Brock

Perez is clearly an artistic genius, and after nearly 50 years of books from him, it's easy to take him for granted. Here are a couple of my favourites:

Found two more today: Edit: It's too bad they printed these ones sideways

My latest arrival, from a seller in Wisconsin. This is the 2nd highest graded by CGC.

It’s a bit unfair for me to be posting that one here in the modern area.

I found this one in a dollar bin over the weekend:

Not all Modern books, but I rescued these from a dollar bin in Moncton, New Brunswick... Since that's $1 Canadian, it was really a 78 cent bin.

I’m just saying that some people seem to take their own experience and imagine all of eBay is just like their little corner. No tumbleweeds at my end, is all I’m saying… And then I told you what was selling for me, in case it’s useful intel.

I had a very good week, including quite a few sales of Sonic the Hedgehog books.

13 also dropped in a typical post-movie decline in demand. This was exacerbated by the fact that much of fandom decided they didn’t really like Brie Larsen (“she’s mean”,”she’s too self-important”,”she has no ASSets”, etc.), which seemed to accelerate the decline. Contrast the reaction to Brie Larsen with the reaction to Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, or Letitia Wright in Black Panther, whose character’s key books have all largely held their value.

I keep waiting for Solo Avengers 14 to do something... Hawkeye and Black Widow team-up in the lead, with a She-Hulk vs Titania back-up. Seems custom-made for the MCU crowd.

You could also look at comicspriceguide.com - they may not be comprehensive, but they currently have 24 covers for #1 listed (for example).

It had sat for about a year, and this week I had 4 different offers on Amazing Spider-Man Presents: Jackpot #1.

Maybe the same reason your water goes down the toilet in the wrong direction.

I believe this is a 2nd print. The Canadian price variant has a UPC... As you suggest, this one was likely part of a bagged set. A lot of these GI Joe variants and reprints are poorly researched. I did find one reference to this edition online, but it's on a website that - if I posted a link - would trigger some boardies' pet peeves, launch a five-day Mobius loop flame war, cause 17 boardies to put each other on ignore, and get you and I banned for a month. I kid - sort of.

I call this “buying season”… low prices now on books that will sell higher when tax rebate checks come in the spring.

Comics4less almost always gets high prices for his books. I used to buy stuff from him quite a bit when he first started up, but I haven't in years because of this.

To me, this is an interesting question. Sometimes, like with Secret Wars #3, a little digging will reveal a reason. Other times, our explanations are really post facto rationalizations. We can say (as was mentioned above) that a book started to rise because it is rare - but there are lots of rare books that don’t rise. Similarly, we often start to talk about “classic covers” driving prices. But this is ALWAYS a rationalization of rising prices after the fact. Nobody goes to a Diamond Previews solicitation to see the publisher announce that issue #57 will be produced with a classic cover… In the end it seems to me that - sometimes - the market moves in mysterious ways, and in these instances we generate “after the fact” explanations.

Aquaman #18 (from ‘96) which has sometimes been referred to as the “happy dolphin” cover, possibly NSFW.

What are you missing?

That’s definitely one that also doesn’t get much attention, but I also enjoyed it. The conclusion was not as strong as the rest of the series, but overall it was pretty solid. Clean Room launched around the same time, and was also good, but it got cancelled mid story.

Just how much does a “used” zebra go for these days?

Bill Mantlo

As someone who started collecting the title around this time, this was also when X-men hype was shifting into high gear. The stories were increasingly popular, and the post-94 books were starting to spike in price. By about 135 everybody was jumping on the x-train. I would suspect that both overall supply and high grade supply grow dramatically between 129 and 137.

He's a Japanese man posing as a balding, middle age white dude, since that's what Marvel hires.

Just because it's such a cool piece of art, here's the unused Tintin cover that sold for so much: