RCheli

I don't think most people in the know thought this was a bad deal. It isn't. The challenge would be the SIZE of the collection. Sixty long boxes is a lot of work, especially if this is more of a part-part-part-time hobby. My suggestion for him would be to get them all, pull out the great stuff (maybe a box worth), the pretty good stuff (maybe 4 boxes worth), and the decent stuff (5 boxes worth). The rest I'd put up for sale on Craigslist, selling 5 boxes at a time for $150. Flea market sellers (at least up here) eat that stuff up, because they know they can get $1 per comic for these things all day long.

The profit margin on sub $10 comics is significantly higher than on more expensive books. Paying ten or twenty cents for books you can sell for a few dollars a piece makes me a lot of money at cons. I can go through at least a long box even at the speedy of shows. Those $100 and $400 books? I may have to pay 75% or more on those, especially in a very competitive area like the mid-Atlantic. Yes, the cheaper books are more work, but they make me good money.

If he's really offering 10 cents a piece if you take a full run, then it's a no-brainer for Preacher, Batman, and some others. But why would he sell the whole Preacher run for under $7?

Depending on condition, $40-80 per long box if you're getting it all. If you're buying that much, you're probably going to end up with about 4 long boxes worth of decent stuff and 56 of dollar books. 60 long boxes is a LOT OF WORK. Make sure this is something you want to take on before buying the collection.

411/412 are always good sellers.

Yeah, but WW Chicago is their premiere comic show. There are still a ton of comics dealers at that one.

Bold move putting this up against WW Chicago.

I'll be there!

What is everyone's problem with this guy? First you overly defended CGC after they misplaced his books. Then you criticized the guy for sending it Media Mail (even though he also had signature confirmation and insurance). Then you give him guff for his only getting one 9.8 out of the Eternals. I'd be pretty damn defensive too if, instead of being helpful, half of the people commenting are telling him all the things he did wrong. He wrote -- early on -- "4 Eternals #1s, Booster Gold #1, and Nova #1 which all have the potential to get 9.8s." If you get one 9.8, two 9.6s, and a 9.2, I think that pre-grading is pretty decent, especially for a group of 40-year-old books. To me, three had a potential to be 9.8s (and one was a mis-step...)

I met him once at a convention a while ago. From what I've been reading, he was a ... difficult guy ... but was amazingly passionate about a lot of things. Which sounds like about 95% of all comic collectors.

Someone messaged me about this being in Camden -- not the best city in New Jersey. This con is located right over the Ben Franklin Bridge (or right off 676 if you're coming from Jersey) in a very safe section of Camden. (If you're from Chicago, think Hyde Park -- an oasis surrounded by not-so-great areas.) This location is about 10 minutes from Independence Hall, so even though it says New Jersey and Camden, it is really, really close to Philly.

This is one of the hidden gems of the NJ comic book scene. A once-a-year/one-day/free show on the Rutgers-Camden campus. (The parking's free too.) Nice guest list, including: Louise and Walt Simonson Gerry Conway Mark McKenna Neil Vokes Larry Hama Mike Manley and more! Admission is Free. Parking is Free. Fun is free! It runs from 10 to 6 (that's a long day for us dealers), but everything I've heard is good. Saturday, April 27th, 2019 Rutgers University—Camden Campus 301 Linden St, Camden, NJ 08102 HOURS: 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM https://camdencomiccon.com

I've noticed some other dealers bringing their con stock in these plastic boxes and I'm considering doing the same. All that loading and unloading takes a toll on cardboard.

The question is that are these "newsstand" copies or are they "UPC" copies? Were these comics ever actually on a newsstand?

That's true at the beginning when very few comics were published on a monthly basis. And after a few years, the publishers just kept up with it instead of changing their dating.

5 week. They may have ignored the schedule, but they didn't ignore the colors. The calendar was not important and they likely didn't look at it to figure out anything. They got green bar comics in and pulled the green bar comics off. They didn't know or care whether it was a red week or a black week or whatever until they got the books. Again, I'm not sure where you're coming up with this information. I would suspect -- though I never saw them -- that there may have been some newsstands that carried comics more than an issue old, but I'd love to see some proof. And if it did happen, I would wager that it was either a comic shop in operation before the direct market or it was, like you said, a larger business where comics/magazines were a small part of their operation and didn't monitor the racks as one would see at a newsstand. But these would be exceptions rather than the rule.

The one I'd be interested in -- and the easiest one to look at -- was the Spider-Man #1 Gold. That's a second print, and I don't remember how much longer after the first print did this one appear.

If you feel that this statement -- "You are wrong" and "It's difficult not to be confrontational when you are discussing things with someone who is presented with facts and yet refuses to budge an inch." -- are too much, I'm okay with not continuing this. I think I've laid out my argument for how Marvel and DC could easily have published multiple printings on the newsstand, and I've given you information on how newsstands worked. Take it all however you wish.

You're funny.

It's difficult not to be confrontational when you are discussing things with someone who is presented with facts and yet refuses to budge an inch. And the color-coding on top of comics is how newsstands knew when to pull/return their comics. You know of newsstands that carried 2-3 months worth of issues on purpose? If so, they would be very much the exception rather than the rule, and I'm not really interested in talking about a dozen newsstands across the country that had the room/gumption to carry multiple issues of the same title. Newsstands did not have the room -- nor the cashflow at hand -- to have that much old stock on their racks. And publishers would be very pissed that they're getting returns on comics that should have been pulled 2 months earlier. If Superman #50 is out and DC is getting return numbers from issue #46, they're going to call up that distributor and complain. When pulling old comics, you didn't look at the cover. You looked at the top of the comic. It was a green week, so you just pulled all the greens. This helped because people didn't always put that issue of Superman #50 back with the other issues. And think about it -- most comics were displayed fanned out, and you didn't see the whole cover. In many cases -- especially with DCs -- the issue#/date were on the right side, not the left. That's a PITA if you have to look for dates on each individual issue when there is no uniform spot. That's why you just looked for the color on top. I did not say that Western sold comics when Image did. But Western was publishing comics on the newsstand after 1979 when the various publishers adopted the color coding for weekly distribution. That helped because Western-published issues didn't have dates on the cover. Here's an issue of WDC&S with a black distributor mark on the top: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Walt-Disneys-Comics-Stories-473-Vol-40-5-Gold-Key-Comic-Book-1980/372392608451 By the time comics were putting the issue numbers/dates in the UPC box (like that X-Men #100 you posted earlier), sales were so pathetic, Marvel and DC were not particularly concerned about a) newsstand sales and b) second prints. Not much was worthy of that. This discussion was mostly about the comics published during the mad rush of the early 90s, where for that short period of time there were plenty of books that called for a second/third print.

I suspect that a lot of his work is coming back into print because of the GOTG movie, so he's getting something.

You are wrong. Yes, cover dates were used in the 30s through the 60s to see what had to be pulled (though removing an old issue from the stands was usually prompted by when the next issue of the series came out). In the 70s, many local distributors were marking the top with spray or markers or something so the newsagents could more easily manage their comics. But by the 80s -- AND CERTAINLY BY THE EARLY 90s -- the comic companies were printing the colored bar on the top of the comics. Newsagents did not have the time to look at each comic to see the cover date. They looked at the top of the comic and just pulled every one of those colors off. I know what I'm talking about. I worked at Matz's Newsstand in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for about 3 months in 1984 (for the sole purpose of getting my comics early; my friend, Jen Hassler's grandfather owned the place). That was how the comics were removed. Image was not the only publisher that didn't have a date on the cover. No comic from Western/Gold Key/Dell/Whitman -- which had many more titles than Image -- had them. And while their comic output was much smaller by the 80s, they had the colored bar on the top to let the newsstands know when to remove them.

That's not true. By the 80s, newsstands did not go by dates on the cover; they went by the color stripe at the top of the book. (Think about it: not every comic published even had a month on their cover.) So all the comics with the green stripes were shipped on the same week, and the newsagent -- before putting the new books out for the week -- would pull all the green stripes that were still for sale on the rack. They'd put them aside, strip off the top cover, and return them for credit. Then the next week, it was a red stripe at the top; then black; then... another color I don't remember. (They had 5 different colors.) So if you wanted a second print, you'd just have to make sure that the distribution stripe was the same color as what was being put out for sale that week. They'd be up for 4 or 5 weeks (depending on that month's cycle).

I suspect that, if the newsstand sales had stopped (or even slowed) cratering at the rate that it was in the early 90s, there would have been more of these newsstand second and third prints. Comic sales overall were higher than they had been in 15-20 years, and Marvel and DC were ready to keep all of the hot books available. But even if some issues were selling through at the newsstand, which they hadn't done in a while, there wasn't the sales opportunity there. What was the distribution ratio in 1992? 7:1? Higher?

It's difficult to have discussions with people when one comes with beliefs and the other comes with data. This is not my data, I only looked it up because you made a remark about decriminalization of petty crimes (which seemed to be untrue and it was). With every rebuttal, I have given you verifiable information and you have come back with opinion.