CentaurMan

Way too young. Very sad. I'm glad he was able to enjoy his last months with friends and family.

Very sorry to hear of his passing. An absolute giant of a collector and a man.

Oh wow, Rick, just now seeing all of this, going to the boards to see whose collection this is. My heart aches for you, buddy. I don't "need" those books in CC, per se, but I'll do my part to make sure the loss of one Centaur under-bidder won't lead to a profound revaluation. Even forgetting the horrible circumstances for a moment, your accomplishment in assembling these books deserves full compensation. Please let me know when/if you'll be in Chicago for the con this summer.

rarehhighgrade's quote "He was the most kind, generous and thoughtful person I ever had the pleasure of doing business with" is beautifully said and 100% accurate. I haven't brought myself to tell my daughters yet. They're going to be so sad. Every year when they dressed up at the Chicago con, they did it partially so show off to him & the entire Verzyl clan, who would take pictures and ooh & aah over them. They even would send us framed pics afterwards. He was a genius in many ways, but he was an even better person. We miss you, John.

The world was a better place with John Verzyl in it. My wife and daughters loved the man. He was so wonderful to them, whenever he visited Chicago, and even sent them Christmas gifts knowing their interests. We love you, John.

Fantastic to check in on this thread. Wonderful books! And a big thank you to Gator and buttock and all the other boardies who helped me knock the publisher out. I kinda don't know what to do with myself now that it's finished.

I don't need it and am sitting this bidding out. My copy is a restored 1.0 (amateur), brutal technical condition but reasonably presentable, so I'm not going to go nuts paying for the upgrade. I consider this one of the true toughest Centaurs, harder than the Keen Komics #1.

Once upon a time I would've called it possibly the rarest Centaur, based on the fact that Jon Berk said it to be true. But since then I've seen four copies for sale, including this one, plus the one Jon owns, plus a copy in a bound volume, which is more than I can say for a dozen other Centaurs that virtually seem not to exist. So I'm saying "top 15 rare". Which, for Centaurs, is still pretty much impossible.

Well, with those rather agressive BIN prices for raw books that appears to be bordering on the low-grade side, it almost makes the Heritage prices look like a bargin. Especially for the Keen Comics with a BIN price of $2,500. That Keen Comics is crazy rare, definitely one of the 15 toughest Centaurs. But to find it in that condition? Unheard of. It's a large oversize book and is usually totally beat up. I think it sold for a fair price.

If you want to talk 1) rarely seen and 2) great color scheme take a look at this one. It's striking for how they decided to make the logo area transparent instead of a solid banner of color, like they did in virtually all their other books back then.

Ha!! I just JUST pulled my scan of that book because it fit the theme. Not as nice looking as yours, though. Here's another, from the same era:

Hmmm, best color design on a Centaur cover.... That Funny Pages #40 might be the winner. There are a few other choices, though, I think. One came just two issues earlier:

I'll keep it going with one more (thanks, buttock!), the equally if not more tough 3rd-to-last issue. I love the colors in this one.

And the much tougher 2nd-to-last issue:

The final issue:

This one's about as tough as they come: Little Giant Detective Funnies #4

Boy, that's very cool. Excellent group!!!

If I'm not mistaken, that other book is the Cocomalt comic.

For kicks, someone do this exercise for Action 1-50. You'll see some interesting things pop out, like the toughness of #49 & #46 vs the easiness of #30 & #47, for instance. Really fun to have a full notebook of thousands of books like this. You can set eBay screens for the tough stuff, rejigger your bartering, cull your collection, etc., without being a multi-decade collecting expert on the sub-series on which you're compiling data. Remember, it's not only ok to do this across titles and publishers, it's encouraged. That's how to get your sample size large enough to matter. What the difference in scarcity between Silver Streak #1, Wonder Comics (1939) #1, and King Comics #1? You can figure it out, with thousands of different issues in your spreadsheet. Excel will do all the calculations for you if you know the formulas, so you don't have to redo the rankings by hand after entering another hundred books. Stick to unrestored 2.0 as your pricing grade, as you're much more likely to find that data, and as the pricing curve in higher grades accelerates similarly on all but a few books.

If "most desired" amongst the collecting community isn't the same as "highest priced", then prices are fixing to change soon. Price will always properly sort based on desire, given enough time. Now, it's got to be a broad-based group of collectors to permanently move price. Just because we experts don't like 'Tec 38 doesn't mean it isn't highly desired amongst a broad group of collectors.

Yeah, this list is no substitute for the knowledge of an expert who knows a market really well. But if you're getting into collecting a new title, or want to spot check the true scarcity of all Gerber 8's, or anything like that, it's a very easy way to get a hugely valuable piece of info, and all the data points you need (value in unrestored 2.0, number of copies on the census) are available readily. My Windex scarcity rankings have another factor which is harder to quickly collect (basically, a census of copies sold in public venues or currently available in inventory lists), but it's built on this principle. I'm never going to have time to complete it, so I figured I might as well publish the foundation of the methodology.

But you MUST always remember that the more valuable a book is, the more likely it will be slabbed. Every single time, that law holds true. So let's pretend you had no idea about the scarcity of a run, but you know what the run is worth in unrestored 2.0 (a constant grade). For 'Tec 27-38, you'd expect the order of "most slabbed" to "least slabbed" to be: 1. 27 2. 29 3. 31 4. 33 5. 38 6. 35 7. 28 8. 37 9. 36 10. 32 11. 30 12. 34 (Please note that I'm not a pre-Robin Tec pricing expert. Adjust that list as you'd see fit, for value of books in unrestored 2.0). Your order of least to most slabbed: 1. 28 2. 32 3. 30 4. 37 5. 35 6. 34 7. 36 8. 29 9. 27 10. 31 11. 33 12. 38 If my economic rule of scarcity held true, #1 on the first list would be #12 on the second list, #2 on the first list would be #11 on the second list, etc., so that every book had a "sum rank" of 13. In reality, here are the sum ranks: 27=10 28=8 29=10 30=14 31=13 32=12 33=15 34=18 35=11 36=16 37=12 38=17 Any number below 13 is scarcer than economics would've predicted, while any number above it is more common. So for this run, the scarcity is: 28=rarest 27 29 35 32 37 31 30 33 36 38 34=easiest Unfortunately, doing this for a run of 12 books doesn't properly capture the range of the economics. Some of these books are very similar in value, while others are outliers. Rank-ordering them is linear and doesn't capture this dynamic. However, if you had hundreds of books, thousands even, across publishers, years, genres, whatever, and you knew what they were all worth in unrestored 2.0, you could rank them accordingly on value, figure out the correct sum rank, and compare it to actual copies on the census. You'd have a HIGHLY accurate scarcity guide at that point, way more accurate than Gerber.

Yeah, it's reprinted in its entirety in The DC Comics Rarities Archives, Vol. 1. Amazon link

I'm not going to argue with Batman #1's first place slot, thanks in large part to the significance of the characters it introduced, but in terms of enjoyability, a very good underrated book (cover-to-cover) in my mind is the 1939 NY World's Fair. I have heard others speak fondly of it but I've never held one. What makes it special to you? Every story is actually written with the Fair in mind. Clark & Lois are covering the Fair as reporters when Lois gets kidnapped, Slam Bradley breaks up a gang of crooks on the NY fairgrounds, Zatara's at the Fair, hell, even Bob Kane's Ginger Snap has a humorous adventure at the Fair. The book has a really nice flow to it, it seems like a great slice of life from that time period, plus you get the first ever Sandman story by Gardner Fox and poor Bert Christman. It's a great read, and a reasonably significant book. Yeah, it's cold as ice in the marketplace, but I'm a fan.