fantastic_four

Wonder if those old Converse All-Star cloth sneakers that NBA players used to wear in the 60s and 70s are worth money now?

Oh yea, and this is slightly off-topic since it's hard to "collect" items like this, but this is my favorite item besides my comics...a Medieval armorer's metal rendition of Magneto's helmet! I bought this from ebay a few years ago for only $200, which was less than the guy who had it made paid the blacksmith. I want to get it glossed (like the gloss finish all cars have these days) and it needs the little "horn" piece mounted on the front center (the guy who had it made never quite finished that part of it), but it's still an EXTREMELY cool piece.

Crappy webcam pic of that re-posted below...they're display cases from a statuary store with three lights built into the top of each cabinet. Both are glass on all sides and each shelf level is glass; they're exactly my height at around 6'2" and they're light enough to pick up and move by myself if I take the shelves out, although they're so large and therefore unwieldy that it's easier to move them with two people. You can find them on the web for about $1000 or so, although I got mine for about $350 apiece because the store had downsized from a warehouse-type building to a smaller shop in the mall.Only thing I collect besides comics is full-size statues (why do people keep cutting the arms and legs off of superheroes with those stupid BUSTS?!??! ). I don't really "collect" them in the sense that there's any kind of completionism to the ones I buy; if they look cool, I buy them. I'm so glad Bowen regained the Marvel license!!! Diamond was really squandering it compared to what Bowen is able to produce.

I have a list of approximately 15 to 20 people who have received restored books from comic-keys. It sounds like there are a few more to add now, including Tomega and that guy on the ebay boards... I'm also interested in hearing stories from people who have bought unrestored books from comic-keys. I have yet to meet someone who hasn't received a restored book...

Would have been a more convincing article if he wasn't primarily defending and openly hyping a book in his own inventory, but other than that, it was pretty good. Could the post below from Metropolis have directly led to Mark's article? http://boards.collectors-society.com/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=gold&Number=346891

Wonder why you can't renew anymore? Why should Disney lose Mickey Mouse?

It was every 28 years until 1978...after that it became 75 years for companies and the life of the author plus 20 years for individuals with no renewal possible. The site I linked to earlier says that the change applies retroactively to older copyrights, although I think it didn't apply back in 1978; I'm not sure when it became retroactive. I'm sure Marvel and DC were renewing their copyrights every 28 years, so all of their books would still be in the collection. However, if "Spark Publications" was out of business, their books might have been tossed and this would explain why the LoC's collection isn't a more complete one. One thing to remember is a good percentage of the copyright items the LoC holds are probably junk--corporate training manuals and [!@#%^&^] like that which do nothing but eat up space once the copyright is gone and they're no longer useful. They can't hold onto all that junk indefinitely.

If you mean about the business behind the art world, yes, I can be that naive...I typically could care less. I'm interested in copyright as it relates to art, not business, so my characterization was taken from how they sold the bill to the public when it went into effect. We all appreciate your insightful commentary about the politics behind the change , but we could do without the egotism.

You should if you want to have a decent chance of winning if you sue someone who rips you off...but I'm sure sometimes publishers forget or get lazy and don't send a title in some months. You don't actually have to register with the LoC to put a copyright notice on your original work of art, it just strengthens your position if you ever have to take action to prevent people from ripping you off. As for how it got out...I just looked at that web site I linked to, and copyrights taken out by companies last 95 years from the publish date. If memory serves, copyrights have been extended a few times over the years. At one point it was the life of the author + 20 years, and Sonny Bono pushed to get copyrights extended so the heirs or benefactors of an artist could benefit from the work long after the artist's death. However, the web site says that copyrights used to only last 28 years before 1978, at which time they could be renewed. Note that this book is published by "Spark Publications." Twenty-eight years from the publish date of ~1946 would be 1974. Was Spark Publications still around by 1974? I've never heard of them. Does the copyright office keep items FOREVER if a copyright expires? I bet they don't--I suspect this book was disposed of. But I could easily be wrong; I wonder if they destroy them, give them away, or whether the disposal process is even defined? I don't know for sure they dispose of old stuff, but since it only costs 5 bucks or so to register a copyright, I can't see them spending too much money storing tons and tons of expired copyrights.

Far as I know it's done for every single issue of every single periodical in existence. If someone rips you off by reprinting your publication, the copyright office compares the reprint to the copy you sent with the copyright registration. So no, it's not special--every single comic title and issue is potentially in the LoC. Does every one get sent? Maybe not, but I would assume the vast majority do.

The supplementary stamp tells the tale--it's a copyright-clinching copy. The publisher sent this to the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress prior to it hitting the stands. I wonder how it got out of the LoC? I assume they ditch the sample copy once the copyright expires.

Luckily, Matt Nelson has shared most of this information with the world in his CBM article published a number of years back, and he's planning on sharing it all in the book he's working on. You can read his old article here: http://comicrestoration.freeservers.com/article1.htm Up until America entered World War 2, Tom Reilly bought comics from the stands himself, but after he went off to war, the local store he bought them from were putting them aside and his parents would go buy the saved issues from time to time. The store owner probably kept saving them after his death in 1945 because I'm sure he wasn't informed right away, but how much longer, I've never heard defined. What year were the books from that you say were published after his death?

Now that I think about it, he definitely meant that the preservation is just one factor in helping to identify San Francisco or Curator. Were the SF books marked? I can't remember. With Curator, and a bunch of other Silver pedigrees, I'd imagine it's more provenance documentation than anything else.

Haspel told me he thought he could identify them...he said they have more gloss, whiter pages, and nicer colors than he's ever seen on any other Silver age books. He said he can identify San Franciscos in almost exactly the same way--they exhibit a higher degree of preservation than any other pedigree. I dunno, though...he knows a lot more than I do, but I can't imagine you wouldn't mis-identify some books using that technique. No list as of yet--not to say it's impossible to compile one with a bunch of work. The original owner consigned them to a shop in her hometown and the shop sold most of the comics off before Hauser got to them...the ones Hauser got hadn't been given over to the shop yet for consignment. I think the idea of the pedigree designation only came a few years later after Hauser and/or Brulato submitted theirs to CGC.

No markings, so you can't, that's why we'll never know what the collection was like in its entirety. You can guess its from the same collection based on preservation, but that seems like an unreliable way to do it.

I hear Pacific Coast is a totally complete run of Silver Age with all books from all publishers present, which is why it's often called the "Mile High of the Silver Age".

I haven't seen Curator described anywhere on the web except in these forums, so I doubt there's a link to anything other than another thread around here. Most of the copies that are known to be Curators were sold to one person by John Hauser in the late 1990s, but that one person doesn't own most of the comics that were actually in the collection because they were sold off with no records kept before Hauser got to them. The one collector owns a bunch of the Marvels, but a famous comic book creator owns the FF 2 to 100 and he wishes to remain nameless so people don't bug him to buy the books. Hauser believes the collection was both Marvels and DCs, but he only got some of the Marvels. The curator actually owned complete runs all the way up to the modern age, some of which Hauser still has--you might still be able to buy those now if you asked him because he was just auctioning off his remaining Curator Daredevils a few months ago. He tried to get CGC to pedigree titles such as Marvel Team-Up, but they wouldn't give the designation to books that new--something they also refused to do for parts of the Western Penn collection. It's remotely possible that Curator rivals Pacific Coast in terms of completeness and quality, but we'll probably never know for sure.

Spine roll is caused by folding back the cover and interior pages. Everybody's seen people do this; it's the way a lot of people read magazines in such a way that they can hold it by using only one hand. It's called a "roll" because the back half of the book gets bent in such a way that it "rolls" over to where the spine used to be when the book was brand new. A lot of low grade books are like this, with the whiteness on the back cover heavily visible on the left side (and I don't mean from printing miswraps). I know what you mean about the spine curving that occurs from comics being in a stack for too long...I personally call that a "spine curl" just to distinguish it from a spine roll. Spine curl is an almost nonexistent danger in my experience once comics are bagged and boarded. When you stack up a bunch of unbagged comics, you can see the side of the stack where the folded edges are sitting visibly higher than the side where the reading edge is, but in my stacks of bagged/boarded comics, they tend to lie flat. You can't even stack unboarded comics very high because the stack tips due to the raised spines, but I can stack boarded comics quite easily.

Ah, you're probably right, the earliest Overstreet I have is #3 and it shows Action 1 at $1000 so it makes sense they were lower in #1 and #2. That's quite a big jump over a year or two though...from $300 to $1000 in two years. Either the hobby was changing at an extremely rapid pace then, or he underestimated their value in the first guide.

I believe the Gold keys were listed over $1000 in the first Overstreet guide back in 1970, so they've been highly desirable for more than a decade. I figure there's got to be a close parallel to comics out there that have been bandied about for more than just the 20th century; tulip bulbs, Internet stocks, or land sound too different from comics to be a good comparison. They're not entertainment-related cultural items. Art comes to mind, but since it's only the originals that sell for much, they're not a good direct comparison since comics have multiple copies. Stamps, and possibly first-edition novels, might be a good comparison. Wonder how much first editions from the literary greats from previous centuries sell today...I think I should spend some time browsing the Christie's and Sotheby's auction results. Maybe old Civil War-era statuettes of Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis exist out there and are highly prized by some people out there. E-Bay is probably a good place to do this kind of research on how much people are still willing to pay for useless [!@#%^&^] from centuries past. There must be cultural items from the past that commanded a premium during their time that have been forgotten by most people today...but since they've been mostly forgotten...probably none of us know what those items were! Wonder who you could ask that would remember something like that.

Definitely a good thought that made me think about what I meant. There's a huge difference between losing $49 when a $50 book goes back down to $1 and losing $960 when a $1000 book goes back down to $40. Even a little kid can afford to take a $49 hit, but only the affluent can claim to not care about a $960 loss. I wonder whether some of the early Golden age comics which are uncommon but haven't been featured in any kind of media for a long time will eventually lose their value in 30-40 years once the people who grew up with them have passed on. I'm sure there must be period pieces that have gone up and then back down in the art world that could be comparable to this.

Does anyone know of specific examples in any collectibles field (painted art, statuary, stamps, coins, cards, etc) where a massive loss of value occurred comparable to a drop from $1000 to $40? I'm only familiar with comics myself and can't think of such a drop in their history to this point, but I'm sure there are examples of this in the more long-established fields. I'm sure there are lots of examples of this in the art market; anybody know of any specific drops?

Couldn't agree more with this; I've had this idea in my "about me" ebay page for about two years. It might be 10 years, or it might be 15-20 years, but eventually, standards will tighten a bit and sellers will be reslabbing their 9.2 to 9.6 books. Since I've been buying with the idea I'll keep most of my books for a decade or more, this is why I don't pay the huge multiples for just any 9.4 to 9.8 book...it's gotta be an exceptional copy in EVERY way before I'll do it, with all "eye appeal" defects that CGC barely downgrades for factored in. I figure that if I hold books to higher standards than the general industry does at this point in time, I've got a better chance of my books being worth the same amount or more once the tigher grading in the future hits. How many people who bought books a decade or two ago thought they had NM books only to have CGC tell them they're really VFs? Too many; I don't want to be in the same situation as those unlucky people once the next generation of grading hits. One of the changes I'd love to see is greater grading consistency. I've said this several times before--the 25-notch scale is too ambitious if even the pro graders have a margin of error of 1 to 2 nothces on that scale. The standards have to be more well-defined, and grading on the 25-notch scale has to become a consistently repeatable process. Somebody asked whether CGC has been ISO-certified earlier. I assume from their revenues the answer is 99.99% likely to be no, but still, they do need written, documented internal guidelines to make sure all the graders grade the same way. They may have this, but they may not; I haven't heard them say anywhere that they do. And based upon some of the inconsistency I've seen, they must not have them, unless they've been changing those guidelines and I saw one book with a defect before the standards were changed and another after the change. If the back-issue industry ever gets consistent on the 25-notch scale, or if the standards actually get so good that we go back to the 100-point scale Overstreet proposed in the early 90s that we eventually realized was too ambitious, then without a doubt, these early CGC books will be looked at as a risk and reslabbing will have to occur to have a shot at getting fair market value or better in the future.

hehe, you don't have to validate yourself...you're pretty much like the rest of us. Most of us would resubmit a book we thought was undergraded if we were gonna sell it. It's just that one statement you're having to validate, that there are collectors resubmitting just to validate themselves or the book. They're out there, yeah, but I can't imagine that they amount to any more than 10% of resubmissions, 20% at most. Heritage's resubmissions alone likely dwarf collectors who resubmit books they know they're going to keep. I can see resubmitting a few times to validate your grading, but once you knew you and CGC were on par, future resubmits would likely be to maximize value. Collectors who submit their own books they have no intention of selling are in the minority, and amongst those, people who resubmit books they're going to keep are lesser still.

Do you still own any of those 3 books you resubmitted? If not, it sounds like you're fooling yourself a little. The vast majority of the time, people resubmit to increase the value of the book. If you're gonna keep it, it's the same book no matter what the label says. As a pure collector who has very few books I want to sell, the restoration check matters, but the number on the label doesn't matter much. I have a few 9.0s I bet would get 9.2 or 9.4 upon resubmission, but since I'm keeping them, no need to. If I ever get better copies I might resubmit, but until then, why would I? That's where most of the resubmission thinking comes even amongst collectors; they resubmit on books they think they're gonna keep to maximize profit in case they decide to flip or trade once they get a better copy. If you're confident in your grading, then there's no reason to resubmit.