RCheli

I know the seller of that lot, and while there may be a handful of "decent" books, I know he went through those boxes and picked out 95% of the good items. I mean, if you're buying 10,000 comics and the best thing is a mid-grade ASM #300, you're going to be stuck with a ton of junk. And with no conventions happening, where are you going to sell that stock? It's likely just going to sit in a storage locker where you're paying $100 a month.

23 hours ago, jsilverjanet said:

but a great one at that!

Aw, I bet you say that to all the rinky-dinks.

On 6/8/2020 at 12:17 PM, Robot Man said:

I’m of the belief that most big shows this year are toast one way or another. Hard pill to swallow but probably inevitable. 

I seriously doubt many of the larger dealers of vintage comics will be putting out the money or traveling to these shows. As a serious collector, I want to see a large group of good dealers. I doubt I will. That and even the slightest chance of getting this virus without a hazmat suit really makes for a less than pleasurable experience. 

As a seller of comics and vintage toys and collectibles, I have written off setting up at any, especially indoor shows. Probably wouldn’t be worth my time with this virus floating around and an extremely depressed economy. 

Those who feel different are welcome to it. I just don’t think it makes any sense. 

 

I'm a rinky-dink dealer, and I was going to do Keystone this year, but even if it isn't canceled, I'm 99% sure I won't be there. Obviously my health and the health of the people who would be with me (and my family and their families) are incredibly important and I don't want anyone to get this virus. That being said, attendance will certainly be significantly lower than in the past, whether it's due to the virus fears or restrictions on how many people can be in the hall at any one time. Add that to the depressed economy that you spoke of, what's the benefit of doing it? 

1 hour ago, Cpt Kirk said:

If you look around on the internet, you will see a lot of information that states these were only sold in U.S. military stores overseas.  I don't have any personal experience in those stores, but I have been in touch with people who said that they recall getting jeweler variants from those stores.  

These were not just sold overseas. If that were the case, there would be barely any copies available -- who's bringing back their comics after 9 months in Germany. Do we even see many copies of these books for sale in Europe?

11 minutes ago, kimik said:

     

 

Of the two I found, one went to CGC and was graded without any restoration. I would hope they would be able to detect something like that.

I usually take what most people say on Facebook (whether comics or otherwise) with a grain of salt, because there is just so much misinformation out there. So here it goes...

Someone posted in one of the groups I follow a nice group of MJ comics, including some key DCs (Swamp Thing #20 and #21). I see many less DCs than Marvels, so I got excited. Another person pointed out that these MJIs were also sold at Macy's and Woolworths. While I'm certainly not an expert like some of you, in all my years of collecting, I've never heard this before. Is this true? Or was it just another case of a Facebook poster not knowing the truth. 

Edit: They said that it was to tie in with the Mark Jeweler jewelry that was sold there.

I searched for information on these, but I haven't found anything. So I figured I'd ask you smart people...

I've been cataloging my books during these nutty times, and I came upon a handful of Disney Gladstone-era books that had "Disney Comics Distributed by Marvel" in the logo box. Does anything know where these were sold? Newsstands? Disney theme parks? (In no way do I think that they're more valuable or anything.)

Thanks.

29 minutes ago, ADAMANTIUM said:

it WAS weird!  

@RCheli Is the one who found 2! 2 I tell's ya! pretty much at the same time haha, how crazy! He posted here and I was curious myself and snagged one to send in  

I forget who got the other, even at only 6.0, it was worth it!

  Reveal hidden contents

presumably worth it   

 

@FlyingDonut grabbed the other one. It was the strangest thing I've ever come across in my comic life. It was OBVIOUSLY some sort of error when they put the three parts together (the cover, guts, and insert), but I wonder if other DD #231 Canadians had the same mistake.

Edited to put in the correct issue #.

Final price drop to $60! Come on, people! Somebody must want some comics to read!

Now $70! Cheaper than that dime store floozie!

7 minutes ago, NoMan said:

thanks for the answer. I love the idea of some of those Yoe (forgot his first name) reprint books of old forgotten strips but you pick them up and you can't make out a damn thing. It's just all bleed or whatever. Except Fletcher Hanks reprint books. Don't know who Fletcher Hanks is? Only the greatest talent in the history of comics. Puts Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Ditko, all of them to shame.

A lot of the cheaper reprints just take scans of the actual comic pages and end it there, and they don't recolor or do much touchups. That makes them seem more authentic, for sure, but it also makes things messy and more difficult to read.

There was a lot of ways that they made reprints of these older comics. For a lot, there were photostats available. Comic companies have been reprinting stories forever, and I suspect nearly none of them are made from the original art. I mean, when DC published the Famous First Editions in the 70s, they certainly didn't have the original art still available.

For others, if they didn't have photostats or plates any more of the originals, they would use photostats of the later reprints. (You can see in a couple of instances where they missed a "Continued in the next issue of Marvel Tales" and not Amazing Spider-Man.) 

And with others -- most notably the early DC Archives -- they physically bleached the color out of actual Golden Age Comics, rescanned it, made a photostat, recolored and printed. Thankfully, they don't have to do that any more. Those poor comics...

Now they tend to do it all by computer. They take a scan of the comic page, drop out the color, clean up the lines, and recolor digitally. It's a painstaking process for sure, and if the proper time isn't taken, it looks terrible. (Some of those IDW reprints of newspaper strips are atrocious because of the slapdash way they scan the newsprint.)

1 hour ago, Crimebuster said:

I think in the late 70's, when the creators' rights movement really got going, many creators stopped using their good ideas at Marvel and started saving them for their own use. Why lose the rights to a cool character with work for hire when you could self publish or later go the Image route? I think this is why we haven't seen any real breakout new characters debut from either Marvel or DC since the 90's. 

Even Roy has cited this as a reason why he didn't create a lot of original characters, at least until he was EiC, but rather revamped older properties like Vision. I mean, I think it was also because he's a big nerd fanboy like us, but I've read interviews where he said he didn't want to create new characters he would lose the rights to. 

I agree to a point, but how many great characters were created outside of Marvel/DC by former company regulars? Doug Moench had Sabre. Grell had Jon Sable. Marshal Rogers had Cap'n Quick and a Foozle. Can you count Starlin and Dreadstar (which pretty much was Captain Marvel)? Roy Thomas had Blue Bolt and Lightning (was that was it was called?), but who else did he create? Steve Gerber had Nevada, which I liked, but that was decades after his hey-day. Some creators need to have a bedrock of an already-created character or of an editor with a heavy hand in reigning everything in.

17 minutes ago, Casablanca said:

Amazing Spiderman 33 CGC 9.0

$230

I'd take this, but I don't think the price isn't right....

I love all these treasuries -- thanks for sharing.

I was wondering what people see as the most common/least common titles out there? The ones I have seen the most are the Star Wars #1 and #2 and the Conan with the white cover (I believe it's #4). The third Fantastic Four issue (I think it's #21) is one that I haven't seen in person in years.

11 hours ago, bellrules said:

My best guess would be that they would print them once the art was approved and stockpile the books. Battle of the Planets 8 (11/80) came with Black Hole 4 (9/80) in the pack I have, but the 1/81 price error books from 1/81 all came in the same packs. I suspect that it took from 8/80 to 12/80 for Western to get their stuff together, and by 1/81 they caught up. Some of the books from 8/80 came with issues that were from 4/80 and earlier. That’s the beauty of the sealed packs. They help decipher how the books were sold. 

I think you're right, but unless we get the details of when every issue was actually sent to the printer, we'll probably never know. 

It's a shame that for decades Whitmans were seen as the red-headed stepchild of comics, or we may have had more accurate information about their distribution. I know that when I started really collecting in the early 80s, if I had a choice between a Whitman and a non-Whitman, I would never choose the one with the "W" in the corner. Never!

The other problem is that, of course, Western stopped publishing with any real regularity by 1980, and seemed to only print when they had sold through their available multi-packs. We can't really trust their indicia when it came to actual printing or on-sale dates those last 5 or so years. 

13 hours ago, Warlord said:

I've seen foreign currency in some that I have.  Don't recall that I ever figured out what it was but presumably worthless.   And others have little paper game/trick type prizes.  Here are a few pics of some of those that I've saved away.

LAME!

(This is as bad as the new Cracker Jack prizes.)

55 minutes ago, bellrules said:

Battle of the Planets and Black Hole were only published by Western. Issues 6-10 of Battle of the Planets and The Black Hole were only available in sealed packs. The only Black Hole Comic available through newsstands was Walt Disney Showcase #54. Battle of the Planets 1-5 were sold under Gold Key on newsstands and Whitman in bagged sets.  

Right, but were they printed all at the same time or were they printed every month like their indicia indicates? I don't know if we'll ever be able to answer that question. 

2 minutes ago, Get Marwood & I said:

I don't think it matters which came first - a run of 20k pence and 180k cents is still the same single run in my view, regardless of printing order. There would have to have been a significant gap between printings in my view for one to be called a second printing or reprint. 

Oh, I don't either. One doesn't make it a second print or first. It's all the same. I just was thinking about why one would have brighter colors. Pence/Whitman/Test Price/Newsstand/Direct... if the insides were all printed at the same time, they're all first printings to me. 

On 3/7/2020 at 6:10 PM, Warlord said:

 

 

 

What's the free prize?

47 minutes ago, Get Marwood & I said:

If we ever prove that some of the early pence copies were printed first, some people are going to have coronaries...

I have heard people say that the colors on the Silver Age pence copies were brighter so that meant that they were printed first. I don't know if that's true or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. Why, you ask? Well, printers often give you quotes with a +/- 10% number. It takes a lot to start/stop these presses -- especially older ones from the 1960s. You don't just put a number in a computer and press a button. The print masters are eying this up. They know, generally speaking, how many can be printed every minute, and they're guessing when to stop the run. You say you want the print run to be 100,000, you can get 90,000 or you can get 110,000. (This is not true with digital printing, which prints to a specific number and usually overprints at a much smaller amount, and that's mostly due to having some extras due to bad printing/cuts/tears/etc.)

So if Fantastic Four #15 had a pence and a US version. if they're going to over or under print, at the end, it's going to be for the version that has the most copies. There were (again, I don't know the real numbers, but this is a guess) 10,000 pence and 190,000 cent. They run the 10,000, stop the press, change the screen, run 190,000, run a few more for your overage. 

I have no idea if this is how they did it, of course. But this is based on working in advertising for a long time, and going to the places where they had these HUGE offset printing presses, but I suspect that's why they did the pence first.

13 hours ago, Warlord said:

 

For packs that contained 3 consecutive issues, it would be a minimum of 3 months after printing before Western would have accumulated the issues and could package them.  M&I shared a pic of a Spider-Man pack containing #181, #184, and #185.  A weird grouping, to be sure, and it would require holding inventory for 5 months if they were getting them from the printer at the same time the newsstands were published, which I suspect they were.  ASM #181 showing up in a pack Whitman pack 5 months after the newsstand issue had been on the stands would certainly give the impression that it was a later printing, which I suspect they were not.

Whitman had a lot of multi-issue packs from publishers other than Marvel, of course: Battle of the Planets, the Black Hole, etc. And even though the issues in those packs had different publication months, I am not knowledgeable enough to know if they were actually printed at different times (so was Battle of the Planets #7 which has a date of October 1980 actually printed a month before #8 which has a date of November 1980). If they were printed at different times (which I suspect), then Whitman would certainly have a warehouse capable of holding onto numbers issues of a single title and then packaging them together when they had 3 copies available.

On 3/7/2020 at 6:43 PM, Lazyboy said:

Printing means printing.

Distribution means distribution.

Printing and distribution are different things.

This is a great point, though. Marvel was in the printing business. Seuling, Whitman, and the local companies were in charge of distribution. In theory, Marvel would be happy to reprint any comic at any time if some company was willing to pay for them. But Whitman wasn't stupid. They had a very successful business model, and knew what they had to pay per book to make money, and a special printing with a low circulation would be cost prohibitive.

7 minutes ago, shadroch said:

Whitman weren't selling product at a discount. They were selling non-returnable books at a higher margin.

Sure they were. They were selling $1.20 worth of comics for $1.09.