F For Fake

Is it a regular 1/4 scale premium format piece? They did indeed used to sell for $300-$350. Then it was $400. Then it was $450. Then $500. It's nuts. Hot Toys figures used to be $80 too. Sigh. If this is bigger than the regular 1/4 scale pieces, then I'm not sure, I never went above that scale. $600 may be a steal for all I know for a 1/3 or larger piece. But the Primes are usually closer to $900-$1k, right?

I'm not a bright man, so I'm really not sure. I'm going to say "something something algorithm" and let someone smarter than me provide the info. And like I said, it's not perfect. For one, sometimes items are entered under individual DCPI #'s (I said "SKU" above, but really it's DCPI that it's tracking) but sometimes an entire wave of something will be entered under that number. For instance, back in the fall I was looking for a Frankenstein figure, but several figures had been entered under that number, so while a store may have shown they had 5 Frankensteins, they may, in fact, have had other figures in stock. So, yeah, it's not perfect, just another tool in the kit. Between that and the website checker, and random dumb luck, sometimes you can get what you want!

Also, if you have the SKU#, brickseek.com is a bit more reliable as an actual inventory indicator. Not PERFECT by any means, but better than the Target site itself. https://brickseek.com/target-inventory-checker/ They have checkers for the other big brick and mortar stores on their as well. Happy hunting!

Yeah, learned the same lesson myself some time back, it stinks! So nowadays I just refresh the site throughout the day to see what might pop up, and visiting the actual stores is just a treasure hunt. As for the Cyclops figure, he is pricey. Not sure if you're interested in the whole wave, but Big Bad Toy Store has the whole wave for $156. Not cheap, but considering the secondary market price on Cyclops, not too bad if you like the rest of the set. https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/51623 Oh, and yeah, that entire wave of Legends that they show on the site, (Daredevil, Carnage, Black Cat, etc) has been sold out at Target for a couple of years, they just never took them off the website for some reason. Also they have some items like Baron Zemo that are actually being sold by a third party seller through their site. Really, the site is kind of a mess. But it's still worth looking, because you can occasionally grab some gems!

Ugh, to think that we're HOPING for $600, is just nuts. These things used to be $300. Insane how the prices just keep climbing. I understand that some of it is the price of the materials has risen, but man, it still stings.

In my experience, Target's online inventory doesn't reflect what's in the stores at all. Their online inventory changes minute to minute, and I've seen it in action many times, but especially this week as I've been buying up the new Mego figures. Same with Marvel Legends. I search the site for Marvel Legends several times a day, and things pop in and out all day long. Also, it's not a reliable indicator of what is actually in the physical stores. You just have to get lucky on that front, I'm afraid. As for the X-Men legends, they had the most recent wave up a couple of times last month, but I haven't seen them for a few weeks now. I've still got them in my "save for later" section of my cart, but they've never come back into stock. And I never saw Psylocke on there at all. The last couple of weeks they've seemingly only been restocking the most recent Deadpool wave and the Civil War wave (with Antman and Wasp).

Not sure if anyone in the thread other than myself and @Gatchaman are picking up the new Mego figures at Target, but they're running a pretty great Buy 2 get 1 free sale on the figures right now, and they've also been furiously restocking the figures on the Target.com site. The hot figures tend to come and go throughout the day, but it's worth checking. Not only did I score all of the newest wave that I was interested in (Wolfman (aka "Screaming Werewolf"), Romulan, Green shirt Kirk, Demon Gene, 14" blue Batman) but I also FINALLY, at long last managed to pick up a few Gorn and Frankensteins as well. If I could finally find a Spock, I'd have everyone I want! Anyway, sale wraps up tomorrow, but his is a great deal. If you have a Target card you get another 5% and free shipping, brings the figures down to about $8 a pop.

They will sometimes do rereleases and reissues. For instance, the Deadpool and brown Wolvie figures from the first wave of the new X-Men Legends were rereleased, as was that entire wave, at least once. But eventually it sold out and they moved on to the next waves, and now they're expensive again. Cyclops is an interesting one. His secondary market price exploded a while back, but he is still showing up here and there. For instance, I grabbed one at Target out of the blue about a month ago. I'm assuming at this point they have a pretty good idea of how many units to produce in order to maximize their profits, and at a certain point it's no longer cost effective to return certain figures to production. Just spitballing, I don't really know. The good news is that they often reuse and reissue figures, a lot of exclusives end up repainted in regular waves, etc so there's always a chance he could return!

You know, I've always hated Venom, but I really loved that series, especially the Tony Moore issues. Lots of great stuff there. Should have kept my set.

Absolutely love stuff like this, so cool!

Oh man, I loved Alita back in the day, one of my all time favorites. I used to pick up all of that Viz stuff, back when they still published them in individual floppy format. Especially loved the Rumiko Takahashi stuff like Lum, Ranma 1/2 and Maison Ikkoku. Great books. It's also been a while since I read GitS, but I used to really be in love with that series. I'm helping a buddy sell his comics right now, and there's a minty set of the Dark Horse GitS books, and the longer I look at them, the more convinced I am that I need to buy them for my personal collection, as I sold mine long ago. Such pretty stuff.

Yes, this, or they can be used in banana bread. My wife used to put old bananas in our freezer, telling me that one day she would make banana bread. Eventually I got tired of seeing black bananas in the freezer, had the realization that my wife hasn't baked anything in the 10+ years we've been together, and I threw them out. I don't think she ever noticed.

Wow, amazing haul, congrats!

This one surprised me. I picked up a run of 1-7 including the "butt cover" for $1 a pop at HPB, on a whim. I almost didn't even pick them up at that price. Was amazed at what they sold for. Definitely won't pass them up again.

I've bought a few over the years but have never had one worthy of slabbing. Cool book!

Yeah, I can get tongue tied too. I try to get in, say something nice but not belabor the point, and get out before I stick my foot in my mouth.

As I mentioned over in the "This Week in Your Collection" thread, this weekend I attended the Louisville Supercon, primarily to get sigs from a bunch of Batman the Animated Series folks. I was never a huge fan of signed 8 x 10's (though I certainly have a lot of them) so a couple of years ago I started getting action figures signed. It's a fun way to combine interests in toys and autograph collecting, and makes for a nice display. So, I brought some of my BTAS series figs and got Kevin Conroy, Loren Lester, Diane Pershing and John Glover to sign 'em. I love the colored paint pens they used, they look fantastic. I considered getting Conroy to sign my Combat Belt Batman, but considering the prices that one is going for today, I just couldn't do it. So I brought Bruce instead.

Oh, the lion brings back such memories! When I was a little kid, my aunt gave me a bunch of the Flash Gordon figures. I had no idea who Flash Gordon was, hadn't seen the movie, etc, but I LOVED those figures, particularly Thun (the lion), beast Man and the Lizard Woman. I must have had them all, long since lost to the years. Now I'm feeling the urge to buy them all over again!

Congrats on the Moray, I just completed mine this summer! One of my best friends (who is a HUGE Joe collector, his collection is insane) had several of the original spotlight lenses, so he gave one to me. He used to buy big lots of Joe parts back before interest in the line started picking up again, so he has lots of spare parts, and had held onto several of those as "trade bait". So that one was easy. For me, the difficult part was finding an unbroken bottom half of the missile box. But I finally snagged one on eBay a couple of months ago. Now she's all complete, I just need to clean it up really good and apply a new sticker set. As for the loose torpedo, I have the same issue. I've finally gotten it kinda wedged in there so it'll stay put, but if you barely touch it, it'll fall off. I hesitate to use any sort of adhesive to keep it in place, I don't want the plastic to get discolored.

My Louisville SuperCon Report! Per usual, I don't have enough to say/show to make it worth doing an entire thread, so I'll just tie this one up. This was the first year since the Supercon folks took over our little bitty Derby City Comic Con, and man, it was a drastic upgrade! Attendance was huge, and there was so much stuff. It was pretty impressive, and immediately put the show near the same size and scope of the burgeoning Lexington Comic Con. This is a pretty legit show, now, and that's cool. Unfortunately, due to the timing putting this show just a few weeks before Xmas, my discretionary spending account is more or less depleted, so I didn't even LOOK at comics, because I knew I couldn't buy any. Yes, please feel sorry for me. Instead my money went to getting sigs from several Batman: The Animated Series voice actors (will have those pics up in the Plastic Crack thread momentarily) including the One True Batman, Kevin Conroy. Otherwise, my only real objective was to finally get some signatures from Keith Giffen, who I have been waiting to meet since I was about 12 years old. In all of these years, for whatever reason, he's never been at a show that I was attending. So I was stoked! He couldn't have been funnier and nicer. There was a sign on his table saying "First signature free, each additional $5" but he didn't even know where the sign had come from or who had put it there, and seemed to know nothing about it. So he signed these books for me, as well as my DC book, and then I bought the Ambush Bug print from him out of appreciation for signing for free. I don't do Signature Series, I just collect the occasional autograph on books that have personal significance. I've been dragging these LoSH books around to shows for 20+ years now to get sigs. Finally added Keith to a small handful of my favorites. As for the 50 Years of DC Comics, I've also been dragging the book around to cons since 97 or so, getting as many sigs as I can. Some day I'll scan them all in. The book is beat up, but there are a lot of good memories in there. The best moment of the show was talking to Kevin Conroy, who couldn't have been nicer. You just don't expect that Batman voice to come out of that body. I mean, IT'S BATMAN, right? He was admiring the Paul Dini sig in my book, and we were talking about how Bruce Timm's signature is "nothing", and he proceeded to jot his version of Timm's signature on his table. I told him he could do one of those in my book too, if he didn't mind, which got a big laugh. Making Batman laugh, it was a great feeling. Anyway, I've talked enough, here are some pics of things that are not really new in my collection, but which have been updated.

Ah, that makes sense, FTC has been doing those DC Mego reissues and additions to the line. Cool, I'll have to keep an eye open for this, it looks cool.

Can I adapt it to "Go eat a bag of Man-Things"? if so, this is my NEW new go to put-down.

Woohoo just picked up a set of these for 50 cents each last weekend!

I'm sitting on a goldmine of American variants!

Spirit is tough because that blue chest piece is usually yellowing. I was on the hunt for a sharp blue Spirit for a year or so, but still haven't found one nice enough at a price I want to pay.