Brock

Here are today's new arrivals. Action #495, Flash #275 and Justice League #169 are all the highest copies of those books on the census, while Flash #278 is the 2nd highest. It's worth noting that the Justice League issue is not noted by CGC as a Whitman edition - technically, there are no copies of this book on the census. CGC seems to have a real quality control issue with DC Whitmans. Based on my own experience, I would suggest that about 15% of these books are mislabelled, either not noting them as Whitman editions, or assigning them an incorrect issue number.

It seems likely... The Grand Comics Database is fuzzy on this one, and lists everything as "later printings", as is mycomicshop.com, which lists only "Reprints" generically, stating they will have either a $1.25 or a $1.50 cover. However, comicspriceguide.com has more detailed lists and photos (though these are only the covers, and not the indicia) suggesting 7 printings of each issue, with some clues for identifying them, and with the suggestion that the $1.50 cover price appears with the 5th print. I have some $1.50 copies of #1, #2 and #3 currently listed on eBay, where I've identified them as 7th prints. In looking at the indicia, there is no printing notation - it seems to be copied from printing to printing without much change. When the price jumped from $1.00 to $1.25, it looks like someone changed the price per issue and the annual subscription costs by hand in the indicia with a pen. When the price jumped to $1.50, they didn't bother to update it again. To me, this is all consistent with the Pinis running WaRP Graphics from their apartment... I could be wrong, but it seems to me that when something sold out, they just printed it again, with limited documentation around subsequent print history. Who knew that 40 years later, this approach could be turned into a business model for Bad Idea...

When I was about 13 and first starting to really collect, I was a New X-Men completionist... I wanted every appearance, but my knowledge was limited. One day, I was looking through the bins of a rather unscrupulous dealer, and found an Iron Fist comic. I was sure that the X-Men had appeared in an issue of Iron Fist, but I couldn’t remember which one. I took it to the dealer, and asked if I could open it to check. He said no, but assured me that it was the X-Men issue, so I bought it for the enormous sum of $7.50. When I got home, I opened the book up, only to find that it had no X-Men appearance in it. Now, I’ll never know for sure whether that dealer was lying to me, or if he simply made a mistake, but rather than finding Iron Fist #15 with its X-Men appearance, I had found Marvel Premiere #15 with the first appearance of Iron Fist. And as disappointed as I may have been that day, today the book is worth many multiples of what I thought I was buying.

I'm not sure this is entirely accurate, though I may be nitpicking. I believe that Elfquest #2's 2nd, 3rd and 4th printings were all priced $1.25, and the $1.50 price began with the 5th printing. Elfquest #3's pricing works the same way - that is $1.25 for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th printings, and $1.50 beginning with the 5th. Elfquest #1 and #4 also follow this pattern. I believe there are 7 printings of each.

I don’t think it’s been mentioned here yet, but Machine Man #7 is picking up. It’s the first appearance of the Power Broker, with connections to Falcon and Winter Soldier.

So... the crux of your argument is that Warner Bros. has warehouses of old Pepe Le Pew merchandise, and is using an army of 3rd party sellers to somehow boost corporate profits?

They were fan-voted annual comic awards given in the UK. They were a reasonably big deal for a few years.

OK, I’ll never pass on a chance for free Canada lessons... Canada has 8 English-speaking provinces, 1 French-speaking province, and 1 bilingual province. Rough numbers, but about 8 million have French as a 1st language, with 5 million of those also speaking English. It has about 32 million people with English as a 1st language, with 3 million of those also speaking French. Everyone knows how to read their breakfast cereal boxes in French.

I think “almost all” would be more accurate. Archie Comics released some Canadian direct variants in the 1990s.

And bandoliers... lots of bandoliers. Ah, they don't make 'em like they used to. Love that he also has a sword, just in case.

I think I might be one of them, so I reported you.

In my mind, it was hard to separate the books that were influenced by the Lord of the Rings from those that grew out of D&D... in most cases, there was a fair bit of overlap, especially in the post-Elfquest black and white boom of the 1980s. Every other book seemed to feature elves (or trolls or halflings) fighting goblins and evil wizards. A lot of these series had weaker art that - stylistically, at least - was heavily influenced by things like the Monster Manual. I do remember being particularly fond of Empire Lanes, though, and trying (and failing) to follow it through multiple publishers and distributors. I don't know of any sort of genre-specific comprehensive list, but this site is making an effort at a general one: http://jimcripps.com/collections/comicbooks/80sBlackAndWhites.html

That's why I scooped a few to flip... I just couldn't understand why they'd gone crazy in the past 12 hours.

I also thought I was skilled at finding obscure stuff, but your track record is incredible.

And it sold for (a higher) BIN as I was posting this. List 'em if you got 'em.

Marvel’s Voices #1 seems to be picking up, with the first Children of the Atom. Did some spec site point to this yesterday? i had one listed on ebay for two weeks with little interest, then got an offer last night just as someone else used buy it now. I listed a 2nd copy an hour ago, and it already has 17 views and 2 watchers.

I do, but it's raw - I haven't had it slabbed yet.

I just shipped one of these out last week, as an add-on in a Death Rattle/Xenozoic lot I sold on eBay. If I'd known, I'd just have sent it to you.

Yes, I recall... I was the one opening shrinkwrapped DVD sets to try to find you a Babylon 5 comic.

I have 37,000 fillers for you if you need any help.

Is that all?

First, the admission... I have about 37,000 books at the moment, so one possibility is that, for me, I'm in danger of having "completeness" be about having one of everything, ever. In the past, I had aims of completeness that grew too big. Back around 1982, I set out to collect every appearance of the New X-Men (i.e. the post-GSX 1/X-Men 94 team), including their solo appearances. When I started that was a relatively attainable goal, with only a few hundred issues. Now, of course it would be thousands. Later, I shifted to a focus on CGC books, and smaller sets. I decided (for example) to get a "complete" CGC 9.8 copies of every Adam Hughes cover. I'm currently at #2 on the registry, so I made good headway... but Hughes is releasing a few covers a month, and this could also become thousands of books over time, so I've backed off a bit. In a sense, an din retrospect, both these projects seem impossible to actually "complete"... Most recently, I'm focused on "completeness" in a smaller context. There are few artists (such as Dave Stevens or Milo Manara) who have a relatively discrete (i.e. small) number of books that is unlikely to grow substantially, so I'm focusing on CGC copies of those. In this instance, I have no preference for newsstand vs. direct, etc. but I will go after colour or logo or price variants. My highest "completeness" quest, though, is to try to assemble a high grade, CGC-slabbed set of DC Whitman variants. This has the double advantage of being a reasonable size (about 180 books) and being difficult enough that it will take me some time. I've been at it for about 5 years, and have about 1/3 of the books. To me, this seems a good balance - big enough to be meaningful as a "complete" set, but small enough to actually complete; hard enough to be a challenge, but without being impossible.

I have a few of these, but probably the less collected ones - Space:1999, Planet of the Apes, Tomb of Dracula, Curse of the Werewolf. I did list a few Superman books on eBay recently (pictured), but haven't had any takers. It's definitely a specialized audience.

They were related... at some point on the regular series, they built the original team from the mini-comics into the history of the Atari Force team. It's almost 40 years since I read it, so I don't recall details. I recall really liking the team from the mini-comics, and badgering my friends with Atari systems to give them all to me. I remember how disappointed I was when the actual DC series came out, and it featured different characters. While Atari Force wasn't the most amazing comic ever produced, I'm surprised it doesn't get more love - it had some great art, from folks like Gil Kane, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Marshall Rogers. The mini-comics sets are really tough to put together. There's five of these issues, with the latter ones being scarce. They're all extra-length, at about 48 pages. For other Atari mini-comics, there's a cool Yar's Revenge one-shot, but the toughest one for me was Swordquest (recently revived by Dynamite). My friends wouldn't let them go, because you needed details from the comic story to play the game. I suspect that means a lot less of them survived in grade, as well.

This is a pretty fascinating discussion. It seems to me that if companies like CGC (and its various competitors) aren't already looking at this kind of approach, they're running a real risk of being displaced by startups that will. This leads me to several thoughts: 2-D scans and photographs are probably an inadequate resource for the effective development of this tool, aside from an interesting "hobby" project. Reference to NCB defects, for example, suggests these might not be visible in a 2-D image, though they should be visible in a 3-D image. Similarly, tools to assess the interior of a book could be utilized for a more comprehensive assessment than a simple 2-D image of the covers. This kind of approach will ultimately be attractive to CGC or others as Moore's Law and similar effects dramatically diminish the cost of these 3-D imaging systems over time, until they reach a point where they are far more cost-effective than human labour. While these systems will inevitably hold a financial advantage for users, they could ultimately have a performance advantage as well. On these boards we constantly lament the quality control issues at CGC, and we often talk about how grading is subjective, and how (even at CGC) it varies over time. Using machine learning to develop consistent grading and quality standards is an attractive possibility. There are always funds to assist companies in doing research into innovative process improvement activities like this (and this is the area I now work in). As a U.S.-based company, CGC could easily tap into funding from the National Science Foundation's Small Business Technology Transfer Program to support this, and if the OP is a researcher at a college or university in the United States, it's possible that he could be paid to do this research with them. TLDR version? While using 2-D scans may not be the best way to approach this opportunity, the core idea is viable, and a smart company in this space would already be exploring it.