't think the cover could actually happen in real life. Somebody should tell Al Jaffee. General wear, with the cover pulling away from the staples, but still pretty strongly attached.

Katy Keene Annual #1 VG -- $60 I don't know a single person who hasn't told me how much they love paper dolls! Not a single person! (Slight exaggeration) Nice condition. Slight squarebound spine roll and general wear, but still a nice looking book. Nothing cut out.

Patsy Walker #42 GD/VG -- $20 I love Patsy's and Hedy's heads at the top of the cover, don't you? Spine wear, but otherwise pretty decent.

Here are the rules. A claim in the thread trumps any PM negotiations. Payment is by Paypal, check, or money order. (You can also come to one of the local shows I set up at and pay me there) I would also be willing to trade for cool Silver and Bronze. Shipping is $6 for Priority mail, regardless if you buy one or all of them. I also ship outside the US, and that cost is exact shipping. Returns are accepted within 30 days of delivery for any and all reasons.

It is -- actually, everything has to be a dollar or below. I can understand the appeal of a Gold/Silver show, but there are so many shows and good shops in the area that sell Gold and Silver, I'm not sure what the appeal of a con just for that product has. I didn't end up going.

I may go, but I wish he did another CHUD show again instead.

I love trivia -- especially comic trivia -- and the more odd and obscure the better. I'm not talking about what was the first appearance of some minor character that nobody cares about, but something that's really interesting that a lot of comic fans don't really know. (I liken it to the Miracle on Ice hockey game in the 1976 Winter Olympics. Most people assume it was for the gold medal, but not only wasn't it the final game of the Olympics, even after beating the Soviets, the United States still had a chance to not even medal if they had lost their next game.) So here's mine for comics: Alex Schomburg is Puerto Rican. His real full name is Alejandro Schomburg y Rosa, and he was born and raised in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, moving to New York City when he was in his early 20s. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Schomburg, and his name doesn't scream or even whisper Spanish/Hispanic, so I was really surprised when I found out. How about you?

When I ran the magazine department at Borders we got stuff from 5 different distributors, though most were from either our local distributor (for the weeklies and other big name magazines) and Ingram (which distributed the second tier ones). Borders at the time (94-97) carried no comics, but I suspect that if they did, they would have come through Ingram. (Also, we returned the magazines to our local distributor full copy, cover and all, whereas we stripped the cover and returned only that for all other avenues.) The only thing I had control over as far as ordering was the out of town newspapers. Pre-internet, people still looked at the newspaper to apply for jobs, and certain papers and areas were getting more popular so I was allowed to add to that. Edit: I ran the section at just one store, obviously. Not the whole chain.

I don't think this is true. Barnes and Noble gets their periodicals through a few different distributors. The store didn't count how many of a certain issue was sold, just that there were X issues sold at a certain price point. And when the unsold copies were returned to the distributors, they did a count to see how many of a certain issue of Time or Rolling Stone or whatever sold overall. There are too many periodicals and too many stores to do that sort of store by store inventory. Magazines are a pretty volatile market, too,so if they sold 0, 4, 2, 1, and 8 of the last 5 issues of Superman, it wouldn't be surprising. Each store did not order its own number of titles. That was done by the home office, and for magazines, they looked more at how many copies were sold overall throughout their stores rather than how many of each issue was sold at a specific location.

You should come out and do a show in my neck of the woods and you'd get twice the price for most of those books. It took me a while to realize that there's a significant Midwest discount on comics, and I really underpriced my stuff here. (I still have great prices, obviously...)

I thought you were doing Ace?

To piggyback on RMA, it's very likely that Marvel and DC still distributed a significant number of newsstand copies even up to the end of their program. They may not have sold that many (because no comics were selling a lot at the time), but they still printed them. Think of how comics are printed. First, they print the guts of the book -- the 32 or 48 or 62 pages -- which have the story. Then they print the cover -- which is usually on a heavier stock. And then they bind them together. Back in the days before digital printing, setting up an issue to print was pretty costly, so they more they printed, the cheaper the per-copy cost was. I'm making up a number, because I don't know the specifics, but it maybe cost them $10,000 to set up the issue to print (creating the plates, setting up the plates to run, QC, etc), $18,000 to print 50,000 copies, $25,000 to print 100,000 copies and $35,000 to print 200,000 copies. For them to print a newsstand copy, all they had to do was change the plate for the cover alone, and usually it was only the bar code and price area. So if they were already printing a lot that was pre-sold for the direct market, it wasn't a financial burden to have them print some newsstand copies.

Never mind.

THEY HAVE NO LIQUID IN THEIR BODIES! Final drop to $310.

My children are thirsty! One price drop to $325.

It looks as if my beautiful children will go thirsty...

For those of you who want a key early Silver Age DC but don't want to break the bank, I'm offering up this always exciting JLA #1 (again).... It is complete -- and everything is attached, though that seems to have been helped by two extra staples on the spine and some tape. I honestly don't know if those were necessary, but little Jimmy must have thought so several decades ago, so there you go. Pieces out of the back cover spine, too. The latest Overstreet (and we all know how accurate that is) has it at $525 in Good. This is $350 -- NOW $325 -- NOW $310!!!! shipped in the US. (If you're ex-US, I'll take $12 off the cost of shipping). Payment in Paypal G&S. The family is headed down to Universal in a few days (God help me) and I'd like to add a little extra to the coffers, because that $350 may pay for 4 lemonades. PM me with any questions.