wiparker824

On 8/10/2023 at 6:59 AM, namisgr said:

Can you tell if a book has been pressed by looking at a two dimensional picture of it?  You can tell it's extremely likely, when it's an early SA Marvel, comes from a collection that has very few if any issues with normal cover wraps that have the interior pages badly exposed, has a top edge with big overhang that lies perfectly flat all the way across, and has a certification number indicating it was graded in a sizable batch of early SA Marvels also sporting these features.  Like the many examples from the thread linked earlier on the Cole Schave collection. 

Runny White Mountain pen arrival dates are a pretty good indication, too.

Proof, as always, can be found in before and after scans, as noted and made clear 10 years ago now in the thread devoted to Pedigree Comics' sale of the Cole Schave collection.

You’re saying this like there were 1000’s of books in this collection, and they all looked the same. There was just a handful of books in the Hake’s auction tagged as this collection and they did not all look the same - not all of them had the “interior pages badly exposed” as you think is proof of pressing. Here’s the ASM 14:

On 8/9/2023 at 10:31 PM, ExNihilo said:

But it seems they did find a sucker.  So what's with the canceled screenshot?  For starters, I find it hard to believe that anyone would spend four figures on a book when the title doesn't make it clear as to what exactly they're buying.  And then beyond that, who cancels a four figure sale knowing the book isn't a 1st or 2nd printing and that they likely sold the book for way more than should have been reasonably expected.  I'm with Mystafo, this whole thing is really confusing.  

I’ve seen it before. People list ambiguous facsimiles or later printings and people buy them inflated. Happens less now, but early days of facsimiles especially those that were of moderns like UF 4 where you’d expect the book to look brand new got a lot of people. I’m not surprised this TMNT got someone. That book doesn’t look like any of the later reprints, and the last page ad being for gobbledygook only appears in 1st print (not 2nd/3rd), so anyone who knows anything about what they’re buying knows it’s automatically not a 2nd or 3rd even though those are possible options from the listing title. So if you don’t see that price omission on the back cover, you may roll the dice it’s a 1st print. And with eBay’s policy of return money back guarantee for 30 days you can buy and figure it out when you get it. That all seems plausible.

Why cancel it? I don’t know, was being called out here and found a conscious to do the right thing? 

On 8/9/2023 at 9:22 PM, godzilla43 said:

I would have first find out what it is that I am selling before listing it to Ebay.

That’s asking a lot from a guy who was doing 80mph driving home from the flea market antique shop while taking pictures of the interior pages to post for the eBay listing. 

But yes, you are correct. Because if you actually did have a 1st print (or even thought there was a real chance you did) the last thing you’d want to do is hastily throw it up on eBay with an ambiguous listing that had 3 questions posed in the title - “1st? 2nd? 3rd? Print”. Especially since you’re estimating it at a 9.4 potential grade, which would land a value of around 35k. It’s almost as if the seller knew it wasn’t a 1st print but wanted to find a buyer (sucker) who might believe it is. 

This is the thread that keeps on giving. 

On 8/9/2023 at 2:37 PM, SBRobin said:

Every time I think about buying a non-CGC graded comic on eBay, I'm going to remember this dude claiming to be a "comic guy" and then saying this book is a 9.0 - 9.4.

To be clear he called himself “Comicbook Guy” in the eBay description. And, well, the only person I’ve ever heard of refer to  themselves as Comicbook Guy is this man:

On 8/9/2023 at 1:15 PM, ExNihilo said:

bruh...did you buy a book without verifying what it was you were buying?

teenage mutant ninja turtles 1 1st? 2nd? 3rd? Print | eBay

Gross

Most of the dealers I’ve actually bought from at cons are way too busy to talk life and become my best friend. They really just want to talk business - after all that is why they are there - and if they have quality selection and reasonable prices (only reason I’d stop in the first place) they usually have multiple customers they’re dealing with at once. 

Do people really experience what this video implies? Like a dealer just has time to sit there and chat you up? My conversations usually go like this:

Me: “If I get book X and book Y could you do $200 total?”

Dealer: “Best I can do is $225”

Me: “Okay cool” … proceed to hand cash… “Thanks”

No part of this do I think we are now “friends”. Just a person running a business and a customer. 

LCS owners are a different story. They build a rapport with customers they see every week for years. And they also aren’t always super busy like a con floor, so there are times when I have sat and chatted with those types. It’s never some sort of weird predatory thing  where I’m pressured into buying something as being portrayed in this video though, just a friendly business owner - which isn’t a bad thing.

On 8/8/2023 at 6:10 PM, Cman429 said:

Disney inspires me with little confidence. Nor does WB’s “leadership.” If/when the comic movie craze fully collapses - and if Gunn doesn’t succeed I think that’s the end - you’re gonna see “investment” sell offs the likes of which we haven’t seen 

We’ve seen investment sell offs before. I distinctly remember seeing a guy try to sling a short box full of investment copies of X-Force 1 (along with boxes full of other gems) in the early 2000’s out of the back of a Honda civic in a used book store parking lot. Got to say I was tempted, but then remembered I have my own stash of X-Force 1 investments already. 

In terms of the movie hype sell off I think that’s already been happening. You have to keep in mind it’s not as though one day every speculator who bought every copy of Eternals 1 during the peak before that movie came out decided today is the day we all sell. They slowly but surely all come to the conclusion that “investment” isn’t paying off and sell over years at a loss, but it’s already underway for books like that. The big keys that were keys before any movie came like AF 15 will still be keys, they’ll go up and down with the times but they’re not going anywhere long term.

On 8/8/2023 at 6:13 PM, Ryan. said:

Man that's a weird one. I thought i knew all of the reprints but I'm not familiar with this one. No cover price. Very strange. 

Same. If this is a reprint and not a counterfeit it’s a new one to me. It’s not a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th print. Also not any of the more modern reprints I’ve seen like the 2020 shattered ones, or the loot crate one, not the convention exclusives, GameStop promo… probably a few more I don’t remember off the top of my head. 

This book has a long history of counterfeits being common as others have said. Normally the ones I’ve seen were more lazy, they just white out the 2nd print text on the inner cover but the ad page at the end would be different. This doesn’t look like that but counterfeit seems likely with the missing price.

Yeah there’s not a lot for SA/BA in Tempe, most of the shops are just modern and they’ll have some random copper age key like ASM 361 on the wall for 3x FMV. Tempe is a college town though so I guess that makes sense, not a lot of college kids dropping money on SA books.

Fantastic Worlds in Scottsdale as previously mentioned is a good one. Greg’s Comics in Mesa is pretty close to Tempe and will have some selection of back issues. 

Unfortunately the best shop in Phoenix metro for back issues closed during the pandemic - All About Books and Comics.

On 8/8/2023 at 3:56 AM, namisgr said:

He's right, in that I would be surprised if this ASM #1 didn't get pressed.  It has the appearance commonly found with overzealously pressed early SA Marvels, that we came to recognize so well from the handling of the Cole Schave collection many years ago: books with 'starched collar' top overhangs front and back in which the cover extends well beyond the interior pages yet is as crisp as a starched collar; interior pages sticking out from the covers both front and back, especially along the top half of the book, despite the comic not having a severe front-to-back miswrap, which when naturally occurring exposes the pages on a front cover view, or a back-to-front miswrap, which tends to expose the pages on a back cover view.

The other sign that hints of pressing is the collection as a whole.  The Hake's auction had numerous early SA Marvels from it that had the same starched collar top edges, interior pages sticking out, and the slight counterclockwise rotation look to the front cover from when the pages are more exposed at the top half than the bottom half of the comics.  One or two had significantly impacted staples that can potentially be made worse by the pressures applied during pressing.  Considering that the collection was assembled secondhand and is not in its entirety an original owner one, it is unlikely to the extreme that most of the books with these telltale stigmata got that way naturally.

This isn't meant to suggest proof or certainty regarding the ASM #1, as for any individual comic only the owner and, if there is one, presser knows for certain, if there isn't photographic evidence of before and after appearances.  So I believe what the consigner of the book is saying.  But the statement stands that if the ASM #1 had any potential for receiving a still higher grade than the incredible one it was assigned, chances are very high it would have been manipulated in order to achieve it.  Even in the unlikely event that the owner of such a comic didn't care about maximizing the final hammer price, the auctioneer that collects fees based on the final hammer price certainly did.

Regardless of the speculation around the one particular comic as to whether it might be a 9.8 in waiting, it was an extraordinary high grade example and the price it fetched at auction seems well deserved.

 

He posted these books raw though months earlier before he sent them to Hake’s to grade (I’ll drop the ASM 1 here below). And they looked identical. Exact same “crisp collar”, same “interior pages sticking out”, everything. Which should at the very least rule out the idea Hake’s just did it for him.

And he made the comment about not pressing them when asked well after the sale. Which there is no incentive to lie about that at that point. And he also indicated his dad was against all things related to grading (why they were all raw) and had these for over 30 years. So if they were pressed by a previous owner it was back in the 80’s before such a thing was wildly popular. 
 

If I was a betting man I’d bet on them not having been pressed based on everything I’ve read about the collection. But yes you are correct in that none of this is exact proof and nobody will know 100%. It’s possible it was all an elaborate lie and this has been cracked and pressed from a 8.5 to a 9.6 many times over the years, the dad didn’t die, and there is no dad - this is just some dealer who’s been doing this their whole life, got the 9.6 finally and cashed in.

Definitely not in place universally. I just had a buyer take 3 days after I accepted their best offer to make the payment. So I’m not sure if this is something the seller has to enable, the buyer has to opt-in for, or eBay just doing it randomly but it’s not happening for me.

On 8/5/2023 at 4:58 PM, The humble Watcher lurking said:

One thing I noticed is the low grade silver age keys are getting hit hard like CGC 1. 0 to CGC 2.0 range. People just trying to get  some money for them on eBay. I guess they were right to always try to buy one high grade key then a bunch of low grade keys. Quality over quantity as they say seems to be good advice they gave. 

This is true, and I’m buying in that low grade range now for some books. But I also think that grade range just went bonkers during covid, more than the overall market, so the correction is going to be harder. An AF 15 in a 1.0 for example has come back down to earth, with 2 sales on GPA from 11k and 12.7k for 2023. Pre-pandemic on GPA this book went for 9-11k in 2019. Did someone pay 29k for a 1.0 in 2021, yes, yes they did. Which makes the drop look insane, but you’re doing fine if you bought pre-pandemic, which is the case for most books in any grade. 

My guess as to why it went so crazy during covid was because that’s the entry point for whatever book someone wants to get into. The whole market was nuts and a lot of people just wanted in on whatever book they were chasing and got in at the cheapest price possible, so demand was even higher for the low grade. 
 

On 8/5/2023 at 8:34 PM, Telegan said:

Stupid question, but what grip do they have?  I usually buy there or MCS because everything I want on Heritage usually gets bid past what I want to pay.  I need to try Comic Connect one day, though.

I don’t know I don’t sell there, but I can tell you they seem to get a quantity of books I don’t see on other sites. They may not get as many massive books as Heritage but they get enough of everything else that leads me to believe sellers like selling there, a lot. 

On 8/5/2023 at 5:19 PM, Pantodude said:

In the meantime, Collectors Comics is having like its 7th auction with no seller or listing fees and no buyer's premium.  Their auctions appear to have been growing with each one.  I like the patience that family-run business is showing.  I wonder if this recent CL situation directs even more traffic there, especially while it remains "free" to sell/buy there.  So long as the offerings are good, it should.    

It’s just about convincing the sellers to move elsewhere. As a buyer I’ve bought from all of the big auction sites, doesn’t matter to me, I go where the books are that I want. But CL’s had a grip on a lot of sellers for a long time, not sure I see that changing overnight over this outage. 

On 8/5/2023 at 9:14 AM, Chaz G. said:

This is my 1st time bidding there and I put in my max bid early. My auction ends Weds night, so we'll see.

What a week to pick to start bidding on CL…. To be fair this whole debacle has lead me to believe CL wouldn’t know how to programmatically phantom bid you to your max even if they wanted to, so I’ve come to the conclusion it’s probably just my paranoia. 

On 8/5/2023 at 3:18 AM, Gaard said:

This is off-topic, but I seem to pay my max bid an inordinate amount of the time. I'm not shouting from the rooftops yet, but I am starting to get suspicious.

This has been the case for awhile for me on CL, especially if I enter my max bid early. Now I usually just wait and snipe at the last second because it seems to avoid the magical power that brings everything to my max bid. But I’m also on the west coast so it’s not past my bedtime yet either - which makes that easier

On 8/4/2023 at 2:57 PM, bc said:

Depends. If a local datacenter provider was compromised, anyone hosting inside could be vulnerable.

As you stated, the older the code, the greater the risk.

-bc

I guess but I assume CL isn’t even in a data center. Just some guy’s old Dell tower running Windows Sever 2003 in a closet at CL. 

On 8/4/2023 at 2:37 PM, Bumble Kitty said:

I was flipping through radio stations this morning and I heard several hospitals suffered a malware attack.  I didn't think much of it until they said the northeast part of the USA was affected.  Then my ears perked up and I remembered that is where ComicLink is located.  Is this the same attack?  I dunno.

Not unless those doctors were all bidding on auctions at CL. Malware is what happens when you visit a bad site like CL with lax security, it downloads to your machine and that’s it. This is likely whatever these hospitals did, someone clicked something (probably not CL) they shouldn’t have and it infected the machine and compromised the entire network. CL is in its own boat of running old code with security vulnerabilities and it’s surprising they’ve got away with it as long as they have… I noticed they were on a jquery library which came out over 10 years ago and has had known vulnerabilities for at least 5 years… that is not ideal. And this is what’s out there now - after they seem to believe they’ve “fixed it”.

On 8/4/2023 at 1:07 PM, bc said:

If this was a hardware/network failure, then the risk of exposing PPI is very low.

You guys do realize that if this is a malware attack, you should not be logging into your account at all which could expose your credentials while they are still "recovering"?

With an outage this long, expect all information to already be archived and copied to a private server. Now they sit back and harvest your credentials that they can use against the copy they have to expose all your personal data. Pretty basic hacking technique actually.

The fact that they have not communicated a fairly detailed reason for the extended outage leads me to believe that 3rd parties have been brought in.

-bc

Which is exactly why you don’t just operate business as usual and leave the site up during the recovery portion, more people log in, more credentials potentially taken. It’s actually that which tells me they probably don’t have a 3rd party involved, because any real company brought in to handle this situation would not have the site live in its current state. 

On 8/4/2023 at 11:29 AM, Bick0 said:

I never really thought about defects. I guess in terms of defects it depends on the book its self. For example, ASM 20 I know I can find copies that have consistent page quality (off-white to white) and better page quality than others with minor/less defects. However like you said an ASM 1 in a 1.8, I have to expect more defects such as brittle pages, writing on the cover, tan/cream pages etc, unless I want to spend 500k+. Like you said with golden age books, I cant be too picky with the quality/defects without spending an arm and a leg.

For you personally, do any defects put you off from buying? To add to that, would defects put you off from getting a higher grade copy of a comic if it had more/worse defects than a lower grade copy?

Thank you for the reply.

In low grade I just like to find a clean complete book free of things that will not age well like rust, mold, brittle pages, etc.

In mid grade I tend to gravitate towards nicest presenting cover and page quality. 

On 8/4/2023 at 9:46 AM, alecholland said:

Is it even safe to login to their website yet? I won a book in the auction that just ended and would like to pay for it, but I don't think I want to use their website to pay and I haven't received an email confirming that I even won the book yet.

IMHO this is completely unacceptable. Down this many days and not a word from CL to let their customers know they are working on the issue and whether it is even safe for people to visit and login to their website. It makes me very wary of being a customer in the future. 

It’s not recommended. Any site compromised like this (which it still is as of this morning people reporting being redirected) can send the payload including CC to the attacker with the redirect. It’s really just a matter of if that payment page is a page with open vulnerabilities or not. The redirects are worse than the errors people are reporting, the errors are likely attempts to patch gone wrong and look like just syntax errors. 

Yeah… seems unlikely they let this run tonight. Or at least they shouldn’t. There are some big books like a 9.8 ASM 194 ending in about 8 hours and people hitting errors when they try to bid? Yikes.

My wallet.

Unless you have unlimited funds this is almost always going to be the primary factor in your question. Would I prefer to have bought the ASM 1 in a 9.6 instead of a 1.8? Of course. Only problem is I didn’t have an extra 515k laying around. 

That question often takes care of itself with your budget, the more interesting thing I think is what defects actually matter to you within the grade you’re buying. Let’s say you’re set on buying a book in a 3.0. All 3.0’s are different. Are you okay with writing on the cover? Slightly brittle pages? Tan pages? Marvel chipping? What type of 3.0 do you really want. Especially with SA where you typically have enough selection as opposed to golden age where you may not be able to be as picky.