Brock

No, they're later issues from Gladstone (296) and Gemstone (329). Collected editions of the Life of Scrooge McDuck are starting to rise, too.

All the eBay copies of both were snatched up on Tuesday.

The US-only seller with all the high grade slabbed Whitmans is back at it... all his auctions seem to be starting at $9.99, and there's definitely many of the 8-12/1980 Whitmans again. https://www.ebay.ca/itm/115706734158

So if I’d said tree fiddy, I’d have been close?

Here's the latest addition to my collection, from a seller in Oregon. Believe it or not, this is the only copy on the census.

Just playing around... I told the Booster naysayers that there are a lot of Booster fans out there.

Told you.

They tried the same shtick over in the Copper Age forum, but there were too many Booster Gold fans there for it to work, so it migrated here. If a talking racoon and a monosyllabic tree can reach the heights of pop culture stardom, so can a morally dubious time traveler with a robot sidekick.

Rescued yesterday from a $1 bin...

Some of the stuff I collect is so scarce that it might be another decade before I see it again.

Wow! Those are spectacular copies!

One of the ways we know that this is not the case relates to evidence from the production process. In looking at Batman #307, for example (pictured below), we can see that the printing of Whitman editions appears to have taken place in the milddle of production, as books printed before and after the Whitmans exist as two distinct variants. In the spot where the Whitman logo was used to obscure the issue number of the regular edition, we can see that the removal of the logo has "damaged" or altered the colour on the printing plates in the latter part of the run. This is sometimes described as the "Blue Box" variant of this issue. It's mostly a curiosity, but it does tell us a lot about how and when Whitmans were produced.

This is a great question. I think the first thing to remember is that CGC is not always correct on their labels... They do their best, and they know an awful lot, but they are a grading firm and not a research firm. As you can see a few posts back, one relevant Whitman example is that the DC Whitman registry set contained (until the last day or two) a large number of books that don't actually exist. As our knowledge about Whitmans is fragmentary, so too is CGC's, and sometimes they make errors of judgement based on incomplete information. My guess in this instance is that CGC recently decided they needed to find a way to differentiate fat diamond Marvels from others on the label, and settled on "multi-pack edition" as a way to do this. There's some logic to this, in that when we find Marvel multi-packs from this era, they usually contain fat diamond editions. From there, it's a short leap of logic (but potentially a faulty one) to say "All these loose fat diamond editions must have originally come from multi-packs, too." However, we have no evidence for that latter assertion, only speculation. In fact, as I think about the relative scarcity of DC Whitmans, or even Gold Key Whitmans in this period, vs. fat diamond editions, it's clear (as I make a sweeping generalization) that fat diamond editions are much more common than Whitmans. This may be circumstantial evidence that fat diamond editions were far more broadly distributed than Whitmans. We know that a few books (Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica 1-3, Micronauts 1-3, etc.) were massive multi-pack successes, and very common as fat diamond editions. It's harder to explain why copies of (say) Thor or Fantastic Four fat diamond editions are so much more plentiful than Whitmans of the same period without resorting to wider distribution explanations. The idea that all newsstand copies are "returnable editions" while all diamond editions, fat and skinny, are "non-returnable editions" appears (to me at least) to be the most compelling explanation of this pattern.

Or even "formerly"?

Quoted for truth! The first of these is a Marvel Whitman, while the second is not:

I think perhaps you're misreading some of the ideas being discussed here... There's pretty broad consensus that Whitman books (and the Marvel fat diamond books, if we acknowledge that they may or may not be Whitmans) are all "first prints". I'm not sure there's evidence that they were perceived as reprints because "they were still on the shelf in bags where they hadn't been purchased." Turnover and dead stock were concerns for retailer even back in the 1970s. The more likely scenario is that Whitman books (and possibly the books of other repackagers in the case of the fat diamonds) were being warehoused, and released to retailers as the market demand dictated. In a sense, they didn't have to have a "shelf date" or "arrival date" the way other newsstand and direct comics did. As for being hard to find, and hard to find in high grade, this is generally true, but - for some books - may be overstated. I have been doing a longitudinal study of DC Whitmans for some time now, and many of these books are relatively common, even in high grade. At the same time, books reputed to be rare are frequently found, while books overlooked by the market are actually quite scarce. The same is certainly true of fat diamond books, and I would imagine that there are (for example) cases where finding a high grade UK price variant is substantially harder than finding a high grade fat diamond variant. It's impossible to generalize.

Hi, and welcome to the discussion! More ideas and input are always welcome! I'd love to hear more about the "persons who were working at Marvel" and their information. I think we've seen some comments, sometimes secondhand, from Jim Shooter, but I'm not aware of others. Do you have some source you could share? There's mixed feelings in the Whitman community about the Shooter comments themselves... they would be more credible coming from, say, Phil Seuling on the distribution side, than from someone in editorial. Of course, they cannot be completely dismissed, either. I think the big thing I would point out here though is that the argument is not usually Whitman vs direct on the fat diamond question, but "Whitman exclusively" vs. "Whitman and others", as there do seem to have been some other players in the repackaging game at the time. Gold Key and DC both produced Whitman-branded variants, so we know they were exclusive to Whitman. With a couple of notable exceptions, Marvel did not. The important question is "Why is that?" The fat diamonds were certainly distributed by Whitman, but there does not appear to be any evidence (currently) that they were exclusive to Whitman. I'd love your take on this!

Let that be a lesson to eBay sellers everywhere... Prohibiting buyers from outside the US means that the seller misses out on money, because you and I are not running up the price.

This might work: https://www.ebay.com/itm/115675509537?mkpid=0&emsid=e11021.m5055.l9429&mkcid=7&ch=osgood&euid=a137cc3cdbe14fc9aab10419f3ec6122&bu=43155438028&ut=RU&exe=0&ext=0&osub=-1~1&crd=20230117014653&segname=11021&nma=true&si=oQMjZoR5KWu0d4LLf1UbjNKgcbw%3D&orig_cvip=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557 Unfortunately, I think most of the auctions have ended, but he may have more.

Just a heads up for everyone that eBay seller jake9338 currently has a large number of CGC-graded Whitmans, mostly from the 8-12 1980 period, at auction on the site. These are really nice high grade copies, and most are only $20 or so at the moment. He's not shipping to Canada, so I can't bid, but if Whitmans are your thing, you may want to check these out.

If you build it, we will come...

Just in case anyone is interested, or has research pointing in a different direction, I wanted to share a message I just sent to the folks managing the CGC registry, and concerning the DC Whitman set on the registry. Here are the highlights: This is in relation to the "DC Whitman Variants" set. You'll see that I've had the "Best in Set" status since 2016, so hopefully this gives me some credibility. This has always been a problematic set for CGC, with frequent mis-labelling, etc., but in the context of the registry itself, there are a number of items that need to be cleaned up. The set currently contains entries/slots for a number of books that do not exist (as in, they were never published in the first place), and it would be good to have these removed. As it is (of course) impossible to prove a negative, I'm not sure how to demonstrate this to you, though...The non-existent books include: Action Comics #506 (no Whitman variant exists) The Brave and the Bold #143 (no Whitman variant exists) Justice League of America #163 (no Whitman variant exists) Justice League of America #164 (no Whitman variant exists) Justice League of America #165 (no Whitman variant exists) Justice League of America #170 (no Whitman variant exists) Justice League of America #177 (no Whitman variant exists) Justice League of America #178 (no Whitman variant exists) There are also several issues that are listed by the wrong title, and are inconsistent with both CGC labeling and with other registry sets. These include: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #261 should be Legion of Super-Heroes #261 Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #263 should be Legion of Super-Heroes #263 Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #264 should be Legion of Super-Heroes #264 Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #266 should be Legion of Super-Heroes #266 Finally, there is one book missing from the set, although CGC has graded at least 2 copies of this book, according to the census. This is: Superman #350 (Whitman variant exists, and has one 9.6 and one 9.4 copy graded by CGC) Is it possible to have this set cleaned up a bit?

What’s selling well for you? And it’s ok… either you or the dummy can respond.

A couple of recent acquisitions, all in a vain attempt to keep up with @bellrules

The comic is based on the autobiography I Changed Gods in 1968 (released in the U.S. under the same name as the comic) by Maria Anne Hirschmann. I believe that Hirschmann is still living.