namisgr

You asked for opinions. Mine is that I would rather have a Wolverine comic signed by Roy Thomas than Andy Olsen.

I'd much rather have Roy Thomas. A character is defined by a lot more than their name.

Copies sold, or copies printed? And if the former, how were sales tracked?

No, for me comics with first appearances are not much like rookie sports cards. Comics are a creative medium involving story, art, and their creators, things that sports rookie cards are lacking.

Love those list prices, Mike. Those were great times to be a comics fan and collector.

Not any major regrets over the Bronze Age, but I regret not pulling the trigger and buying a lot more of this original owner collection when it came to market in the spring of 1999. It was the Pacific Coast pedigree collection, and while the listing below shows part of the FF and JIM SA runs, over the span of a couple months nearly the entire group of SA Marvel comics in ultra-high grade published from 1962 to 1969 was put on the market by Robert Roter and his Pacific Comic Exchange. I bought a dozen FFs and JIMs/Thors in May and early June, but by July nearly all of the Marvels from every running SA title were gone.

The closest example I know is that for several years there was a single owner to the Massachusetts pedigree run of Strange Tales with Nick Fury, from 135 to 168. But it wasn't made by years of assembly, but by a single owner submitting the entire raw run for encapsulation. Similar to that, the artist Dan Jurgens bought as a group the entire Silver Age run of Fantastic Four as raw books from the Curator pedigree, which was later slabbed and sold at auction one by one by Heritage.

Pacific Coast:

The Massachusetts copy:

There were more young adults buying comics in the early 1970s than you might imagine. Unlike 10 years earlier, certain comic titles had appeal to young adults both for their storytelling and the quality of the artwork. I bought Hulk 181, Giant-Size X-Men 1 and X-Men 94 when I was in college. There was a news agency right on campus that stocked all the new Marvels and DCs not on spinner racks, but tiered wooden shelves. And I believe it was the young adults buying, reading, and storing books back at that time with great care (much more so than how pre-teens read and stored them) that accounts for the much, much larger number of copies surviving until today in near mint and better condition than is true for early and mid Silver Age books. As for buying multiple copies of new issues for speculation purposes, I know lots of the older regular buyers did so, but the selected issues were usually number 1s of new titles, especially those with famous creators. It's worth a good chuckle to remember the books I bought multiples of back then: #1s of OMAC, Sandman, Shadow, Invaders, PP Spectacular Spiderman, Man Thing, and Iron Fist. Not exactly books to have gotten rich on. Swamp Thing #1 would have been a good choice, but I was a predominant Marvel guy and frankly didn't know Berni Wrightson from a hole in the wall when that ish hit the stands.

My experience indicates it's neither every post office nor every city. Our local US postal service is generally excellent. From the delivery truck, to the local office, to our regional distribution center. It's easy to have the local office hold mail when we go on vacation. Shipping packages has been and continues to be consistently reliable. The only problem I've experienced in the past few years has been purchases being shipped to us from distant locations have sometimes shown up via tracking in unexpected and out of the way places. An example is an E-Bay purchase from a seller in Pennsylvania (a neighboring state) that first went to Grand Rapids, Michigan. So I think that USPS services around the country are more of a mixed bag. They get lots of things right, but have a few problem locations, too.

For context, this was the X-Men issue on the racks before the new series began. It's a reprint of X-Men #45, and my original copy bought at the time. I think it helps explain why comic buyers and readers of the day may have overlooked ish 94:

In a mylar before slabbing and then after:

The Pacific Coast run of FFs is terrific:

It was more like an exciting two months. Bought my first one in May and more in June. By July all the SA Marvels were gone.

This is what the Pacific Coast copy looked like, raw in the mylar and later slabbed.

Good question, James. Perhaps it's because the overall trend since CGC opened its doors over 20 years ago has been for prices of slabbed comics to skyrocket.

Agreed. That's the policy Highgrade Comics took, as Bob has said many times that his proprietary sales data are too important to his business to make freely available through GPA.

I didn't find that to be true. Over a half dozen different auctions for around 350 high grade SA and BA slabs, I realized excellent prices overall and the after-commission returns were much better than anticipated based on past market prices. It's almost certainly not the best venue for realizing the highest prices possible for every era and genre, but for the kinds of things I collected they were a major outlet for buying and selling for 15 years.

Their choice

Owned over the collecting years: