F For Fake

Thanks bud! Everyone wins, it's my favorite kind of deal!

Ok, at long last, here's the story of the G1 collection I picked up last fall. Or just skip my rambling and check out the pics. So, one of my oldest and dearest friends had been telling me for a while that he wanted to sell his collection, which was taking up space in the basement. It included a bunch of comics, tons of music, and his childhood collection of G1 Transformers. I started with the comics back around September or thereabouts, a few of which I bought outright, and the rest I sold for him. In October he decided that he really wanted the rest of the stuff out of the house, as he was wanting to set up a studio and second drum kit. So, he was either going to let the toys go to his cousin for next to nothing (cousin was opening a comic shop) or I could take them. I hadn't dabbled in TF's for many years, so I wasn't sure on values. Plus, the stuff was all dumped into a couple of crates, the accessories in a big shoebox. There were a lot of broken pieces, I wasn't sure which ones were complete, and they all needed a serious cleaning, but i gave it a shot. I told him that I estimated the value between $1600 and $2000, so I'd generally pay half that, $800 to $1k. I offered the $1k, he told me he'd take $800, he just wanted them gone. So, I took them home, and he bought a nice new set of Zildjian cymbals with the money. The crates sat in my home office for months, completely untouched. There was a lot going on, the holidays, work, a couple of comic collections I picked up, etc. I just knew that once I started on the project it was going to take a while, so I kept putting it off. Fast forward to March, one of my personal traditions is that every year for the first weekend of the March madness tournament, I take off on that Friday and do nothing but watch basketball from Thursday night through Sunday night. So, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to get some work done while my brain focused on hoops. For four days I watched basketball and sorted, ID'd and cleaned Transformers. I started by picking out everything I planned to sell. This included: 1. Anything significantly broken. 2. Anything missing enough expensive pieces that it wouldn't be cost effective to try to complete them. 3. Any loose parts that didn't have corresponding figures. 4. Anything I just didn't care about. The collection was initially made up of just under 100 unique figures and a bunch of parts. I ended up making about $1100 off of the random parts and pieces, which covered my initial purchase as well as the $150 or so I spent on competing the keepers, buying repro stickers, etc. I was left with 50 some odd pieces for the personal collection. Next was the cleaning of every single piece, going through tons of baby wipes, Dawn dish detergent, Maguiars plastic polish, and an occasional touch of Molotow liquid chrome. It was slow going, but fun work. So, here's what I've got to show for it. I'm not good at photography, but, inspired by YouTube, I built a dirt cheap DIY lightbox, and had a lot of fun taking these pics. There's a little bit of everything. Leaders, Seekers, near complete set of Minibots, Autobots, Bases, Combiners, Triple Changers, Headmasters and more. Although the accessories aren't pictured for the most part, all of these are now 100% complete and look terrific. I think my favorites are the Targetmaster Slugslinger, and the unusual and rare Bumblejumper. Enjoy the pics!

I haven GOT to go one year, looks like a blast. Awesome pickup!

Wow, those are some sharp and uncommon picture frames!

I don't think any of the local shops around here deal with slabbed books at all. I know they'll buy them from people the same way they'd buy any other back issues, but they don't put a premium on them when they resell them, and they don't submit their own books for slabbing. So once in a blue moon they'll have a slabbed book for sale, but its just a copy they picked up in a collection. As has been pointed out, slabbing is a tiny part of the overall comics collecting market. Most shops aren't looking to squeeze every penny out of every book; instead, they're looking to turn inventory over as quickly as possible. They're not museums. And these shops have been open for decades, so I guess they know their clientele.

The last round of posters were up for at least a couple of hours before they sold out. I'm pretty sure the missus grabbed me at least one, if not a couple, for our anniversary. She commented on how she liked the colors on the Batman 497 print, so if I had to guess, I'd say that one is coming home. I have never had an issue with ordering stuff from Mondo. I know lots of people complain about bots, but I've always gotten the stuff I wanted, knock on wood. You just have to have your finger jamming on F5 a couple of minutes before the announced sell time, be sure you're logged into your account with your payment info ready to roll, and you should be good.

I think the thread has officially become "ebay seller cornfield comics and bricks BEWARE...of the side effects of aging!" We're old. @ADAMANTIUM glad you're ok, keep doing what the doc tells you and hang in there! @kav best of luck!

Look, I'm not willing to be a productive or even pleasant member of the CGC community, so let's cut to the chase: who do I have to pay to get one of these things?

I finally got my gout under control a few months ago. Hit me from out of the blue last summer. Started going to the doctor, they put me on a medicine which seems to CAUSE flare-ups. Interesting note: the medication used to treat gout can also...cause gout. Anyway, after three months of routine doctor's visits, we finally got it straightened out. Possibly the most miserable I've ever been in my life. You don't realize how much you take for granted the ability to simply put your foot down flat on the floor, until you can't.

Also, while it's true IST can be slow to ship, they're also far and away the BEST shipper in the game, IMO. It may take a while to get to you, but it's going to be in beautiful shape when it shows up. it's not like Amazon where they just throw a book into a box without any protection. IST does it right. That alone makes them the winner, to me. The discount is gravy.

Also, as white trash from the suburbs of Louisville, KY, I've had more than my fair share of potted meat, vienna sausages (or "Vi-eeny Wienies", as we liked to call them), Spam, pickled red hots, etc. No shame in my game.

Look, I zoned out for a minute, is trimming potted meat food product considered restoration or no?

As always, unbelievably cool stuff!

I get it, but I also love hardcovers and collections because I'm a "book guy". And I'll tell you why: For Christmas when I was about 12, a year or two after I'd started to really get into comics, my grandmother got me a copy of "The Complete Frank Miller Batman" hardcover, which I believe was a Waldenbooks edition, or something like that. And I LOVED that thing. I loved the black leather binding, how it smelled so strongly of leather for YEARS. I loved the crisp paper, the ribbon book marker, the silver ink lining the pages. I stayed up all night Christmas Eve reading "The Dark Knight Returns" for the first time ever. It boiled my brain. The book sat in a place of honor on the bookshelf above my head, well into my teenage years and beyond. I believe for my birthday a few weeks later, I received the Uncanny X-Men Masterworks, reprinting Giant Size 1 and 94 through whatever. It also had the leather bound covers, the gold stamp, the dustjacket, etc. and it had that sweet leather smell. Cracking open those books was sensory overload, and the colors popped so vibrantly on the nice paper. So, since I was a kid, at the point where comics were becoming "my thing", collected editions of comics have meant about as much to me as "regular" comics.It's hard wired in my comic collecting DNA. So while I DO love picking up a run of copper X-Men out of a 50 cent sale and reading through them (reminding me of the days when my Mom worked at the mall and I'd tag along, and she'd give me $1.50 which would allow me to buy a new X-Men comic for 75 cents and a cookie at the Great Cookie Company) and I enjoy collecting pricier books as well, I also simply adore collected editions in all of their forms, from Masterworks to Omnibus to Absolutes and on. They're all part of my world of comics.

I love low grade silver keys. That's where I live. But even THOSE prices are getting insane. How much is a coverless AF 15 these days? Five grand? 6? Maybe $7k for a .5 that's missing a chunk of the cover? It's nuts. But still, yes, I'd rather have a beater copy of a beloved key than not have the book at all. I bought a raw 0.5 FF 5 a few months back for $300. Cover split/detached, a real rag. (Currently I'd likely have to pay $1k or more for the same book.) But it's all there, and it's mine. #beatbutcomplete is my motto.

Of course, collected editions bring with them their own collecting woes. Print runs on volumes these days are miserably low, with most of your "normal" non-limited omnibus and hardcovers clocking in well under a thousand copies, many only in the hundreds. There was a time when you could sort of wait around and pick them up whenever you wanted, but these days you have to make a decision if you want something before it goes out of print. Sure, some volumes linger for months, even years. Others are gone in weeks. The Romita variant of ASM Omni #4 (I have no idea why the Romita cover is a variant whereas the hideous Frank Cho cover is the direct version) sold out in a few days and is already climbing in value. Your point stands, absolutely, and I'd also add thank heavens for Marvel Unlimited and Comixology as well as Humble Bundle and other venues. If you truly just want to READ comics, there are more ways to do so than ever before, many of them very cost effective. I guess I just wanted to complain about omnibuses (omnibii) for a minute, since I missed out on ASM 4 and am gonna have to bite the bullet now. Bah.

For the sake of full disclosure, I am a proud smut-peddling pervert, and was just having a laugh. That being said, I just these butthole bearing covers for a "mainstream" comic are kinda silly. I also think CGC not slabbing them is silly. There's a lot of silliness to go around.

This box was a two part box, being a bottom tray that held the game, and the top, so it looks like the bottom was just assembled upside down before it was shrink-wrapped. It's not, like, printed upside down or anything. I don't know if this is considered an "error" though, or just an curiosity of the assembly process.

Ok folks, with that I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up. Feel free to PM about anything you might be interested in, but I'm planning on moving the remainders to other venues, so I needed to close up shop here. Thanks a bunch, it was fun!

Thanks again!

Thank you sir!

I'd appreciate it if the seller and buyer would both kick in $100 to me to defray the costs of counseling that I'm going to need after reading this entire thread.

And at long last, we're done! It's been a fun couple of days, thanks for looking! I'll leave the thread open for another day or so. For those that have picked stuff up, I'll be in touch in a bit! Thanks!

WW 97 NM $4

WW 84 VF very small top thumb/pinch $3