F For Fake

Oh, and as far as BUYING toys, I just buy everything from bigbadtoystore. Flat $4 shipping no matter how much you buy, and they carry pretty much everything. Aside from random pickups at Target or wherever, I get everything through them.

Have you tried brickseek? Best thing I can think of, though the stock levels that they show may not always be accurate (especially with Target, where their website rarely accurately represents what is in the store.)

Looking for reasoning behind a Mod's actions? Good luck and godspeed!

I buy my trades and HC's at Instocktrades or Tales of Wonder, because the prices usually beat Amazon and they're well packed. But I still throw my LCS a lot of business in the form of new comics, back issues, and supplies. I think there's enough money in the hobby to go around.

Congrats! Some day I need to track one of those down to go with my 1-6 9.8 set. But I've been lazy about it.

I don't know that the Magneto cover is actually in smaller supply (and "smaller supply" aren't words that I'd normally ever attribute to X-Men 1) but anecdotally I can say that I buy X-Men 1's when I find them in NM shape for 50 cents or less, to fill a comic rack in my basement. They look snazzy, and they're dirt cheap. Anyway, after having done this for a couple years, I have stacks and stacks of Storm and Cyclops covers, but very few Magneto covers. Not sure why that is.

I like his umbrella.

It's interesting how HPBs vary from location to location. One of mine seems to re-bag and board every single book in their own bags and boards, and the other store seems to leave them in the bags and boards they arrived in, and then uses a super cheap bag/board combo for the stuff they have to bag themselves. But the only books that aren't bagged and boarded are the stuff they dump in the 25 cent bin.

Well, NEARLY nekkid. IG apparently has some rules against total nudity (so nips are generally covered, unlike Twitter, which is a lawless wasteland) but there's still plennnnnnty to see. Used to be #hotgirl would get you started, but just search for any particular model you like, and then IG will "suggest" similar accounts, and then you're off to the races!

The coupons make it pretty sweet. I usually end up with a couple of calendars each year, plus they will often give out coupons when you sell them stuff, and run a few good sales throughout the year as well. HPB has paid off for me many, many times, so I'll keep going back. You just never know if you're going to be the one who gets there right after they put some cool stuff out. Or it could be the same old junk sitting there for a couple of weeks. It's all ebb and flow, depending on what people bring in, just like the LCS. But it's always fun to look.

And as far as using IG the way it was intended (sharing and looking at pics) and not as a vehicle for commerce, it's TERRIFIC. My account gives me an endless feed of comics, horror, and nearly nekkid ladies to ogle all day long. It's great!

Instagram is attractive just because there are SO many eyeballs on it all day long, while our beloved boards seem to be waning. That being said, the general wild west atmosphere of the platform has prevented me from buying or selling anything there. I think eBay is an outdated model with tons of drawbacks, but I've been doing it for 20+ years (and here for nearly half that long) and I'm skittish about trying something new. It could likely be the future of comic selling, but I'm not ready to make that leap yet. Now, if it was a dealer I knew, like some of the big boys here, I wouldn't hesitate, as I would expect the same service I receive from them when buying on the boards. But these fly by night dealers, I'm just not ready to deal with them yet on a platform with zero protections. Some very cool books floating around out there though!

I find that there's still gold in them thar hills at HPB, just depends on your timing. I think they do tend to wildly overprice stuff that they think SHOULD be valuable (mid-grade silver superhero books, bronze junk, etc) but there are still plenty of scores to be found in the $1 bins. I stopped at my HPB last week for the first time in a month or so, and found a minty Lady Killer #1 for $1. Sold it for $30 later that day. You just never know. Always worth a look, though. PS: The odd thing is that this is the second NM Lady Killer 1 I've found there in the last year, for a buck. Most have been a popular book in the area! Or unpopular, considering the owners let them go for about 2 cents.

Still haven't seen Gorn, Spock, Frankenstein or Paul Stanley around here, and I've hit all of the stores multiple times. It's a shame, because this week the figures are 25% off, so the 14" figs are only $15 and the regular figs less than $10. Tremendous deals, if any of you are looking to get on the bandwagon. Meanwhile, I go to store after store, staring at the rows full of Tooties and Peggy Bundies.

I remember buying a value pack of First books at a Dollar Tree when I was a kid, pretty sure it had a Grimjack and a Nexus in it, not sure what the third book was. But yeah, I remember these packs for sure.

Seriously, CGC, get your act together. My concern used to be getting the books to CGC safely so that they'd arrive at their HQ in the same condition as they were in my home. Until they started tinkering with the cases a couple of years ago, it didn't really occur to me that the books might come back in worse shape BECAUSE OF THE HOLDERS. This stuff is ridiculous. I still have a small stack of stuff I'd like to sub, but until they can offer some reassurance, or hell, at least an ACKNOWLEDGMENT that they still don't have their case situation 100% ironed out, I guess I'll be sitting on them. (Side note; is sitting on a stack of books considered "pressing"? )

No, actually, two new shops opened up in the last year or two. That puts us up to about 5 or 6 shops in the metro area, not bad for a mid-sized city.

Since the thread got bumped, I posted these over in CG, but may as well drop them here as well. One of my oldest and closest friends is selling all of his stuff, or rather, having me sell it for him. Some of it I'm buying directly from him for my personal collection, including all of this stuff. I bought each of these off the racks myself as they were released, but they were lost in "the dark age", when i had to let my collection go. And since then, I've just never bothered to hunt them down and pick them up again. (I do have most of these stories, if not all, in the various HC's, trades, etc.) SO, it was super nice to help a friend out AND get this huge chunk of Los Bros goodness knocked out all in one fell swoop. Now I just need the remaining first half of the magazine run, and I'll be pretty close to having my collection back! (Also picked up some beautiful Chris Ware and Paul Pope stuff.)

Don't like the looks of that!

I have to agree with the general sentiment: before you decide to go whole hog and attempt to make a $100k living at this, first it would be wise to see if you can even make it a profitable part time hobby. Work your 9 to 5 and in your spare time, for a couple of years at least, see if you are able to consistently source collections, flip them and profit on them. It's not easy. To make big money, you have to spend big money, and it is WORK. You have to seriously LOVE it, and even then, it's a pain. I have a 9 to 5 (well, an 8 to 5 with an hour lunch, technically) that pays the bills. In addition to that, I sell on eBay, and have done so for 20+ years. In addition to the random books I pick up here and there, I will also buy a collection maybe twice a year, usually in the 1000-3000 book range, because that's my comfort zone. I don't have a lot of capital to spend, because I'm not really a business. I do this as a hobby. Buy collections to sell books to make extra money to buy more books for me. Rinse and repeat. I am strictly a small small small timer (my wheelhouse is generally buying books for 10 cents a piece or less to resell for $5-$20, but sometimes I luck into nicer stuff) and even as a part time hobby, it is a lot of work, and it is NOT CONSISTENT. If you have a storefront, people are bringing collections in to you. But if you don't have that advantage, then you are hunting every day, and competing with the real big dogs in your area. I generally try to be more positive and upbeat than some of the other guys around here, so I'm not going to say "Oh god no, you are going to immediately lose your shirt and end up in an alley somewhere trading handies for copies of Marvel 2 in 1". But, I WILL repeat what I said above: take a test run at it as a hobby with a decent sample period (2 years at least) to establish if you have the inventory pool locally to work with, in addition to the skill, time and luck, to make it happen, before you make any big decisions. And even then, yeah, it's not likely to work out. Not impossible, just not likely. Good luck?

Wow, my kinda collector! Cool stuff!

Wow! I don't know anything about it, but I love it!

Well that is certainly a nice PCR cover! You're probably on to something there. I saw two Rom #'1 at my LCS just this weekend, but I don't know if I've ever actually seen a 75.

I LOVE it. If I ever get another Flagg, I'm totally ripping you off. This is the only way to go.