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Super copy, Sully - you've got a killer collection. I'm partial to this one, though:

Purchased at today's monthly Philly show:

Thx for the appreciation, Frederic. It's got a couple of bits of wear to the top overhang and spine, and is around a VF+. I love how incredibly primitive the Iceman was rendered on these early X-Men and cross-over issues!

And another early crossover: Fire and Ice!

Back to the main title for a post:

Awesome start, Sully! Please add as much as you can to this thread - I love this stuff. So where ARE all the Curator DCs, anyways?

Northland copy, green label (centerfold detached) also graded too harshly:

Origin of the Black Panther, Green River pedigree, and an undergraded book at 9.2:

How can any collection possibly get consideration as a potential Pedigree at a time (NOW) when the only books from it to have made it into the marketplace are from 1969 and later? I understand from Mr. Rosa's posts on these boards that he has oo material going back to '66 and second-hand stuff dating much earlier. However, until the oldest of the oo books are made public and can be judged by collectors, there isn't even a debate on the matter. And this is only if you believe that an oo collection started in '66 even merits consideration as a pedigree (see "Oaklands"), which is a whole other matter.

A shout of thanks out to JiveTurkey, Nik, DKB, Goldust, and BlazingBob for their easy transactions in the first forum Virtual Comic Con!

I remember the PCE grading system well. 40 was their grade for fine, 60 for very fine, etc. The 4.0 on the label of the X-Men 1 is their grade for page quality, and is their grade for what passes today as "offwhite". They'd use 3.0 for off-white/white, going all the way up to 1.0 (or was it 0.0?) for snow-white, with 4.5 corresponding to cream/off-white and 5.0 light tan/off-white. From the dozen or so books I purchased from them and subsequently had graded by CGC, the page quality grades from the two companies proved to be remarkably similar. Terrific book!

White Mountains are great unslabbed books, and I salute you for liberating your new purchase. I've surmised that the collection (or much of it) was stored in a closet or room with mothballs. The mothballs kept the books uneaten by critters, and the newsprint fresh and white. The aroma of fresh paper and inks mixed with residual camphor is heady! BTW, that's mighty sharp for an 8.5.

For you, Brad, it's the split cover. For me, it's the monochrome cover (pioneered, I believe, by Kirby's X-Men 17 opus):

A very, very small handful of books were restored by Calvin Slobodian decades ago, and another very, very small handful may have been purchased second-hand, rather than directly off the newstand. From Doug Schmell (www.pedigreecomics.com): However, and perhaps most unfortunately, two known Silver Age collections that appear to have the characteristics of these more well known pedigrees have not been afforded this loftier status by the experts at CGC. Both the Slobodian collection (from the private collection of Calvin Slobodian from Calgary, Canada) and the lesser known Edenwald collection (from dealer/collector Conrad Eschenberg of Cold Spring, New York) are both high grade collections, purchased by a single owner, in which the books share a common look, feel and smell. What separates these two collections from the more nationally recognized and CGC certified ones mentioned above is the lack of sales records and data needed to track the dissemination of the individual issues once brought to the public and sold. Another factor, solely in the case of Mr. Slobodian, was the existence of some restored comics among those he had purportedly purchased off of the newsstand, causing a lack of certainty as to which books were actually bought by this original owner.

Did someone say "Pacific Coast"?

Slobodian copy, distinguishable by the "DN" stamp on the back cover (it's a crime this isn't a CGC-acknowledged pedigree):

Two more pedigree JIMs:

So much for the rest of us...

White Mountain copy, Infantino cover:

Now we're getting some variety! Here's more: DC did "science fiction" well in the late fifties and early sixties: Finally, from the sublime to the ridiculous:

As I said earlier, there is almost an obsessive need by board members to pay less than GPA for a book, no matter how desirable it is or how badly they want it. It's like some kind of comic collector macho thing. Y'know what's even funnier, Tim? The serious collector from the boards eventually bought the book from the person that bought it from Bob. Lord knows what he had to pay to acquire it then!

Well, I've still got thousands of my favorite comics, but only one plasma TV. It's akin to the change decades ago from black-and-white to color.

Bob gets consignment business by using his own database and experience-based sense of the marketplace. Case in point from several years ago. I wanted to buy an HDTV and so decided to sell a slabbed TOS 39 with white pages. First, I offered it on the boards for $Y, and a serious collector (at the time) of high grade early Marvels expressed an interest. However, he was only willing to pay 90% of Y since, after all, that was roughly the highest GPA price. I felt that with the exceptional eye appeal and page quality, the book could command more, and we never struck a deal. Bob offered to sell the book on consignment after giving the opinion that it could command much more than Y. He was right, and sold the book for 130% of Y. Even with his consignment fee, I netted a thousand dollars more than I would have by selling it to the serious collector from the boards who was rooted to a GPA-based value system. I understand where Bob comes from when he states his unwillingness to provide "proprietary" information to the dealer community at large by making his data available through GPA.

Don't forget Hulk #2 (first greenskin):

This one is hard to find in nice shape - my copy is a nice midgrade. It is the Slobodian copy, obtained from Marnin Rosenberg, the dealer who first sold most of the Slobodian Marvels. Considering that the Slobodian Hulk 4 is cgc 9.6, and none of the other Slobodian early Hulks have a grease pencil arrival date, I strongly suspect that my ish was bought by Slobodian second hand back in the day, rather than right off the rack. Notice how from the cover art, it appears Kirby still hadn't settled on making Hulk green or gray.