DougC

Over the years I have picked up a couple copies of Adventure Comics #346

5 hours ago, Lucky Baru said:

The subject matter of his "jokes", if you can refer to them as that, is something that Disney's can't be associated with.  Their target audience is children.  The dude had to go.  To not realize that is strange.  To lay the blame at Disney's or society's feet is even stranger.  The guy did it to himself.

If Disney could not be associated with Gunn due to his statements then they would not have hired him in 2012.  All of this was fully known when it happened and has been in the open public for a decade now. Society at large also knew about this and did not care until the outrage mob needed a target one day prior to SDCC for them sweet click duckets.

Regardless of the subject matter in the tweets (which is disgusting) and him being a self described attention seeking edge lord at the time (with Lloyd Kaufmen) it is complete hypocrisy on the part of Disney.  Gunn went on an apology tour, deleted tweets, and so forth back in mid 2012 (when rumors of his hiring were hot) and three months later was officially hired on to helm GotG, then in December of that year even more from his blog had to be taken down for the same reasons.  Gunn was vetted and hired by Disney, this was not a secret the only thing that has changed is the all or nothing society outlook and outrage culture.

Monsterpalooza is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, unfortunately I will be in portland the weekend of the 13th and will not be able to attend.  I do not need a CGC facilitator I just need someone who is attending and has the extra time to get a poster (or two depending how the guest list shakes out) signed.  Obviously I will pay all fees and compensate you for your time.

New DH one shot from the Legacy line

 I have never heard of an ashcan for the EE#1, Eternity was a pretty small house back in 1991 and didn't throw out a lot of gimmicks, Chaos on the other hand sold their version of 90's ashcans for the new series in 94/95 though.  This sounds more like a local shop story for a "custom" book but the early 90's was something of a wild west with publishers so anything is possible but I would advise a healthy dose of skepticism. 

Pictures would help alot as well as this just sounds like someone cut the binding off and stapled it back together.

Do not go into buying storage units if you do not have a way to offload the items.  Out of the entire unit you are likely to only find two to three things of actual value the rest is junk.  My advice is to set-up an account with Goodwill fill out the donation forms and double print them, set up a drop off time so the actual store manager can stamp/sign both copies (they keep one, you keep one) and hand 10k worth of on paper donations to your accountant which will be knocked down to what ever seems appropriate.  Being that you are claiming Goodwill value instead of your paid value this could be seen as "alternatively juridical" dependent on your perception, discuss with your accountant as needed.

14 hours ago, Real Frantic One said:

They have stated on their Facebook page that CGC will be there.

They must have payed a good price but that does simplify things since I can do them myself now.

St. Louis (MightyCon) Comic Con June 17th-18th

http://www.stlouiscomiccon.com/

Will anyone be attending this as a facilitator/yellow slab handler?  The guest list is short but the have:

Chris Claremont

James O'barr

Balke

I have some books I was going to send off for Claremont but if I can get them done locally in person I would prefer it.

The only thing I see wrong with this is the price.

3 hours ago, Gatchaman said:

They should be charging him with murder.

He will get some type of manslaughter at worse, he might get sentenced to 5 years and be out in 3 which is a complete shame

IIRC, if you are the artist and at the convention CGC is taking books at you can walk up to the table and fill out the form.  If you are mailing in the book you have to fill out the artists form (circa 2 years ago), CGC has changed the program and at one point you needed minimum for mail-ins.

If the book is for someone else you just have to accompany them to the CGC booth, I did this for a sketch 3 years ago at St Louis Comic-con (not WW).

Edit:  I really hate the boards and still waiting for accounts to merged.

Ah Wizard World, when you can't make money off of a celebrity who has passed you can do the next best thing:

I thought this was a joke at first but you lucky people in the Minneapolis area can now pay for a VIP pass to see Carrie Fishers dog!

There certainly was a lot of space to stretch your legs and plenty of empty tables and chairs if you needed to find a place to sit.  This was going to be a subpar show but I didn't expect to be able to walk the floor in 10min, though I was surprised by the number of comic selling vendors!  Harley is always a standout with a nice range of golden age books but a vendor named Kristina's Comics (not sure about name) had a nice mix of silver and slabs for this area and were priced below market (they always had alot of traffic and sales).  I ended up spending a large portion of time bothering shooting the breeze at Stuart Saygers booth as it is rare to find another Millie/Decarlo/Goldberg fan so I make it a point to stop by any convention he is at.

This is the first Wizard convention I've been to since they really fell on hard times the end of last year but the Celebrity area was in the middle of the convention floor and from a design perspective gave the impression they were spreading it out to take up space rather than showcasing talent.  There was probably about 25% of the floor space sitting empty with an additional 10% of empty booths (I was only there saturday).

With all of the above stated, the general crowd atmosphere seemed pretty good though, I would be very interested to hear the vendor and artist reaction.  I believe most of the vendors will do ok (not loose money) any artist in attendance had to be worried in my opinion.

The only money I ended up spending was at the above Kristina's Comics:

• X-Men V2 9.8 #205 (for the registry)
• X-men V2 9.8 #4 (newsstand)
• Flash #113 in Fine

All for very good and very sub market/GPA prices!

I will be there for at least one of the days, but this is looking worse than last year.  I just don't see how anyone setting up is going to make their money back let alone eek out a profit.

As someone who does a lot of contract and consulting work every year I receive 1099's after I have filed my taxes (as late as June! despite the law).  After 15 years of this I stopped stressing about it and simply file them unreported with the rest of the tax info in case one day I get selected for an audit.  I am not making light of properly doing your taxes as that would be a legal concern, but it is what it is.

Since X-cutioner's Song has been mentioned here are some of my favorites from the 90s

• Operation: Galactic Storm
• Rise of the Midnight Suns
• Siege of Darkness
• Age of Apocalypse

All of these can be found in the cheap bins for readers and some have cheap TPBs.

CGC has become very restrictive on sketch ops and only handful of people are even allowed to post them currently, this in addition to most artists skyrocketing pricing for blanks (to the price point of what their 11x17 commission was) and the diminishing returns on the actual art.  What has dis-waded a lot of potential buyers is the entire lack of value for an unknown artist, I think 40 is fair depending on what the art looks like but in no way do I expect to be able to sell it at a future point.  If I commission or purchase a sketch cover, I do so with the complete understanding that if I am lucky I will be able to sell it for 50% of what I bought it for.

I have sketch covers in CGC holders that I can not even give away at this point.  Personally last year I switched from sketch covers to getting sketches done in a sketch book as it was becoming to much hassle and money dealing with CGC and facilitators, this year I will be doing the same.  

Well my account didn't merge properly which is not good and the forums are in desperate need of a skin instead of the all white everything

This was going to happen eventually with the parties involved and how they choose to operate. It is in everyone's best interest that this came to light with a police report instead of a personal interaction that would have devolved into he said/she said.

This is only my opinion and based on my personal interactions.

Didn't DJS Adventures have something like this called the Showcase Sealer back in 92?

Found a new update for this set.

Set Type: X-Men #1-#275 (1991) Including Variants

X-Men Legacy #246 (Second Print)

Certification #1052471021

I will add to this from my experience.

I live in a very small town of 9k people the closest place to buy anything comic related is over an hour away. When asked for advice on opening a comic only focused shop here I strongly advised against it. Last year a couple a gave the advice to opened their coffee shop/comic store on main street in the town square between a bar and restaurant. As of today they are drowning in debt with only the coffee shop keeping them afloat. The actual building they are in is an amazing three story brick store front with the coffee shop on the first floor, comic shop on the second, and the third is currently inventory storage.

The coffee shop is great and caters to a robust and returning customer base. Given the low overhead for product it prints money. The comic shop is a sea of new manufactured pop culture that is a cancer.

I have been asked and given advice over this year on why it seems to be failing and here is the short of it.

• Comics are too expensive!
  New single issues are $3-$5 cover price and out of the range of anyone just looking to get into them.
  
• Trades where priced to high.
  While the shop stocked hundreds of trades they were priced at 90% of cover when anyone can go on amazon and pick most up for half that.
  
• They were buying to many "toys"
  From Q-Figs, Pop Vinyls and Retro-Action Figures that look pretty but never sold and cost to much.
  
• Nothing was older than the day they opened the shop
  Anything that could be confused for "vintage" was of the newly manufactured retro style
  
• The Customer base was either never defined or a targeted base was never realized
  Imagine if Hot Topic was a comic store, it has a lot of pretty stuff but after returning to the store a couple times it all look the same.
  
• The market was to small for the business.
  There just is not the foot traffic or inventory turnover for it to be a destination type store
  

My best advice to him was to shrink the amount of comic material and branch into MtG and RPGs which is very popular in the area. A local pawn shop had about 1200sqf of empty space they put tables in and rented them out for gaming (and later began selling cards/books). This was very successful to the point where it became the business focus over the pawn shop. The owner passed a couple years ago during a tornado and the shop was never reopened (either portion) so there was an obvious hole to fill. Unfortunately this was deemed as undesirable and "not comic related" so out of the question.

Overall this was a dream that was never thought out properly. All of the above issues are still relevant today with the same results. At this point I hope the comic portion closes and they focus on coffee or the entire business will go under.