mycomicshop

Bob's a friend and a great guy who's passionate about comics. As he himself speaks to somewhere in the video, qualifying for a Guinness World Record requires a substantial amount of documentation. He's made that effort--nobody who might have more than him has documented it. There's also a distinction between dealer stock (including lots of multiples) and an individual's collection.

With With a little further thought, I get your point about the strengths of an auction for a book like JIM 89 CGC 9.4 and agree with it. Auction provides a nice incremental permission structure for the bidders to give each other confidence about each next step pushing the bid higher. In 2022, obviously the 9.4 should have sold for a lot more than the 2019 $9K sale, but how much more? My mental math FMV estimate range of $18K to $30K leaves a lot of wiggle room. I can see it being much easier for a bidder to feel comfortable taking the next step to bid $26K when somebody else has already bid it up to $25.5K, than it would be for one potential BIN purchaser in isolation to pull the trigger on a $26K purchase when the last previous sale was $9K, even with the market obviously moving up a lot since then.

To me, FMV is always a *current* value, not something anchored to the last time a sale happened, if that sale was long ago and/or the market has moved significantly since then. GoCollect may report an FMV, but I don't use GoCollect. GPA doesn't quote a FMV, it just reports sales that happened at specific dates. For high dollar books I look at the underlying GPA data and construct my own idea of current FMV, which is what I think most people do. For example, if I was looking at this book in June of 2022, before the Nov 2022 $26.4K sale in 9.4 happened, this is how I would estimate FMV for a 9.4: - Prices for silver age Marvel keys and big books have gone up significantly from 2020 to 2022, so prices before 2020 are obviously not representative of current FMV - The last sale I see for 9.4 is $9K in 2019, and before that $9560 and $12,250 both in 2015. All three of those sales are well before the run-up, so not great proxies for FMV as-is. - What's the closest comparable book that does have recent sales? Looking one grade down to 9.2, I see a $9K sale in Jan 2022. That $9K amount is 2x to 2.5x what the previous sales were in the 2012-2015 timeframe, so as a rough estimate of current FMV for a 9.4 in summer 2022, I would multiply those $9K-12K sales from 2015 and 2019 by 2x to 2.5x to arrive at a general ballpark area of what I'd consider current FMV for a 9.4 in summer 2022, giving a range of around $18K to $30K. Big range, but still more accurate than assuming that current FMV is equal to the amount of the last 9.4 sale, the $9K sale in 2019. My point is that, in my opinion, auction and BIN are both very capable of pulling the market up for truly rare books, as long as the person pricing the BIN prices intelligently and doesn't just stick to a poor conception of FMV based on sales results too old to be relevant. It's primarily the upward movement of the market itself doing the work, and the choice of listing format, auction or BIN, is secondary. Both are capable of reflecting the gains coming from higher demand for a scarce item and an upward moving market.

I agree you can find plenty of consigned books we're listing that are posted at prices that are too high. One thing I'd caution whenever anybody mentions overpriced consignment listings is to be aware of survivorship bias. BIN listings that are priced fairly to market tend to move quickly, and once they're purchased they're not there to be seen. What's left is the accumulated unsold overpriced listings that can give a distorted view making it look like EVERYTHING is priced too high. It's something we as a company can definitely improve on, and are working our way toward--adding mechanisms to encourage consignors to price more reasonably, and probably also worth making some changes so that items that are clearly overpriced and common are maybe not even visible on MCS or posted to eBay, since they are very unlikely to sell and create negative feelings in buyers.

ASM 300 for me is a good illustration of the difference between a seller's market book and a buyer's market book. A buyer's market book = lots of available supply, multiple copies available for sale at any given time on eBay, MCS, etc. A buyer can afford to miss out on any given copy because there's another one available elsewhere, or at least another one is likely to be listed somewhere pretty soon if not right at this very moment. A buyer's market book can still be very popular, it's just that there's a lot of supply even when there's a lot of demand. A seller's market book = relatively scarce. Doesn't come up for sale that often, either at all, or in higher grade. If an interested buyer misses out on a given listing, they might either need to wait a long time for the next one, or pay a relatively high asking price for one of the few/only available listings. With buyer's market books, there will be a consistent trend when aggregating over multiple results: - auction sales will tend to pull down the GPA average - BIN sales will tend to pull up the GPA average Any given single auction can certainly violate that--it's not that rare for an auction to end up above the GPA average, and auctions can sometimes end up going for more than an equivalent BIN listing that was just sitting out there available for purchase the whole time the auction was running. But those events are less common than the opposite case. This is because with a buyer's market book - The "market value" is pretty clearly understood by everybody since there's so much recent sales data. - The cheapest available alternative is readily available and visible, tending to put a cap on how much auctions will go for. - There's a greater chance that the top bid ends up coming from somebody who intends to flip the book for a profit rather than hold it in their collection. Those buyers will not go as high as full GPA market value. In contrast, with a scarcer seller's market book - Sales don't happen that often and not much density of recent sales results, so there's a broader range of what constitutes realistic market value. - There is no readily available alternative to purchase, or if there is, it may be priced at the high end or well above what most buyers would consider realistic market value. - The winning bidder is more likely to arise from among people who want the book for their collection rather than resale, and so are willing to pay what they consider full market value. Or, if dealers/flippers are in the running for those books, they're willing to pay "full market value" in auction knowing that they can turn around and sell it as BIN (online, at a convention, retail setting) for a further 10-20%+ more. In my opinion, the rule of thumb that BIN sales tend to pull up the market average, and auction sales tend to pull down the market average, is true for both buyer's market books and seller's market books. But, it's much more pronounced, and more obviously visible, with buyer's market books like ASM 300. I'm not claiming it's a universal rule, just an average trend. And there are definitely cream of the crop books, very rare gotta jump on them when they appear, that will do great in auction when competitive juices start flowing and could end up going for more than if a single potential buyer were soberly debating pulling the trigger on a high asking price for a BIN listing.

Every item consigned with us that you choose to sell as buy it now format (rather than auction) is automatically cross-posted to eBay at no cost to you. So you still have all the visibility of eBay, plus visibility on the MyComicShop website, the highest traffic comic retailer/consignment website.

Only other cons for us the rest of 2023 are Baltimore September 8-10, OAFCon in Oklahoma Sep 16-17, and the Collectors Summit at Heritage in Dallas in November. No other cons for us this year. Any cons in particular that you'd like us to be at? Heroes and Baltimore are solidly on our annual schedule at this point, but I'd be interested in extending some coverage to other parts of the country. Anybody within driving distance of Dallas is also always welcome to drop off at our office.

One thing I'll say about our grading--we readily acknowledge we downgrade more than CGC does for some interior defects like a partially detached centerfold. In some cases where buyers think a book presents well from the cover images and we've graded it unexpectedly low, it may be due to interior defects or spine issues that don't necessarily show up well in images of just the front and back cover. Or, in the case of a slabbed book, any interior defects become completely invisible once the book is slabbed, but are easily seen by the buyer when we're selling a raw book. Those aren't the only reasons why our grading may come in tighter than a seller expects, but in my experience, structural interior or spine defects are often responsible for the largest differences in opinion.

Yes, if a buyer doesn't pay we'll cancel the original auction and you can resume with either a BIN listing or put it into a new auction.

We're adding it to our database.

Corrected, thanks. Looks like the new product data was wrong, maybe artist changed at the last minute.

So sorry to hear that. Condolences to Jose's friends and family and the folks at Superworld.

Sent you a PM, happy to take a look.

Oh okay, thanks. I thought I'd managed to keep up with what was taken and what wasn't but missed that.

@reed_richards Thank you for sharing about your father. My grandfather was in the navy in the pacific during WWII.

SOLD BlackOut21 Wonder Comics #5, raw, MCS graded VG- 3.5, no restoration, grade notes "Staple tearing. Staple rust with migration." Will cover shipping to US or international $1100 shipped

SOLD skypinkblu Startling #40 CGC 3.5, will cover US or international shipping $400 shipped

SOLD comix4fun Archie #55 CGC 6.5, will cover US or international shipping $350 shipped

SOLD thirdgreenham ASM 121 CGC 9.4, will cover US or international shipping $1250 shipped

Curious to see the official announcement. Great move, CGC!

Shocking, my heart goes to his family and friends. I knew Thomas just a little from the boards, and got to meet him at Baltimore last year. Kind, helpful, and just a friendly, chill dude. A great member of the comics community who appears to have made a warm and lasting impression on everybody fortunate enough to interact with him.

Secret Romances 21, 2 on the census Wotalife 3, 1 on the census

It wasn't in place until just recently, but a version of this is now active. 5% price reductions should now, in many but not all cases, result in want list emails going to people who have that book on their want list. Want list notices will not go out after your 5% price reduction in either of these cases: - despite the price reduction, other copies of the same issue/grade are available and priced more cheaply - the item is priced more than 20% above our internal estimate of market price for the item. This calculation isn't perfect, but I think it's better than not using a filter at all. For example I don't want somebody consigning an item that should sell for around $100, pricing it at $300, and then triggering multiple want list notices on each 5% step down from $300 even though the item is still way overpriced

@sledgehammer Thanks for the report--it'll be corrected soon.