F For Fake

I stand by the overall point I was trying to make, but I do apologize if I was unnecessarily snarky. I am not always a nice person, but I am trying to do better. Enjoy your time on the boards. Lots to learn here. Hopefully you learned some things in this thread as well. I liked my high horse joke though.

Thanks as always, @Buzzetta

I'm very much hoping that you posted this in jest, and are not sitting over there with a very dour and righteous expression, thinking that in any way this quote is applicable to people paying too much for comic books. That would be hilarious, true, but also terribly sad. But at this point I truly can't tell if you're on a high horse, or just high. The boards have their own way of dealing with bad sellers. It's very efficient. It's like a self-cleaning oven. If insufficiently_thoughtful_persons start pouring in from FB and Instagram, and try to get away with selling overpriced books, no one will buy them, and eventually the sellers will go away and try to find a less educated buyer pool. It takes care of itself. No one has a responsibility to "warn" people about overpriced books. Sellers have the right to ask whatever they want for their books, and we have the right to ignore them completely. It is simply poor etiquette to comment on pricing in a thread unless it is explicitly welcomed by the buyer. It's not just a rule, it's common courtesy.

My feelings on this topic fit pretty neatly with my general life philosphy, which is LEAVE PEOPLE ALONE.

This is it in a nutshell. Like I said before, the appeal of the line is the sheer breadth of the licenses, all in the same format. You want to play Marvel vs Star Wars vs Jaws vs Scooby Doo vs Freddie Mercury vs the Sex Pistols? Here's your chance! There will always be collectors of these individual licenses, regardless of the continued appeal of the Pop itself. Someone will always be collecting music themed toys, SW themed toys, etc. Beanie Babies are limited to fans of, uh, teddy bears? Maybe someone out there is really hardcore about the platypus? Who can say. People like what they like. As has been said, I wouldn't want to park a lot of money in them, but I see no reason why they'd lose their appeal any faster than any of the other ridiculous garbage people like to hoard. Stapled paper pamphlets featuring the adventures of men in tights seem pretty passe as well.

So true of so many of these pieces. Unfortunately those tiny, thin strips of plastic were barely sturdy 30+ years ago. It's a miracle when they've survived until now!

It's a little rough, but definitely worth the $4.49 that the lcs wanted for it!

Mine is in transit! Meanwhile, I think I'm all caught up on my modern WW Omni's now.

Last week my LCS got in a huge GI Joe collection. Unfortunately I was a couple hundred miles away, so I figured it would all be gone by the time I got back into town today. Swung by the shop and got a couple of the left overs. Man, it stung to miss that stuff, they had some great prices and it looks like all of it is in nice shape. My friend at the shop said that most of the stuff sold about 30 minutes after they posted it on Instagram. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. As for what was left, this complete Stormy was really really nice, as was Alpine. Alpine is missing one of the climbing hooks, but that's ok, I have a spare. Was also all over the Shipwreck. Polly has broken feet and the gun is broken, but the boarding hooks and rope are in terrific shape and are worth more than I paid for the whole thing. Plus the figure is still a nice bright blue, no yellowing. I'm pleased with my consolation prize. Of course, the REAL sting is knowing that someone sold this whole collection to a comic shop, who paid pennies on the dollar, when I would have paid close to FMV for the whole collection if I'd had a shot at it! Oh well.

Two of my all time faves. I spent so much time in the pool with the Devil Fish, what a fun little boat!

X-Men: Shattershot and Wedding of Cyclops and Phoenix Oversized Hardcovers– Ugh. This really was a slog. To me, these volumes represents the X-Universe at its absolute nadir. The ugly 90’s artwork, the Psylocke/Revanche/Kwannon storyline, the Cable/Stryfe/clone/time travel junk, the laborious Rogue/Gambit “romance”, all of it. Just some ugly, needlessly complicated, dumb superhero soap opera junk here. Some parts are better than others. I was unexpectedly surprised by the Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix mini-series pretty much solely due to the BWS-esque artwork by Gene Ha. And even the core X-books seem to improve as they proceed. Kubert’s art eventually firms up a bit over time, even if it is still an unfortunate reminder of the era in which it was birthed. So, not much to love here. They will go on the shelves to keep the collection intact, but should they go OOP and start selling for $$$, these will be pretty easy to let go of (as I did with Phalanx Covenant and some of the other 90’s X-junk that I don’t particularly need to own). All told that’s about 43 or so books between the two collections. A side note: while the contents are carp, these are very nice volumes. Sewn binding opens up beautifully, colors are reproduced gorgeously. Very solid collections, insides aside. And so I think that brings my grand total for 2020 up to 454. Not quite halfway there. Going to have to get moving!

House of/Powers of X. All right, this is more like it! I really dug this. It felt like a perfect companion to Hickman’s Avengers run, which we discussed previously. It has all of the stuff I like about his work. The epic scope, the time jumps, the charts, the graphs, the languages, all of that goodness. Is there anyone in mainstream superhero comics who does a better job of world building? There’s so much detail to dig into. It makese for a very satisfying read. As always, I think Hickman’s weakness is characterization, as the characters sometimes all have a similar voice, but it’s easy to overlook in favor of the scale of this storyline. What great stuff! The X-Men are once again truly weird and dangerous, and not just another spandex brigade. Top recommendation! That’s twelve giant sized issues right there. Dawn of X Vols 1 & 2 – First of all, I really dig this format idea. Each month a new volume comes out, collecting all of a single month’s issues of the various post-House/Powers X-Men Spin-offs. So Volume one has all of the #1 issues, Vol 2 has all of the #2 issues, etc. I really dig this digest format, and I wish DC would do something similar. I’d love to pick up a monthly trade called “Batman Family” or some such that collected all of the various Batman titles in one paperback volume each month. That would be swell. As for the contents, as you might expect, the quality fluctuates as each book has a different creative team. Unsurprisingly, I’m most into the Hickman books, X-Men and New Mutants. The others range from “Ok” (X-Force, Excalibur) to “hrm” (Mauraders) to “I barely skimmed it” (Fallen Angels). But, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Even the lesser titles still connect to the overall story. All in all I can’t say that they uniformly live up to the standard set by the preceding mini-series, but I am still interested in the story and am fully onboard for the ride. I don’t buy floppies anymore, but I will keep buying these digest trades as long as they’re putting them out (or at whatever point the quality inevitably slides.) Fun stuff! So that’s 12 more books over all.

Now, for something slightly different, Batman Earth One and Green Lantern Earth One. The only other Earth One title I’d read so far was Wonder Woman, which I enjoyed primarily for Yanick Paquette’s artwork. I found these volumes suffered in comparison. I guess they’re…fine? But do we really need yet another elseworlds-style origin story for all of these characters. They’re slim, quick reads, but definitely suffer from a “why are we doing this again?” vibe. Nothing wrong with ‘em, but they didn’t strike me as anything particularly special, and I’m not sure I’ll be continuing this line. Maybe if I find them cheap. These are OGN’s, so I guess they just count as a single “issue” each.

Next up, the DC Universe Rebirth Omnibus. Now, aside from the introductory Rebirth one-shot, this doesn’t really tell a singular story, and is, instead, a collection of the various relaunch specials that brought Rebirth into being. The quality vacillates wildly between the titles, as you might expect. Some are much better than others. Some stuff, like the various Superman titles, I just skimmed. It makes a good addition to the DCU bookshelf, but I can’t recommend it as a story in and of itself, because, well, it isn’t one. This one totals up around 31 issues or thereabouts.

Last Friday was our 10th wedding anniversary. We’d been planning on taking a nice trip, but with travel being unsafe right now, we decided to spend a quiet week at my folks’ lake house. And since the beaches and water parks were closed, and it rained a good chunk of the time, there wasn’t much to do except play cards, eat a lot of junk, watch bad tv, and read lots of comics! So, I was able to put a dent in some of my reading backlog. Blackest Night 10th Anniversary Omnibus – I read the BN miniseries several years ago, but the story felt very much incomplete and thin to me. So, I was excited to tear into this Omni, which I believed contained the entire series with all of the various crossovers. And for the most part, it is complete. However, a few of the tie-ins are missing, and I was most sad to find that the Booster Gold issue where Ted Kord comes back was one of those left out of this collection. I’m surprised it wasn’t included, as Ted was one of the superheroes who received the action figure treatment. Seems like if he’d been important enough to immortalize in plastic, his story would have been included here! Oh well. There’s still a lot of story here. At around 1600 pages, this thing is a real wrist-breaker. Suffice to say I got a lot more out of the story this time around, and this collection does a very good job of assembling the stories in a reading order that makes sense. The story itself is nonsense, of course, but Johns does a good job with this sort of dumb cosmic superhero trifle. It was all in all a very fun, if inconsequential, read, and hung together very well between the various one-shots, mini series and series tie-ins. It all just kinda WORKS. Not as impressive as Infinite Crisis or 52, mind, but all in all, this is still a pretty fun effort. After I finished the omni, I had a hankering to read the follow up Brightest Day, and was wondering if they might be reprinting the OOP BD omni in the future. What I found was that they are actually doing another one of those enormous 12 volume hardcover boxed sets for Blackest Night/Brightest Day. A quick look at the contents reveals that once again some of the stories are being left out, which is infuriating! You have TWELVE hardcovers, if ever there was a chance to collect every single thing related to the storyline, this is it! However, I’ll be still be selling this omni and buying that set. Unlike the Crisis set which had a $500 MSRP (meaning it sold for $250-$300 at most online retailers) this set is only $299 MSRP, so hopefully that means I can pick it up for under $200 when it drops. The BN Omni is already OOP and selling for $100+, so that’ll make up a chunk of the funds. Recommended for folks who like this sort of overwrought DC fluff. You/we know who we are. As for the book itself, not sure if it’s glued, but it certainly is TIGHT, lots of gutter loss, and not easy at all to open up and read, which worth noting when a book is this horking huge. Would have preferred that they’d included ALL of the various tie-ins and made this two large sewn volumes as opposed to a single, incomplete doorstopper. This clocks in at around 61 issues, if I counted correctly.

Thanks for the heads up! I've gotten some amazing deals through those bundles. I still have tons of stuff in my backlog!

That must be a very powerful hug!

I've gone to the state fair with my best friends every summer since we were in middle school. When we were young, we spent the whole day on the midway. Now that we're old, we'd rather stay inside the air conditioned pavilions, and look at the art, photographs, etc. Our favorites are always the kids art entries. I've seen some unhinged, beautiful stuff that I would love to own. Kids have no filter. Sure, you have a lot of traced pencil drawings of Sonic the Hedgehog, but sometimes you get bizarre watercolors that look like something out of Hellraiser.

No hugs until there's a COVID vaccine, but I'd be willing to wave at you from behind a plexiglass shield.

Yeah, I did ok, would have done much better if I'd held onto them longer. I sold the #1 for $900 (which paid for the whole lot and a chunk of the grading) which was a strong price at the time, I think this was around season 2 of the show. If I'd held onto it for a couple more years, it would have been a crazy good deal. Oh well, as my wife likes to remind me, "You were really happy with the price you got at the time!"

I will never understand the impulse to meddle in other people's business. Several years ago I bought a complete run of Walking Dead, 1-60 or whatever the current issue was at the time. They were advertised as NM, but you could tell they needed a little TLC. I think the BIN was $800 or thereabouts. I figured I had some wiggle room to turn a profit. I bought the books, and soon after (and I don't even know how they got my user id, I guess back then they were still visible?) and I got several messages from a guy chastising me for buying the lot because they weren't NM, and how could I support a dishonest seller, etc. I told him that it wasn't any of his business, and I was sure I'd do ok on the lot. They arrived, and sure enough, they looked pretty good. Sent off 1-10 and the other keys (1st Michonne, Governor, a couple of others) for a press and grade, and every single one came back 9.8, including the #1. Dear jerks: leave strangers alone. And for that matter, leave your acquaintances alone too, they probably don't like you either.

Agreed. There are some gorgeous books floating around in 9.4 cases that never get the time of day from collectors because of the number on the label. Not complaining, means more cheap books for me!

On that particular cover, I think it's actually both. Watcher is bigger than the people, but there's also some forced perspective going on for dramatic purposes. Great cover regardless!

The Watcher is generally depicted as being larger than a human, but just how MUCH larger fluctuates depending on the artist. Is this a good place to derail so I can complain about the fact that Darkseid used to be, like, just a "big guy", but these days he's like 16' tall or something? Why did that happen?

Yes, unfortunately, that is correct. I've gotten a few of these before, they only work if you make the purchase through the app, rather than the desktop site. I'm assuming this is just to drive traffic to their app. I'm PO'd because recently the app stopped working on my ancient iPad. I've upgraded the iPad software as much as I can, and it can't handle some new apps, which sucks because the old versions worked perfectly fine. Still works on my phone though. I really hate how companies force obsolescence on perfectly functional hardware by updating their software. But this is another gripe for another thread...