fantastic_four

It didn't really surprise me because Yao has been outspoken about his love for his country since he first came to the league. He never applied for American citizenship even though he probably could have easily gotten it, always represented his country in the Olympics, frequently went home during the off-season and returned when he retired, he's the former owner of the Shanghai Sharks, and he's the current head of the Chinese Basketball Association. I know before he entered the league China announced they would be taking half of his NBA salary if he wanted to retain his citizenship, but I never heard if that actually happened and have never been able to find info about it. Yao did publicly comment that he was fine paying his country what he owed them so it was clear he didn't view it as an issue. He's also struck me as one of millions of examples of how Chinese Communism is a farce--how does he retain his millions in a Communist country where everything is supposed to be shared with his country? I'd really love to watch a 10-hour documentary on how Communism in China works these days, because it's so mixed up with capitalism that I can't tell why they even still retain it since it's so distant from Marx's Communist ideal. Anyway, back to the topic. Two things will surprise me--if Eternals gets shown in China, and if Shang-Chi DOESN'T get shown. Disney certainly knew before they even greenlit the film that being shown in China would be challenging, and from what I can tell they have structured the film to be entirely respectful to Chinese culture in every way that the Fu Manchu stereotype wasn't. I would also be surprised if they didn't talk to someone in the Chinese government about the likelihood of the film being shown there before they greenlit it. Were they told up front it wouldn't get in, or were they led to believe it would?

If by that you mean he needs to encourage the Chinese government to launch their nukes at Houston, then I think he's probably done that already. He was reportedly furious at Morey for the tweet. https://www.rappler.com/sports/nba/yao-ming-extremely-hot-china-crisis

I recall a lull when COVID hit...? Perhaps my memory is flawed.... I implied there was a modest surge last year "when Covid started," but I mis-spoke--I don't think it was during the first half of 2020 when the pandemic started, it was whenever there was a stock market dip later in the year. When the market tanked briefly I looked at comic prices a few weeks later and they were up, but not drastically, more like 20% or so from earlier in the year. And I only looked at the Silver Marvel stuff I own, so it may not have been reflected in the market as a whole.

I half feel the same way which is why I've been calling it Gamestop-y. It seems quite senseless.

This is pretty much the rule in a recession and the same pattern happened during recessions in 2002, 2008, and last year when Covid started to a lesser extent. But we're not in a recession, the stock market is surging, too! So I don't know what to make of these rising waters on all fronts, at all.

I'll be shocked if they DO let Eternals in. Once any foreigner bad-mouths the Chinese government publicly in any way that person is usually banned from China indefinitely. A recent example is Daryl Morey, the former General Manager of the NBA Houston Rockets. In 2019 he tweeted this: But deleted it quickly afterwards. Doesn't matter to China that he deleted it--China now refuses to air Houston Rockets games in China. Morey then quit the Rockets in 2020 by choice and went to the Philadelphia 76ers, so China banned their games, too. Even after Morey left China has continued to ban Rockets games, presumably because the team didn't make amends by firing Morey.

But if these 2010 sales were auctions, doesn't that mean there was at least one other bidder? It does indeed, but presumably most of the books this guy went for never went to insane levels. Many of us going for top-Census Silver Age Marvels at the time knew that if a new top-Census book was hitting the market for the first time in a year or so that this guy was DEFINITELY going for it, so I wondered if people were shilling him up. The one that blew me away because I also wanted it was a 9.6 copy of FF #26--it went for $24,200 in June 2009. The sale is still visible in GPA; I think it sold on PedigreeComics.com but I forget. The high before that was $5K, and the high since then has been $9500. A copy sold this year for $4440, so that's one of many examples where this deep pocket set records that may NEVER be eclipsed, or at least aren't likely to for quite a while. I really can't imagine any realistic situation that explains that sale or many others in that time period other than pure, premeditated shilling given that his bidding pattern was predictable.

Any person who outright gives or wills any item or money to any other person that's less than $11.7 million (that's the 2021 limit, more info here) doesn't owe any taxes at all. That's a lifetime limit for any one person giving anything to any other one person. I linked the history of that limit a few posts back going back to 1916. But if I extend your example of the painting going from 1 million to 20 million the example works...sort of. I still don't get why non-liquid assets would be taxed at the time of the gift/inheritance because as you note it would force sale. Why wouldn't that tax only apply at the time it's sold? That way heirs or gift beneficiaries aren't forced to liquidate all of a sudden, yet the taxes are still owed at some point when or if it does happen. Taxing non-liquid assets at the time of receipt DEFINITELY seems terrible and something I don't understand at all if it's true.

Yes. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stepupinbasis.asp Cool, thanks for the info! I was particularly wondering if stepping up in basis only worked for inheritance as opposed to gifts. The untaxed lifetime dollar limit on both inheritance and gifts is shared, so it would make sense if stepping up in basis applied to both--but the answer I found is that you can only step up in basis when inheriting, not when someone gives you something.

The first one had cheesy dialogue, too, and this one seems about the same. First one had 29% Rotten Tomatoes so this one seems roughly on track for that. I'm not expecting much better as long as Sony is doing these, so as long as the symbiote effects are top-notch I'm fine with it. I'm unfamiliar with Shriek...where was she in the trailer?

I thought that was already accounted for by the estate/gift tax exemptions. Here's a link to the historical limits through 2014: https://taxfoundation.org/federal-estate-and-gift-tax-rates-exemptions-and-exclusions-1916-2014/ My understanding is also that in 2016 that was boosted from around $5 million to around $11 million. I'm also unclear on why the increase in value of a business over time and the point of time you start from would matter before it's sold to someone else, i.e. until you actually do choose to carve it up. The loophole remains the same--if someone dies today and their heir sells the business tomorrow, do they really owe no tax on the sale since presumably they're worth about the same over a short time period, whereas had their benefactor sold the business the day before they died they'd owe a lot?

That may no longer be the case. Is that speculation or have you heard something specific? I had never heard this before. Seems like it would be a very common issue, so I'm surprised if it's a loophole in tax code. I know my dad has a bunch of baseball cards he bought as a kid in the 1950s including several of the greats from that era, so it's something I may have to learn the specifics of when I eventually get those. I also wonder if it is a loophole is it only one for collectibles or is it a loophole for anything of value? I can't imagine they overlooked this for stocks.

I can see it being a rude awakening to most, and I'm sure most people won't know what to do. They probably also won't know which sales in PayPal match up to which items, although some may type a note tying the sale to an item. If they didn't, and they don't even remember what they sold...sucks to be them! Although the odds of an audit for a few dozen transactions from a garage sale is pretty low, and for those who actively try to avoid that any accountant should be able to help them figure it out without much work. The fundamental idea is easy as pie--if you make money, you owe taxes. There are very few exceptions to that idea. All of the cries of tyranny are bizarre given that this is how it has been for virtually everyone alive today aside from a shrinking handful of centenarians.

Most garage sales are selling EVERYTHING at a loss, i.e. less than they paid for it. Very little in those would even qualify for taxes. And for the things that do sell for more than was originally paid--well, if people don't realize the government taxes all income then I don't know what to tell them aside from ignorance of the law is no excuse. At a typical garage sale so many of the things sold are at a loss that they eclipse anything sold that appreciates so aside from collectibles it's uncommon that garage sales would end up even requiring taxes.

A 9.8 copy of that sold the same day on eBay for $4800 on a buy-it-now. There's also a 9.8 copy on eBay right now currently at $6350, although that one is signed by McFarlane.

Was that the eBay buyer who had the username: pastimperfekt? If so, I remember him buying every high-grade Marvel slab in sight. He was mentioned here more than a few times in the past, circa. 2007-2008. Wonder what ever happened to him - did he run out of money? The guy I'm referring to started buying in 2010, and I never identified any eBay account at the time. I really only watch Silver and Bronze Age Marvel prices, and 2010 was specifically the only year I saw him tearing up that market.

eBay has this new feature where they randomly add ‘allow offers’ to people’s listings even if they originally set it to no offers. Might be what happened with this seller. Yea I saw that a few months ago, but more recently I've had stuff up for 2+ months and the offers aren't getting automatically added, so I'm thinking they backed that out. What's also likely is that they never turned off the allow offers feature. Ebay has gotten sneaky about that by turning it on by default and hiding it down below a section of auction options that you have to click to expand. I assume most sellers either don't know it's there or sometimes forget to turn it off.

You should absolutely hold off on watching Bad Batch until after you finish Clone Wars. He's got roughly 133 episodes and 50 hours of catching up to do spread across some amount of time that for most people is likely to be 6+ months. Holding off a year or more might be a bit much. I'm in a similar boat except that I'm midway through season 4, but I only get enough free time to watch about one episode every week or two. So I wouldn't be able to watch for a few years at that rate. Some of the character arcs might get slightly spoiled, but the concept of the show doesn't sound like much of a spoiler, nor does how it fits into the Star Wars time continuity. We've been watching these films out of order all along, so what compelling bit about the Bad Batch clones gets ruined by watching this now as opposed to later? I mean, yea, ideally you'd watch Episodes I through III before IV through VI, but everyone born before 1990 did that without much issue at the time.

Some of the smaller buys could just be younger, more inexperienced vintage collectors spending some of the $1800 in stimulus checks they've gotten this year on comics, but that doesn't explain FF 48 going up to $10K to $20K for high grades. Usually these surges happen during recessions, but this time the surge in the comics market has coincided with the surge in the stock market. So I'm mostly still mystified. I should probably de-couple any MCU characters slated to appear prominently in phases 4 and 5 from the rest of the comics market. Those were rising before the current overall rise anyway, so the generally-rising waters are just causing those to surge even higher.

Back in 2010 we had one deep pocket setting records on almost every highest-graded Silver and Bronze Age Marvel. That person was putting in bids up to at least quadruple the most paid up to that point, but I don't think anyone ever knew just how high the bids were. In some cases prices were 10x what had been seen before. We do know that they were so outlandishly high that ComicLink contacted the bidder to make sure they didn't type extra numbers into their bid by accident, and the bidder (or their representative) said that it was an accurate bid and they just wanted to ensure they got the comic. Word at the time was that it was a well-known celebrity, which if true probably means someone else was bidding for them. I never heard anyone divulge who it was--my best guess was Samuel L. Jackson, but I have no actual evidence of that, it's just my best educated guess since he said around the same time in an interview that he's a comic collector, his heyday in the MCU was ramping up at the time, and he's easily rich enough so that dropping a few million on Silver and Bronze Age Marvels would be completely within his reach--but whoever it was they created very large outliers in sales data at the time. If that person was going for a book at auction and someone else bid the book up it would just go for a new record price because the bids being entered well in advance were so incredibly high. This time is clearly different. The deep pocket from 2010 would only bid on one copy of a book, and after that the next sale would be significantly lower. It was obvious that one guy was just building his collection at that time and paying insane prices to do it, so I knew you could just wait him out and go for the next copy. A few times a second very-high bidder would come in on a book to bid it up to a truly insane price that was triple or quintuple the previous high, but not often. This time we have what appears to be a set of people bidding on a variety of titles, ages, and grades who clearly lack all perspective of supply and demand for any given issue. In that way it reminds me of the lack of market savvy of the 2010 buyer, but this time it looks like a group of people who probably don't have millions to drop on comics, but they do have tens of thousands. It reminds me directly of almost the same phenomenon seen in the stock market that most famously went into inflating Gamestop's stock to insane new highs. I never fully understood that beyond the idea that it was some sort of semi-educated Robin Hood mentality at the time of saving companies that a relatively small group of buyers thought needed saving mixed in with a much larger group who were just following the hype. What's driving this surge in prices is unclear, but I describe it as "Gamestop-y" wondering if there are any similarities between these surges and the ones seen in the stock market since they started around the same time.

Can't believe the PS5 is still out of stock everywhere 6+ months after release. Anyone know how long the PS4 took to become easily available back when it first released? Is the new XBox also still unavailable?

Side note that's directly related to the topic--back around 2008 or 2009 I calculated total and annual return rates for every certified comic I owned, so I'm back here posting in Comics General because I figured after a decade it was way past time to do it again since I lost my previous MS Access query that did it to a computer crash. This time I've got my data and queries in the cloud so I shouldn't have to do this again other than to keep refreshing market values of what I own. I expected we might be in a bit of a bubble since collectibles ALWAYS go up during tough financial times, but since the market has been so good over the last six months or so I thought it may have ended--but apparently not. Not sure yet what to attribute it to aside from MCU Phase 4 and 5 movie hype. Back in 2008 my annual rate of return was 8.5%, just a bit below the 10% historical annual return rate of the stock market. Almost all of that is Silver and Bronze age FF and Spidey that I've also got up in registry sets that I haven't updated in a decade (because I haven't bought anything in a decade). Back then I didn't compute rate of return on keys only which I assume is well above 10%, but this time I will. I'm a title completionist so most of what I own doesn't really appreciate as much as people who focus on keys. I'm only on year 5 of serving a 20-year parenting sentence so increasing the collection isn't in my immediate future--particularly since I spend most of my free cash on action figures these days--but I was feeling irresponsible about keeping money tied up in comics so I'm long past due for a financial analysis.

Yea, X-Men isn't in the top five Silver books, definitely not. Those prices you're quoting for 3.0 and 5.0 copies are definitely bubbly and won't persist. I hadn't noticed those since I only look at high grade, and oddly this year there are multiple copies that have sold for around those same prices that are significantly higher-graded, so those sales definitely look to be outliers. X-Men has such a weird history since they're a team that didn't finally become popular until twelve years after they were introduced, and because of that I look at the Silver Age issues as a completely separate and inferior title and everything after 1975 as the main title. Had they come out of the gate with Wolverine then yea, it'd probably be #2 behind Amazing Fantasy 15, but since the 1960s issues only feature the B-list X-Men characters aside from Magneto and Xavier it just doesn't compare to other books from the era.

Counterpoint - I think X-Men 1 fits this list because it is ridiculously common vs. the other Silver Age keys of its era. Not as common as Daredevil 1, sure, but far more common than the likes of FF 1, TOS 39, Hulk 1, Showcase 4, AF 15, etc. CGC Census counts for a few Silver keys along with the later ones Rip listed: Showcase 4 - 522 total, 8 at 9.0 and above Amazing Fantasy 15 - 3433 total, 24 at 9.0 and above Hulk 1 - 1854 total, 20 at 9.0 and above Fantastic Four 1 - 2532 total, 17 at 9.0 and above Tales of Suspense 39 - 2374 total, 59 at 9.0 and above Amazing Spider-Man 1 - 4179 total, 45 at 9.0 and above X-Men 1 - 5236 total, 69 at 9.0 and above Fantastic Four 48 - 7102 total, 609 at 9.0 and above Giant-Size X-Men 1 - 10232 total, 2267 at 9.0 and above Marvel Previews 95 - 87 total, 57 at 9.0 and above The order of magnitude spread here is that Showcase 4 is at least 10x less available than the rest and FF 48 and GSX 1 are 10x more available than the rest. So while I agree that X-Men #1 is certainly a bit more available than the other Silver Marvel keys, it's not nearly as large as the jump to Bronze age comics, or in the case of FF 48 a Silver Age comic that is unusually singular in its high availability relative to other issues from the same era. X-Men #1 is definitely not so much more available than the other Silver keys that we should expect anything about it to pop, and it has risen steadily for decades about like most Silver keys have. What reason do we have to believe X-Men #1 would suddenly start decreasing when it hasn't before? It enjoyed a similar bump around 2000 when the first X-Men film came out, but I didn't note a drop at any point after that film bump. I bought my copy in 2000 myself almost entirely inspired by having seen the film, so I was riding that wave the entire time and took note of its surge, concordant levelling off, and subsequent gradual increase that most Silver keys experience over time. I don't know anything about Marvel Previews 95. Is that one known to be rare for a modern, or should we expect a flood of these to get certified over the next decade or two? Of all the issues listed above Marvel Previews 95 and FF 48 have seen the largest increases over the last few years, and we know why MP 95 has--because of the rise of Miles Morales. I'm EXTREMELY personally biased towards FF 48 as it's probably my single favorite comic book ever--or at least the entire 48 to 50 story arc is my favorite--but that issue hasn't seen the kind of increase we're seeing on it over the last few years in almost all of its history. And it's not because of low demand, historically it has been because of high supply. Does anyone have a feel for the jump? Is it almost entirely due to speculation of Galactus being the next big MCU bad we will build up to in the way the MCU built up to Thanos throughout the last decade? What I particularly don't entirely get about FF 48 is where the supply is. There has almost never been a time since CGC started when there aren't multiple 9.6 copies of that issue available, but supply has been down a bit since Disney bought Fox. Are more people just holding onto theirs waiting for full film hype to set in?