F For Fake

Thanks Patrick! Yes, I had to jump on Ratbat, he was in such nice shape, as were all of these. I didn't have High Brow as a kid, so I'm happy to have him now!

Picked up some G1 goodness at my LCS’s Black Friday sale today. Prices were already pretty good, but with the BF 20% off, these all came in at $40 a pop, which is a steal for the Highbrow and Unicron (complete!) and not bad for Ratbat (silver guns!) and Blurr (super tight, clean, and unbroken shield). Would have bought more, but already spent a bit at the Hasbro Pulse BF sale. At 20% off I went ahead and picked up Sludge and Motormaster, as I’ve still not seen them locally, and picked up the Wreck n Ruin Springer as well. Thinking about going back for some Shattered Glass stuff, but have probably spent enough for one day as is!

Here’s my Pac-Man cab. Black light doesn’t show up well in the pics.

Yes! That was right about the moment I got hooked! I got Fallout 3 for Christmas of,,,whatever year it came out. Can’t recall now. Anyway, we had a heavy snowfall not long after, and I was psyched, because at the time I worked in a school, which meant I got snow days. So I was snowed in, didn’t have to go to work, and was looking to have three to four days where I could just finally play Fallout 3. My week was looking great…and then, a few hours into the first night, my 360 red ringed! I was sooooo bummed. I think I went through three 360’s before I finally got one that didn’t RROD on me. Those were trying times!

Oh wooooow, I love it! Man, that’s a great collection. I am very jealous of the Tron, I think it’s still one of the best looking cabinets ever made, maybe my all time favorite. Ha, well, I’ve always loved Pac-Man, but I’m still comically bad at it, especially when you consider the number of hours I’ve put into throughout my life!

Ooh, I'd love to see that cabinet AND the collection! I love those old cabinets so much. The only one I have is a vintage Pac-Man. My uncle owned it since the 80's, and I played it all the time as a kid. He passed a few years ago, and my aunt asked for help selling it. I listed it with local gaming groups, but we just got one lowball after another. So I told my aunt that I'd match whatever the best offer was, because I'd rather keep it in the family than give it away for practically nothing. So she agreed, and then surprised me by giving it to me for my birthday, refusing to take any money at all. I had to put a lot of work into it. Took it apart and wiped off LAYERS of black gunk, from years of smokers standing over the machine in the arcade it came from. The monitor had to be re-capped and de-gauzed and god knows what else (I know a guy that fixes old machines professionally) and I put a lot of money into fixing up the body myself (new bezel, new trim), but it was all worth it to have it back in good shape again. The wife has put a nix on any more huge cabinets coming into the house ,but man, I love them. A Dig Dug would be sweet. I'd also love a Tron and a Donkey Kong. Maybe one day!

One year old? Pshaw! I finally fired up Halo Guardians last week, thinking "I really should finally play this new-ish Halo game,", only to realize that it came out in 2017! yikes! I bought it at a black friday sale last year, and it still took me another year to get around to opening it up. I picked up Halo Infinite last week in yet another Black Friday sale, so maybe I'll get to that sometime in the next five years.

I've considered going back and trying New Vegas again, as I never did a playthrough as a member of Caesar's Legion. I'm sure it would seem a little awkward now, but I really loved it at the time. Maybe my favorite storyline of any of those games.

Was just coming to say that. This omni has been solicited and canceled numerous times over the course of, what, five years? Hopefully it'll finally see the light of day, but DC's collected editions dept being what it is these days, I wouldn't hold my breath. With DC, until you're holding the book in your hands, nothing is guaranteed.

Great pick-up! I got a Cobra bunker at an estate sale four or five years ago, a cardboard box sitting on a bed marked $5. Ended up being several hundred dollars worth of stuff in that $5 box! Anyway, I mention it because the box had a complete Cobra bunker, but ALSO had a Viper Pilot who was missing their emblem! Or was he a swivel armed Cobra Infantry? We'll never know...however, my understanding is that the silver logo of the Viper Pilots tends to wipe away completely, whereas the red logo of the 1.5 Infantry doesn't come off so easily. So, if your logo is truly, completely missing, it's likely a Viper Pilot.

Also worth noting that Amazon's B2G1 sale is just their algorithm copycatting the Target B2G1 sale, so if you don't find what you want at Amazon, it's worth taking a look at Target. It includes vinyl albums, movies and books.

Ha, unfortunately, no, it's pretty terrible. At least in my estimation. And that may be why it's difficult to find, as neither property was really doing big sales at the time, and it seemed like a silly idea. So I'm assuming a lot of folks passed it by. So as a reading experience, no, can't recommend it. But if you see the books on the cheap, they're well worth picking up. Although I am on record as generally not being a fan of Alien crossovers, I did actually like AvPvT a lot! I thought it was a lot of fun, and made a coherent story out of what could have been a big mess.

It's certainly better than it was for the last couple of years, but one does have to wonder if it won't go even lower!

Looks like you're off to a good start!

That makes sense. The items that I had in the auction were books that hadn't moved on consignment. So I wasn't expecting much out of them, just wanted to clear some inventory and figured I'd take whatever store credit I could get out of them. But if the winners never pay, I guess I'll relist as consignment at a significant discount. I've not bought anything through their auctions before, but will have to add it to my rounds. I've been getting a lot of cheap stuff on CLink lately, I'm assuming a result of the market being down, and the holidays approaching. Bad time to sell all around, it would seem, at least for the cheap drek I traffic in.

Yeah, it's not great, but I don't blame MCS. And to be certain, I'm not, like, seriously angry about it or anything. The market is down now, and it's the holidays, and these books are not in-demand books, so I knew the sales would be low. But I was hoping they'd at least PAY for the stuff, so I could clear a few things out of my cart! Oh well, I guess it's not too late, the payments could still come through. Fingers crossed!

So, I think I mentioned that I recently did an inventory of my Aliens books, and I'm missing a few random things that surprised me. Either cases where my LCS failed to pull the books for me, and I just assumed I had them, or random weird variants that I didn't feel like chasing at the time. Oddly enough, I was currently missing AvPvT #2. That shocked me, as I know I've had several complete sets of this series over the years. Anyway, grabbed a nice #2 at a decent price. Next was the Aliens Vampirella variant. This is one of the easy to find books in this set, so I'd not been in a hurry. But I figured I may as well cross it off, as the Aliens Vampi books are some of the toughest to find, in my estimation. The virgin and b&w variants of 2-6 are ghosts. This series came out during the gap where I wasn't buying new comics at all (even Aliens stuff) and I missed them completely. Once I started buying new books again, I found that this series was oddly difficult to track down. I have a set of the regular covers, but the variants are very spotty in my collection, and not at all easy to track down after issue #1. I guess this was a crossover that flew under the radar for most folks.

This was my first time selling comics with MCS through their auction. Three books, and they sold for peanuts. No surprise there, they're not high demand books and frankly I was just hoping to clear them out. However, two of the three still haven't paid. Hmm, nonpaying bidders and basement level sales, hey, I can get that action at eBay! ;) Just kidding, I will likely continue to consign with MCS as I do like the service, but man, it's a double kick in the teeth when your books sell for pennies AND the buyers don't even bother to pay for 'em!

Those are really nifty!

This is a great thread, thanks @thehumantorch I love posters, particularly promo posters from the series I loved as a kid. I ran out of wall space a long time ago, but here are a few comic-related faves. (I also have a lot of signed movie posters, but don’t want to get too far off track.)

These are great. I don’t have a complete set, but I do have most of them, also purchased directly from Steranko. Picked this one to have him sign.

Best Buy had some decent TF Black Friday deals, including Black Zarak for $109! I got this one, then he sold out, but i think he’s back up for order again. They also have the Ark for $105, I believe. I’d been telling myself that I wanted two more Rodimus figures for my displays, but was t wanting to pay $80 for them. Luckily they were also in the sale for about $47, so I grabbed these two. I also had some rewards certificates, so I ended up getting all of this for about $170. Not going to let myself open up Zarak before Xmas!

I didn't win any art, but I won a bunch of slabs at below slabbing cost. Nothing exciting, just modern run books for registry sets. I pick up a few things at CLink every month, and prices have been trending downward overall. As a buyer, it has been great! I'm winning stuff with my "tracking bid"! I'm hoping the next session will go even lower, as it'll be during the holidays, and markets overall are trending down. As far as art, I only bid on one piece, which I didn't win. It sold about where I'd expect it to sell, but I'd hoped to steal it. Oh well.

Wow, great pick up on that Alien Isolation. Suffice to say I paid...considerably more...for mine.

Could be! When I was growing up, I always saw it spelled "Betty" (likely due to the Rocketeer, The Betty Pages, and other Betty related material coming out in the 80's) but at a certain point someone declared "It's actually spelled "Bettie"', and then it seemed to change everywhere. I was never sure when that delineation occurred, but a large number of the books and mags published up until the 90's seem to spell it "Betty".