Hamlet

It all depends on price and availability to me. I’m thrilled to pull ragged SA books out of dollar boxes and add them to my collection. If I’m spending real money I’m more picky. I generally am never interested in spending the money for uber-high grade though.

Those two things are not required to pay your taxes. My two largest sales have been via the boards. I would never be willing to sell on EBay given the target they put on sellers for scammers. Regardless, I will pay the taxes I owe come tax time.

If I could only have one short box of comics, ASM 238 would be in it.

I think people are too focused on the “woke” aspect. This movie isn’t bad because it is woke. It is bad because it doesn’t have any interesting characters, themes, or action sequences ( I’m only talking about the 1st hour, because I haven’t made it thru the whole thing. Maybe the last hour is better? ). It is incredibly slow and bogged down in endless exposition. The highlight of the movie for me so far is the valet. That isn’t a good sign. Black Panther is woke, but it also has interesting themes about dealing with our fathers’ sins and what a wealthy country owes the world, a great villian, good action, humor that works, interesting characters, etc. It gets a little bogged down in the CGI-fest at the end that we’ve all seen a dozen times now, but overall I enjoyed it. I think it’s less a problem of being woke and more a problem of being out of ideas that we haven’t seen before. Black Widow and Shang-Chi are okay movies, but they don’t really have anything new or fresh in them. I think the well may be running dry.

If you are interested in holding for decades, I wouldn’t buy certified books, especially right now. CGC is not able to keep up with the demand right now, so the spread between slabbed books and raw is higher than normal. Plus, if you are investing over decades, it is better to buy more of the thing you are expecting to appreciate ( the comic itself ) rather than the slabbing fees for the plastic case. Buy nice books raw that interest you and that you will enjoy owning. If you are uncomfortable with grading, try to buy from dealers that have good reputations. You can slab the books when it is time to sell.

It's unsung because it is awful. I went to it with a friend who turned to me in the middle of it and said, "If we leave now, we can salvage an hour that we will always regret if we stay." This was right in the middle of a scene of them going down in an elevator that went on and on so long that we started laughing about it. "We get it. It is really, really deep." We stayed, and I regret it.

I’ve made it through the first hour of this movie in two sittings and I’m really not sure I’m going to finish it at this point. It is a really bad movie, IMO. It is incredibly slow, completely bogged down in tedious exposition about characters and backstory that just aren’t interesting to me. I would say at this point that it is the worst of the MCU movies. It’s first Hulk movie bad. Black Widow and Shang-Chi weren’t my favorites but they were a lot better than this. I’m trying to decide if I’m going to force myself to finish this or just bail completely.

I have a few dollar books that I buy pretty much every time I see them because I think they should be worth more. I suspect that they probably won’t be, but if they ever are the pictures of me with dozens of them before I sell them off will be fun. I also have multiples of some books because MCS was pricing them below market for a long time and I just added them to every order I had with them. Thor 338 is an example. They were selling copies for under $4 when it was probably a $15 book, so I just kept buying them when they were available. Now they are pricing it correctly, so I will probably switch to selling from buying. I also have a very few more expensive books that I am speculating on because I think the market will value them higher at some point.

The buyers usually do a pretty good job of figuring out the actual condition of the books from the scans and bidding accordingly. One thing I’ve found as a buyer is that you have to look carefully at every book, because while their grading is pretty much always tighter than CGC, it isn’t consistently tighter by the same amount for all the various defects. So a MCS 4.5 will be at least a CGC 4.5, but sometimes it might be as high as a CGC 6.0 or so. Likewise a MCS 6.0 could be anything from a CGC 6.0 to pushing a 7.5-8.0. I haven’t quite found the exact method to their madness. You just have to look at every book closely and translate it to CGC-style grading. The nice thing about that is when you are buying books from their own inventory, you can occasionally find books that they hammer on grade ( and price ) that would get substantially higher grades from CGC. Those books usually don’t last long though. 😀

I believe the AF15 CGC 2.5 was a new GPA high at $42,300.

Could be worse

That’s a nice world to imagine.

Okay, it sounds like you are set on a 9.8 from the 1980s that has some nostalgic appeal. Nostalgia for other people is hard to judge. I have a lot of nostalgia for a lot of books in the 80s, but it might not match your nostalgia. The four books you listed are very popular. I would lean towards the ASM 361 because I’m a Spidey guy and I’d rather have a 1st appearance rather than “just” a cool cover ( although 316 is a pretty darn cool cover ). Some nostalgic choices I would consider for myself ( given the constraints of 9.8 from the 80s ) A set of 9.8 ASM 229 and 230. These aren’t really keys, but those books have one of the coolest Spidey stories from the 80s, I like the covers and they are not super expensive. A set of 9.8 ASM 249, 250, and 251. Likewise, a cool story with little speculator run-up. Spectacular Spiderman 64. First Cloak and Dagger. I don’t typically buy graded 80s books, so take my recommendations with a grain of salt.

That is a somewhat perverse incentive that I hadn't thought about before.

It was “low” compared to ASM 194, which has 416 in 9.8 and 983 in 9.6. My point was that there are probably more raw 9.8s of PPSS 90 out there compared to ASM 194 because it hasn’t been worth submitting the 90 for all that long compared to the 194. I remember ASM 252 being worth $4-5 basically right from the start, which given that it was a 60 cent cover price book seems like a pretty good return for speculators. I was in a small market though, so it may have just been expensive in my town.

That’s definitely worth paying a big premium for. 🙂

I think the low census is probably because it has only became worth grading in the last few years. Those Spectacular Spider-Mans are pretty sparse on the census because no one will pay to slab them. I have a 9.8 copy of 78 that I paid as much to ship from Comiclink as I bid a number of years back. There are still only 24 copies in 9.8, which appears to be supplying all of the demand at the moment. If I see a nice 78 in the dollar box though, I snag it. 😀

Sure, it’s the same month, but it’s not on the cover. The black costume is just on the final page of the story. The other two books have it on the cover and throughout the story. It’s a pretty lame book to have to spend money on to complete a run, IMO.

I have a really nice raw copy that is nice enough that I am afraid to actually read it these days. I almost bought Dale’s copy in his sales thread just to have a reader.

I have an intense nostalgia for those Spectaculars from 70-100 or so. I get that the art isn’t great, but I did really enjoy the stories. I still pick them out of dollar boxes even though I have at least doubles on most of them. Sadly, I had to buy a raw copy of 90 for a somewhat inflated price because people have suddenly decided that was a first black costume issue. Talk about manufactured keys.

I didn’t have any idea who Carol Danvers was until the movie stuff started.

It’s 6 years newer than those books. I’m also not saying it should be super expensive, since there are lots and lots of copies of ASM from that era. I’m just saying that if you are picking out ASM keys between 151-225, it is probably one of the first books you grab, and has been for a long time. She was in almost every Spectacular Spiderman book for 2-3 years. If you collected Spiderman in 1980s, you probably want her first appearance.

I agree that the $600 threshold is too low. It is going to generate a lot of compliance work that just isn’t worth the very small amount of added revenue. I really don’t think it makes sense for the guy working at McDonald’s who sells his ASM 300 on Ebay to now have to file a regular 1040 instead of the 1040EZ so that we can get $200 from him. I think there should be a personal exemption of this type of transaction in the $2000/year kind of range. The cost in actual revenue compared to the reduction in PITA for everyone ( sellers, PayPal/banks, and the IRS itself ) seems negligible.