Brock

9.6

9.4

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.4

9.2

Sure, I’m in.

I intend to continue my unbroken string of two rounds where I absolutely crush the grading, and two where the entire CGC board community - and all their children and grandchildren, dogs and cats - get a good laugh at my expense.

On 4/8/2023 at 10:56 PM, MAR1979 said:

This one was not a "Vane copy'

Love the so 1980's new Goldberg cover and how its totally anachronistic of the late 1960's/1970's characters and the interior content.

9.4 represents current highest census for this issue.

 

Canadian price variant, too.

I’m small time, but December (contrary to most years) has been very strong for me, especially for Bronze and Copper. Sales include Bizarre Adventures, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Devil Dinosaur, Fast Willie Jackson, Ghost Rider, Ms. marvel, lots of Archie’s and a Marvel Super Special.

perhaps it’s just luck, but the market seems to be improving a bit…

On 12/21/2023 at 4:08 PM, MAR1979 said:

I wonder if Best of DC #20 is the single most rare regular issued DC of the 1980's?

 

The World’s Finest issue? Or do you mean the DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #20 (Dark Mansions) pictured in the thread?

I have always struggled to find high grade Best of DC #58 (Super Jrs).

Micronauts 1-12

It's a small hobby, and I don't have an axe to grind with anyone. From my perspective, he's an enthusiast whose suppositions sometimes get ahead of his evidence.

There are some who feel he can be a little self-aggrandizing, claiming "discoveries" of things that he perhaps could be more properly said to have helped popularize (e.g., Marvel 35 cent variants).

He may or may not have helped contribute to some of the hype around certain kinds of variants (Canadian price variants, for example) where information about things like print runs and survival rates is presented as gospel with only hearsay to back it up.

Sometimes, all of this just muddies the waters for people interested in comics history. In the Whitman context, he has written (for example) that DC Whitman books are reprints.

On 12/17/2023 at 10:10 PM, RockMyAmadeus said:

On 12/15/2023 at 6:10 AM, Brock said:

and it’s full of errors and undocumented assumptions.

My goal is to just help set the record straight.

On 12/16/2023 at 7:34 PM, Ken Aldred said:

I assumed the OP was thinking more about books up in the stratosphere like Hulk 181 or Action 1.

The out-of-reach for many of us stuff.
 

Yeah, but the thread title says “ratio” so we did the math.

On 12/16/2023 at 7:28 PM, Readcomix said:

Ronin

Funny, my first reaction was Holy Terror.

On 12/16/2023 at 1:16 AM, stormflora said:

You guys are lucky to have nearby antique/vintage stores that don't nickel and dime you while only providing scraps. Sucks to live in a major city like mine. I'm forced to resort to online shopping, which isn't necessarily bad per-se due to the increased availability of comics and convenience, but the shipping costs add up.

Big cities are good, too… I travel pretty much all the time for my work, and pretty much everywhere. In most places, big or small, there’s usually a couple of honey holes. You just have to find them, and keep going back. Used bookstores, junk shops, larger LCSes in big towns or forgotten LCSes in smaller towns, antique shops, etc. are all good. A lot of places will have a section for “kid’s comics”, which are typically overlooked by most comic hunters. Dealers who know their superheroes but nothing else are great.

i don’t have near as much luck as @bellrules but I do pretty well…

On 12/15/2023 at 10:49 AM, bellrules said:

 

When I first saw this, I wondered if the March of Comics issues might also be scarce, falling into this period. After watching for a bit on places like eBay, though, they seem to be relatively plentiful. As these made their way into the marketplace differently, this is another piece of (circumstantial) evidence that Whitman's internal distribution system collapsed in 1980 - distribution by others (in this case) seems to have continued normally.

It does raise an interesting question, though... If these scarce books were printed but just not distributed, where are they now? Perhaps they were eventually pulped, but if they were being shipped to and bagged in Coffeyville, Kansas, is there an outside possibility of a warehouse find? Coffeyville is about 75 miles north of Tulsa, OK - I wonder what the antique malls and bookstores of that region might yield?

On 12/14/2023 at 9:56 PM, MAR1979 said:

A scan to go along with what @Brock mentioned:

 

From June 1980 Comic Reader a follow up:

In July 1980 Comic Reader, simply a list. Some (all?) of the books noted are now known to only have been in Pre-Pack's

Aug 1980 same situation as July:

Thanks for all of these… there’s more buried in these issues as well. In that first one (April 1980) there’s a lengthy discussion in the letter column that might be described as “what if DC took over distribution of the Whitman books?”

if anybody else comes across anything in other sources, please share! I’m working on an article/essay to pull some of these things together in a documented way… the only in-depth article on this stuff that I’m really aware of is John McClure’s piece in Comic Book Marketplace 85 and 86, and it’s full of errors and undocumented assumptions.

On 12/15/2023 at 3:55 AM, stormflora said:

Ah, LCSes. I should really try visiting more near me. But the one that I did go to was rather uneventful—it was pretty much on the brink of dying. The suburbs of Toronto’s are just not very comic-centric at all. 

Go west, young man… I find that places like antique malls are better than LCSes for these kind of books. Think of Waterloo, Stratford, Woodstock, London…

Scalped, Sheriff of Babylon, Ex Machina, Losers, Y the Last Man, Strange Adventures

On 12/12/2023 at 11:55 PM, shadroch said:

If you want them all in one lot, paying $2.50 a book isn't terrible.  NM 169s sell for a nice chunk, as does the first Ghost but not many other issues have much of a premium on them.   I wasn't the biggest Iron Man fan and didn't care for it after #220 give or take an issue.  Hopefully, it is a local deal because shipping 200+ books isn't cheap, especially if they are B&BD. 

Best of luck with the deal.

Issues 128, 150 and 282 also sell for larger premiums.

Hmmm... not sure why those lines have strikethrough, but I can't change it... hopefully, it's still legible.

It sounds to me like it could have been this one? Marvel Saga was a series that retold the history of the Marvel Universe through "little bit of the stories too" - basically, excerpted highlights reprinted from the original books. Marvel Saga #4 was the first one to focus on the X-Men, though they were prominent after that.

It ran for 25 issues in the late 1980s, so a little earlier than your suggested timeline.

Everybody vs. everybody? Check!

Seriously... Captain Canuck vs. Gumby vs. E-Man vs. Milk & Cheese vs. Shi vs. Zippy the Pinhead vs. Badger vs. Too Much Coffee Man vs. Captain Action vs. Usagi Yojimbo vs. Flaming Carrot vs. the Tick vs. Bone vs. the Maxx vs. Cerebus... etc., etc., etc.