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Hey Sagii, thanks for visiting and posting. To be honest, I don't know. Market may be more than I'm willing to pay. But if they're the last 2 books I need to complete my goal, and I have the money (i.e., it's before I retire and I'm still making decent money), maybe I'll go for it.

Thanks for your report. Hope to get out there next year. But maybe not because with all these great books I'll probably spend too much.

Back To the Top Spot on the Lady Mechanika Set I lost the top spot on the LM registry set last year. But through a bunch of December sales I was able to pick up enough books to get back to the top. I barely have the lead so we'll see if I can stay at the top. Here are some of the books I recently bought. The jewels of my LM collection are these sketch covers by Joe Benitez. I bought them from FrankJP a few years ago. Thanks for reading.

take it via pm

take it .....thanks, Mike....... by the way, your Journal in that Forum is awesome GOD BLESS.... -jimbo(a friend of jesus) Thanks! This one will be there soon!

take it

Spawn 9 (Angela) and January C-Link (Matt Baker) I have a small collection of Spawn. I have about the first 40 issues or so, and then I collect other issues with covers by Todd McFarlane when I come across them. The only graded issue I have is #9 with the first appearance by Angela. I wish it was 9.8; maybe someday I'll upgrade. I also have the German embossed edition of Spawn 9. I've always found embossed editions to be really cool. This was graded by the EGS company in Europe. I didn't even know there was such a company until I saw this on ebay. Since it was graded 9.9, I guess it makes my average grade 9.8 so maybe it's not so bad that I have the other 9.6. On to something completely different, there were tons of Baker comics on sale this month on the ComicLink auction. Most were too low grade for me to be interested in. I don't mind low grade, in fact I prefer it to keep the price down, but for me to be interested the cover still has to present well and these did not (IMHO). There were a couple exceptions. Pictorial Romances 17 in CGC 6.5 sold for $1500. To me that's just madness. Yes, it's a giant size and those square spines are hard to find in higher grades. But the cover is only so-so (again IMHO). I just can't see spending that much when, for the same money, you could get a major SA or GA first appearance key. Here it is, so you can make your own decision about whether you think it's worth $1500. (Once again IMHO, there is only 1 Baker cover worth that kind of money, Giant Comics Edition 12.) Here is my only win last night, Pictorial Romances 15. I wish it was CGC but what can you do. It's not high enough grade to make it worth the effort to resubmit to CGC. But I might still crack it out to read it. I won it for $245 which is much more my speed for these Bakers.

take it

Frank Frazetta's Famous Funnies Covers A boardie here listed Famous Funnies 210 for sale the other day. I bookmarked the link and then slept on it. The next day I saw it had not yet sold. I made an offer for about 20% off. The boardie's original price was fair but I'd bought a lot lately, and sometimes what I offer is based on what I can afford to spend at the moment. I assume we're all that way. I can't tell you the number of times I've offered what's left in my pocket for that last comic as I'm leaving the convention floor to go home. Anyway, we were able to reach agreement, so now I've got this classic Frazetta cover. Frazetta's classic run in Famous Funnies ran from 209-216. In addition to 210, I also have 209 and 211. So, still another 5 to go. The quest continues.

Jae Lee I'm not a big collector of sketch books, but I had to get this, a signed sketchbook by Jae Lee. I've been a Jae Lee fan since his early work on Namor. Here are a few Lee CGC books in my collection.

Junie Prom #5 and Kamen's All Top #8 (from Tomorrow's Treasures) Here are a couple books I picked up on eBay lately. The first is Junie Prom #5. This cover has always reminded me a little of Cindy #37. I also picked up this copy of All Top #8. Among defects, trimming is probably the one I dislike the most (along with missing pages and water damage). But I decided to go for it because the trimming was limited to the back of the top cover. I bought the comic from Tomorrow's Treasures. His eBay instructions are interesting. He makes his listings BIN/Best Offer, but essentially says he's not going to even respond to what he considers to be unreasonable offers. I can't tell you the number of times I've made what some might consider "lowball" offers on eBay, and they were immediately accepted. My approach has always been, I'm going to offer what I'm willing to pay, and if you counter or reject my offer that's fine. The internet is a big marketplace, I'll just move on to the next thing. Sometimes -- about 1 out of 50 times -- I get a rude response where the seller is offended by my offer (sometimes it happens here, sometimes on eBay). I don't get that. As a selller why would you not want to receive all offers? That gives you control to either accept, counter or reject. How is this not a good thing? Anyway, back to TT. I've done business with him at cons. I've gotten some good books from him over the years. I'm sure he doesn't remember, but he once gave me a really good explanation on how to price out restored books. I've never bought anything from him on eBay, because of his instructions. He's inviting offers via BIN/BO, but he's sort of not too via his instructions. So I don't want to waste his time or mine. On this book his asking price was $300. Because of the defects I decided to go ahead and make an offer. My offer was $250 (a little under 20% off). I didn't expect him to respond (his instructions say he won't respond if he considers the offer unreasonable). But he did. Within a few hours he accepted my offer. As I often do when I win something on eBay from somebody, I immediately browsed his other eBay offerings. I found a Phantom Lady with a Matt Baker. Like the All Top it has defects, but acceptable to me at the right price. His price on this one was higher, and what I was willing to pay was more like 35% off. I thought about making an offer, but in light of his instructions, I decided I didn't have the energy to deal with it.

Kevin Taylor Kevin Taylor is an erotic artist. His most famous characters are Girl and Jill. In the early 2000s he used to go to the SDCC. He was practically giving his art away so I have a few, including an entire 4 page short story (pages for less than $100). Back then he told me he was having a hard time drawing in the small comic form factor because of his hand. So he was getting out of comics and moving to other areas of art. He also moved to Europe (I think to Spain). You still see his work up on eBay sometimes, and I think he takes commissions. Here's his sketchbook from 2006 I picked up recently on eBay. This is the color version; there's a B&W version too (which is rarer). Here are a couple sketches Kevin did for me at those SDCCs. The first -- on the Gen13 cover -- is his Girl character. The second is Kevin's interpretation of Gwen Stacy.

This is a great thread. Here are ones I don't think anyone has posted yet

My Birthday Present -- A Schomburg Grail My birthday is a week after New Years so I was shopping for a present for myself. I decided on this classic Alex Schomburg cover. At the moment my main collecting focus is my Matt Baker collection, where I'm trying to get a copy of every comic with a cover by Baker. I'm just under a third there. By my count there are 299 Baker covers and so far I have 92 (including Amazing Ghost Stories #16 that I just dropped a flag on last night). But in terms of classic covers -- the ones you'd put in a museum if a museum ever had a comics exhibition -- Schomburg has more than Baker, and by a wide margin (IMHO). And his is one of them, Fighting Yank 23. It's the most I've ever paid for a Schomburg, but I actually think I got a good deal on it. I think the seller may have been hurt a bit because he didn't put "Schomburg" in the title or description of his eBay listing. I just happened to stumble on it by accident. We then went back and forth a couple days trading offers, and finally reached agreement late last night. Thanks for reading.

The 100 and Eliza Taylor The release date of The 100 is coming up, February 1st! This show just gets better and better, and Season 4 should be fascinating as they pick up from the end of last season. To celebrate, here's an autograph photo of Eliza Taylor from my collection. Eliza of course plays Clarke in the show.

You're lucky to have those books! There were a bunch I wanted but I didn't even ask the price -- it wasn't that kind of con for me, I didn't want to be tempted and spend too much money.

Here are a few things I've picked up lately (Biro, Jeanie and Morena Baccarin) Recently I've been collecting comics with cover art by Charles Biro. I don't know a lot about him, but his art really has an impact on me. And his comics are cheap compared to other artists like Baker and Schomburg. Here's a Jeanie comic that I recently bought from jimjum12 here on the boards. I always look forward to his sales. In my view this is a classic GGA cover and I was really happy to add it to my collection. I collect autographs of actors in my favorite movies and TV series. Right now 2 of my favorite TV shows are Gotham and Homeland (I'm catching up on them). Morena Baccarin is in both. I like her character more in Gotham than Homeland, but she is good in both. Here's an autographed photo I just recently got (certified by PSA):

I'll take this too at 20% off, thanks

Local Con in Northern Virginia Today I went to a local con at a firehouse in Annadale VA. It's snowing today but the turn out still seemed to be pretty good. Here's how it looked outside the firehouse. The wall books weren't worth mentioning, except these (this was the only serious SA/GA dealer at the show -- he had more wall displays but I didn't get pictures): Cons are no longer my favorite place to buy old comics. I guess I'm getting too old and impatient to spend a lot of time looking through long boxes only to find the dealer has every comic in the run except the one I need. The internet is a lot easier. I used to love going through $1 boxes. But that was when I was collecting runs of comics. Now I've pretty much finished off all my runs. Having said that, I'm probably spending more time and money now than anytime before on my collection. But now I'm going for keys and grails, Matt Bakers, GA GGA, etc. You can find these comics at cons, but the selection is sparse and when a dealer has it he knows it's special so prices are usually high. Prices are usually better on eBay or here on the boards. So nowadays I don't go to cons for comics. Nowadays I go to cons to find different fun stuff. And yes, I do buy comics but it's more serendipity buys. Finding something I didn't know existed. So here's what I got. I picked up these inexpensive GA GGA humor books for about $4 each, and also a cool Terry and the Pirates glass for $5. The same dealer was selling old paperbacks. I bought this lot for about $15. This was my big purchase of the day, the Rocketeer Artist Edition. I got it for $80. I picked up a few new statutes for my comic book room, Zatanna and Poison Ivy. The dealer sold the pair for $80. My last purchase before walking out the door was this Game of Thrones sketch cover. It was priced at $75 but the seller let me have it for $60.

Getting to the Top of the Dave Stevens Registry Set Towards the end of December I reached one of my main 2016 collecting goals. I made it to the top of the Dave Stevens registry set. Here's a link to the gallery of my set if you're interested: http://comics.www.collectors-society.com/registry/comics/SetGallery.aspx?PeopleSetID=76643 How long I'll stay there I don't know. Competing in this set isn't about money. Other than a few common books, there's not a lot of supply of high grade books out there (either graded or raw). I have a stack of raw books that I bought based on eBay pictures and then realized they were too flawed to submit once I got them in the mail. This is the book that put me over the top. It's got a square bound spine so that makes it hard to get in high grade. I think I have 3-4 raws of this book that would grade at most 9.2. So I was really happy and frankly surprised when this book, already graded, came up for auction on ebay. There are only four 9.6s in existence (2 blues, 2 yellows). I even lucked out, as it must have been a time when no one else was shopping, as I won it for only $29. Thanks for reading.

Recent CGC Invoice & Cow Puncher I got these Matt Baker comics in my latest CGC invoice. I'm rethinking whether it makes sense to submit lower grade copies like these. I'm not competing in the registry sets so that's not a reason to submit. I think the value of the book might actually be lower when you grade it and get a comic in this range, as now there's certainty on the grade and you don't get the potential bounce of what the book might grade out as. Also, now I can't read the book. The advantages I see are (1) books look great in the CGC holders; and (2) the CGC holders stop time on the ageing and grading of books. If a comic grades out as 3.0 now, it will be 3.0 50 years from now, as long as you don't break the seal. Now, I'm not saying the book will actually be 3.0, I'm saying getting it encapsulated gives you a pretty good argument to potential buyers that it is. Also, I picked up this Cow Puncher recently on eBay. This is one of the great GGA covers of the series. I won't grade this one. Comics look good in mylar with acid free backing boards too.

End of Year Grails - Schomburg, Rocket to the Moon and Airboy Merry Christmas everyone! Before things get rolling in my family today I thought I'd post a few recent additions to my comic book room, all of them classic covers and grails for me. The first is this Schomburg that I picked up from a boardie here. The following 2 I picked up some time ago, the first from Ricksneatstuff and the second from an eBay BIN. I just got them back from CGC. CGC put the Airboy in a huge slab (so big it wouldn't all fit on my legal size scanner) and you can see it came out of the box with a big crack in the upper left hand corner. I'll be contacting CGC about how to get a replacement for it. Thanks for reading, and I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas!

Wings, Berthet Pin-Up and J. Scott Campbell's Black Cat Here's another miscellaneous posting of new additions to my comic room. First up is a Wings comic. Most of the attention for Fiction House go to Planet Comics, and there are more than a few classic covers in that run. But, Wings, Fight and Jumbo also have alot of great covers, and usually for lower prices. This one I picked up for only $30. I first discovered Philippe Berthet through my collecting of Bettie Page comics and memorabilia. Berthet bases many of his characters on Bettie, including his Pin-Up adventure series. Here is volume 4. Finally, earlier this year I bought this German edition of this J. Scott Campbell. Came back lower from CGC than I hoped, but I'm still glad to have a version of this cover (since the US version right now is ungodly expensive). Thanks for reading.

Very interesting read. I remember being skeptical of the cruise too when I saw it. The demographics don't fit. I love cruising but I could never get my wife to cruise Norwegian. We sailed on it the first time when we were first married and were disappointed with it then. People stayed in the pools all day drinking beers and never got out. So no surprise they had to drain and refill the pools every day. There are better cruise lines than Norwegian for close to the same price (celebrity for example) On the other hand, there might be kids (to me, anyone under 25 is a kid) who would be into the cruise esp with the guests, but kinda of pricey given the up charge in your analysis. Who wants to go on a cruise to see these people? Much easier to go to a ww con The biggest thing about your post for me is what this might say about wizard. Even though their cons are mixed, they are plentiful and often the only ones I can fit on my schedule. So I don't want them to go out of biz