Brock

Fanboy #6 from DC Comics, published in 1999... an auction just finished over $240 for a 9.8. https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Fanboy-6-CGC-9-8-Aragones-Spiegle-Jimenez-Comic-Book-Fan-Finster-Wonder-Woman/303097378162?hash=item469202f572:g:kD8AAOSwf-Bci-dS I dropped out of the bidding at around $150, and was astonished that it went even that high. My guess is that the Bolland Wonder Woman crowd was in a feeding frenzy...

The Massive from Dark Horse.

Slightly better known than the All-New Wang, which of course debuted in Giant-Size Man-Thing #1.

FOMO

Like that scene in Canadian Bacon when police officer Dan Akroyd makes the Americans translate their anti-Canadian grafitti into French...

It depends on the weight, package dimensions and distance. if the package is over 1 kg, and has dimensions (L +W + H) totalling 90 cm or less, then you’re typically looking at about $20-$25. It’s supposed to vary by distance, but distance seems to Typically be measured by some random set of criteria. There’s a tool on the Canada Post website wher you can input the weight, size and send & receiving postal codes, and it will tell you the cost. You can also apply for a Venture card if you’re going to be doing this regularly. It doesn’t cost anything, but does give discounts for shipping within Canada.

A few finds today, mostly as a way of resurrecting this thread! CBSI (FWIW) tells me that GL 68 and Flash 101 are tougher books, and the Detective Annual 8 seems to do well on ebay.

Hi Mollie - Could you add Wild, Wild West #1 (Millennium, 10/90) to the Adam Hughes Cover Set? For a graded example of this book, please see registration number 2007000016. Thanks so much!

I feel like the number is relatively high, though much of it is casual. Think of all the finds in antique malls, etc. that are recounted in these pages... if there were only 30,000 of us, that averages less than 500 per state and province. It seems unlikely that it would be worth selling comics in places like that if only a handful of people will look at your stuff in a typical month/year. And that small a base of collectors surely wouldn't be enough to drive price increases over time. And yet we find keys scooped at the antique malls, people bidding at public auctions, folks lining up at estate sales, collections getting snapped up on Craigslist... Some aspects of the market may be more formal than others, and it's definitely smaller than it was, but I still think it's relatively big. Well, biggish...

Nice find! I sold that same pair of books on ebay 2 years ago for $90. Haven't seen any since.

So, I’m here in the Dominican Republic and decide to check in a see what’s what back home, and have a HOLY SMOKES THERE’S TEN NEW PAGES OF MODERNS HEATING UP THE MARKET MUST BE GOING CRAZY moment... Sadly, it was short-lived.

I was in Courtenay, where the median price for a detached 3 bedroom house is US$337,000. I appreciate your efforts, @spreads, but I've long since given up trying to explain Canadian geography to people... to Americans, it's all just "cold" and "north". To Europeans, they have nothing to give them reference for size... the concept of a forest large enough to get lost in, for example, is mind-boggling for many. Or that if I'm sitting in Halifax, I'm more than 1,000 km closer to London, England than I am to Vancouver. My favourite, though, was the young woman when I was living in North Carolina who told me excitedly, "You're from Canada? My God, you speak English so well!" None of us is as good as we could be at understanding our neighbours, but Canadians will forever be known as frozen denizens of a snowy wasteland. With Toronto as their capital city.

You do realize you're proclaiming the sophistication and expertise of all boardies only a half dozen posts after a bitcoinswami's "Gem Mint" 9.8 2016/2019 extravaganza, right?

I was golfing on Vancouver Island last week.

According to Comichron, that's only true 42% of the time.

Canada wants you, and you can still drive home for the weekend.

I read them as a kid, but didn’t save many... these days, I’ll buy reprints of keys, or Batman issues. They all sell eventually, though not for high prices. I have a reprint of Hulk 271 up on ebay now, though, and of everything I’ve ever listed, this is the only one that won’t move. Somehow no one loves the raton laveur.

I did too. If you ever get diagnosed for this, please tell me what I have...

This seems right to me... I was in Toronto on the day of release. Shortl6bafter noon, I visited Dragon Lady Comics nad picked two copies off th3rack, but because I was literally on the way to the Silver Snail, I put them back thinking I would pick them up as part of a larger purchase at the second store. Ten minutes later, I found the Snail was sold out, nad returned to Dragon Lady... which was also sold out. That meant waiting nervously for two weeks in the hopes of getting newsstand copies when they were released, and then buying up every copy I could find. The newstands were definitely wiped clean within a day or two...

I’ve checked a couple, but have not seen any.

A number of these are listed in Overstreet. In terms of the Columbia Dispatch book, comicspriceguide.com lists it at $14 in 9.4, which is more or less compatible with the previous poster’s MCS listing. The CPG listing has had 3372 searches, which suggests its not uncommon. I think the ones that are listed in Overstreet are in the $16-$20 range in NM-, though I don’t recall if this particular one is there.

Thanks for these suggestions! This year's list has already gone in, but I think you'll appreciate some of the changes. I always do a "reveal" here as the new Guide launches. One of the interesting things for me has been to see how a "second tier" of books like Suicide Squad #1, Omega Men #3 and Secret Wars #8 kind of come in and out of fashion. They don't necessarily make the cut in certain years, but then they'll bounce back. This is different from a book like X-Factor #6 which clearly is seen by the market as less important than it was before, making way for rising stars that have never been on the list before. In the end, it's all more art than science, though.

Those are very cool...

It would make sense for Sgt. Rock, Warlord, and DCCP 10 (featuring Sgt. Rock) to be bagged together, as the books are more or less grouped by theme... However, I'm not sure if anyone has seen such a bag. It would be great to start a "database" of sort for bags. Someone must be out there that has this at least partially put together. I'm particularly curious as to what DCCP 22 was bagged with... Why is this book so tough, when everything else is (relatively) easier? Wouldn't whatever it was bagged with be similarly tough? In terms of the June 1980 books, I do have the sense that the scarcity of some of these is a bit over-hyped. They're tough, but they're not necessarily as tough as everyone makes out. For example, I bought a Legion #264 a week or two ago, but had my choice of three different copies on ebay. The June 1980 books are, of course, very difficult in high grade. One of my working theories (and I'm trying to figure out how to research this in more detail) is that Western's (Whitman's) U.S. distribution system seemed to collapse in late 1980. All of the 8-12/1980 Gold Key/Whitmans are tough books, and Whitman's DC 06/1980 books are tough. It is generally thought that the DC books were printed at the same time as the regular editions, and then held for bagging, so they would likely have been scheduled for release during the 8-12/1980 period. I'm thinking that something happened with Western in the US at this stage that stopped distribution of these books... but in Cambridge, Ontario Whitman had a Canadian subsidiary that was still active. They continued to distribute Whitman puzzles games, etc. during this time frame, and - by extension - it seems likely that they continued to distribute comics. By 01/1981, the U.S. operation seems to be back in full swing, and distribution returns to normal. This scenario would explain why the books from these 5 months are so hard to find, and why they generally seem to be more prevalent in Canada (and in certain other international markets such as Scandinavia and Australia) than in the U.S. itself. I have some (limited) evidence to back up the notion that the Canadian subsidiary continued to chug along at full speed, but nothing to help understand what may have happened to the U.S. operation. Interestingly, the Canadian subsidiary seems to have been publishing other material in this time frame as well that is not generally available in the US, including a range of digest-sized editions of various Disney properties. If these books become known on the broader market, they could really take off as well. I've only ever seen a handful of these - they're easily as difficult to find as DCCP 22.

So that’s what was happening out by the wood pile...