VintageComics

How does GPA police what another dealer does or doesn't do? Do you think all dealers submit all of their sales results? (for the record I don't submit any) 10 years ago is a long time ago.

I think because Heritage has a special relationship with CGC their results get scraped automatically because their results are usually posted within a day or two. CC manually sends the info over because their stuff takes more time, and CC also doesn't send EVERYTHING over. They're actually selective about which results get posted to my knowledge. Heritage posts everything. Clink believes their results are proprietary and don't want them shared. It's been that was since Day 1 Go Collect does have results from all 3 but from what I understand it takes them much longer to get these results (not sure why)

My favorite new sayins is "Looking for progress over victory" Stan was a man ahead of his time.

As someone who has used MULTIPLE scanners, cameras, cell phones etc over the last 20 years trying to capture images over the years I've NEVER seen a single device do it perfectly. Not one. Look at the discussions we've had here and comments people have made in this forum... Heritage's scans are too amped. Connect's scans are too dark. Two monster auctions houses, literally two of the biggest in the world, and they can't get their scans right. I think Comiclink seems to have the LEAST chatter about the quality of their scans, which leads me to believe that they're doing something right. My real point is that I don't think any major sellers are doing it on purpose and each does the best with what they have.

You assume people KNOW how to tweak their images or have the time to do so. Imagine an auction house or a dealer 'spending a few minutes' on every book they sell when they have 1000's to list each month? Sorry, it's not realistic. I think collectors are just going to have to realize that each digital device is going to represent each book differently and no dealer is going to spend as much time tweaking their scans as a collector may of their own books.

1st app of the Catmobile? What am I missing here?

Their algo is probably just sorting out recent sales prices in all grades.

"The Dentist" is a "legendary" GA collector. There have been rumors and sworn witnesses that say he's sitting on the highest graded copies of all the big boys. Tec 27, AC1 and so on. My understanding is, they are all raw. John, I never met personally, but I understand he was just a great guy and a long time collector with an expansive collection. He was involved when collecting was in it's infancy and was able to grab a lot of spectacular books the rest of us just dream of. Not as mysterious as the dentist, but one of those guys like Mitch who helped build the hobby. I'm sure older boardies can share more details about these guys. I knew of the Dentist long before the boards. You would hear rumblings about him at various shows and corners of internet. John I didn't really know about until joining here. 'The Dentist' is a nickname for Dave Anderson, who probably has the single best copy of every GA DC key out there (including the Church Action #1, etc). John Verzyl owns (owned, he passed and his family now owns) nearly every single Church copy of every Timely printed with the rare exception of maybe 10 or 20 books. his Marvel Comics #1 is rumored to be a 9.8 (it's raw and was not slabbed) and his Captain America #1 was the Allentown (a CGC 9.8 now) The reason I mentioned these two guys is because they were rare visionaries that spent the 'crazy money' to acquire 'the best of the best' while everyone else was happy to sell them their books and take their money. If the people selling them millions of $s in comics were also visionaries they'd never have sold the books, right? In fact, during a crash, when the Gary Keller books came back to market through Heritage (huge runs of GA DCs from the Church pedigree) and sold for a fraction of what he paid for them just a few years prior, it was guys like Verzyl that saw the value in the books and bought them all as they came back to market, while most avoided them. These guys put their money where their mouths were but these types of people are also as rare as hens teeth. And they don't just spend frivolously. They're pretty careful with their money and what they buy. I've never met Anderson but I can say Verzyl was a friend and a fun guy to be around. He set up at every SD Comic Con except for 1 IIRC until the time he passed away tragically a few years ago. Verzyl could talk your ear off, which was fun if you had the time and some of my funniest and favorite moments were deals with him. We once did a coin flip because we couldn't agree on a price on his Strange Tales #110 CGC 9.4 Circle 8 copy. We flipped a quarter for a $2500 discount and i won. He did those coin flips often. He also sold me my 1st Batman #1 around 2010 or so. It was a raw restored copy. I believe it was in Orlando and I did a coin flip for that one too and lost and he got an extra $500 on that book. He was a legend in the hobby.

Yeah, but the cell phone pic was a little 'too bright'. Just look at the CGC label in the 2nd pic and see how it almost glows in the cell phone pic while the scanned image makes the CGC label look normal. So the actual look of the book was somewhere in between. See the dilemma? No image does it all very well and if I'd sold that book just on the cell phone image alone some pundits would accuse the image as being 'tweaked' to make the book look better based on the CGC label as a baseline when in fact it was just a simple pic with no tweaking.

This is a struggle I often have. Digital images, taking a live subject, reducing it to a series of 1s and 0s and then recreating the original image from 1s and 0s has it's limitations and will NEVER recreate the original to a 100% accuracy. It's particularly frustrating as a seller. I've been involved in the sales of some really big 6 figure books recently but I had trouble capturing images properly. I tried scans, I tried pictures and in the end, sometimes I had to convey that the actual book looked somewhere in between. Another thing to keep in mind is that everyone favors different things. For example, see the two images below of the same book that I sold recently. Which image makes the book look better? It all depends on what YOU prefer in a book. The top is a high quality scan, the bottom is a cell phone photo taken in the sun. Either image would be 'fine' but neither is exact. I would say that MOST images look close to the book but none will be 100%. I agree that NOBODY should be pumping scans to make the book look better than it is just to facilitate the sale.

Absolutely, but the book is more likely to get damaged from shipping across the country and being thrown around 20 times. No matter how tightly you pack a box, that book still feels the impacts and experiences the inertia of all of those impacts. Placing a book into a press primarily places equal pressure across the entire surface of the front and rear covers (and very little, relatively speaking, on the spine alone) and I have a hard time believing pressing does more damage to a book than shipping, handling, admiring your books with a gin and tonic or dropping it in a Mylar behind the desk.

You are remembering right. But right or wrong, I can’t get it out of my head that the depressed staples generally found in these books are due to pressing. Maybe the feeling will pass, but strong within this one, it is. Thanks. Yes, that was the book I remembered. Your feeling stems from online chatter but the reality is that it's not all that common in my experience. There have now been literally 10,000's if not 100,000's of books pressed over the years and it's still a rare defect to see on ANY book so I certainly wouldn't say it's common and especially not exclusive just to pressed books. As I've repeatedly stated over the years (and did last night as well) we have NO way of knowing if the pressing caused the defect on any specific book unless we've documented the book's progress from the time it left someone's hands to the time it was slabbed to make sure the defect didn't happen during handling or shipping and ONLY happened during pressing. How many staples pop, simply from shipping a book. We've almost all had it happen. I would say it's far more likely if there is a weakness in the paper in that area from publishing that handling and shipping the book can just as easily cause a staple pull, staple pop or a staple indentation (the interior trying to pull out of the guts of the book) than it is from a stationary pressing where there is little to no movement of the paper. Some books just have an 'Achilles Heel' from production - I can literally name a dozen books known just for their specific production defects which seem to plague the entire printing run of the book. I think for the most part, this is just one of those things. You'll never find mention of CCS work unless it's what they consider restoration. But consider this: The book is now more structurally sound than it was before it was pressed. In conservation circles, that would be considered a benefit that will prolong the life of the product. I wrote about this years ago....while pressing received a very negative stigma early on mainly because people were leaving money on the table, there are instances where straightening out a book through pressing and putting it into a 'better state of equilibrium' or rest than before pressing left the book more structurally sound...say removing a spine roll tugging on the staples. This Catman book is another example of that. The real point of the discussion is that people have grown to associate the defect with pressing based on a few correlated incidents when in fact it's ALWAYS been related to production and handling IMO. We just never really focused on them pre internet and pre pressing debates and likely because we never had so many visual scans available online or the ability to discuss them in such great detail until now.

Not in the slightest! I know Roy for a long time and he’s good people I think some of your posts sound aggressive but you probably don't mean them that way. But I was going to say the same thing as MCR - the Oregon Coast copy is NOT an official Pedigree (and it may not be as well centered just going by what MCR has said - I didn't look at the copy). I'm still leaning towards my point that it was an anomaly at $55K because of those two characteristics and not indicative of the market as a whole. Whenever I look up prices on GPA to price stuff up I always notice that certain peds (like Twin Cities, Mass, etc) fetch incredibly strong prices for late silver and bronze books and that is what I based my opinion on. Additionally and anecdotally, I had a customer ask me about 2-3 weeks ago for what they should be paying for an ASM #129 9.8 and I threw out the number that they are currently going for now, even though I knew that the Mass copy had just fetched $55K. It was just a gut feeling but I guess I was right since they seem to have settled in that range. A similar thing happened with Hulk #181 where someone paid $50K for a 9.8 that was from the 'Mile High 2 collection" (Admittedly not a ped but def an outlier sale at the time) and then subsequent copies never hit that range (I sold 2 x CGC 9.8 copies in the mid $30's knowing there was no way I was going to get $50K for them at the time). Anyway, I don't care if I'm wrong or right, just stating my own perception based on my experience and what I see happening. To each their own.

Edit, it may very well be FF #36. It could also just as easily happen during shipping, from which we often see cover staples loosen or pop. Unless you have pics before and after shipping it's just a guess.

By definition, the staple has to be pressed into the book to staple it together. I've seen countless unpressed books from all eras where the staple is recessed. If you haven't seen that, then you simply haven't been looking. In fact, it's a common defect on some books which seem to have a weakness in the paper in that area. I think FF #38 is one of them (as well as the corresponding Marvel books that were printed in that same month) as I've seen several of them. There's a lot of force and speed used when manufacturing a magazine and the loose tolerances of printing presses used to make garbage, throwaway magazines are the real culprits. That's why we see so many defects on virgin books. Not saying the Cap staples absolutely weren't damaged by pressing but I think that it's more likely it's a printing defect.

Very depressing. How is a press that depresses the staples an improvement? You guys are assuming CCS depressed the staples. Any before pics of the book available to confirm? Apparently, from what I saw (or thought I remembered seeing) one of the Promise books had depressed staples that CCS fixed. Or am I remembering that wrong?

You'd have an excellent point except for two things: 1) Heritage uses exactly the same images in their auction catalogs, ...so when color is blown out on my monitor it's usually blown out in exactly the same fashion in the catalog, which means it's not difficult doing A/B comparisons with books in-hand, and 2) this theory assumes that an artist and movie fan wouldn't have his computer screen ...regardless of manufacture... set up for high quality definition, color, contrast, gray-scale, etc., IOW, it's a matter of calibration, not model. My point being that when color saturation is an issue ...and I'm not suggesting it is in every case... this is a problem for Heritage to resolve on their end, not their bidders. It's nearly impossible to make an image look exactly like the book in hand. The book in hand even changes how you see it depending on which sort of light you hold it in. And it's far too time consuming to expect any dealer to optimize every single image when your inventory is more than just a few dozen or a couple of hundred books.

He's been around the CGC boards for a long time. Just a new account.

Socialist! I want it all or nothing!

Nope. Even the rich people I know and deal with don't do this. Like I said in another thread, it's really easy to spend someone else's money. Finding people who are visionaries, who trust their instincts, who know when it's time to overpay, those people are extremely difficult to find. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Instead, they are rare to come by. People like the Verzyls and the Dentists of the world are rare...and that's why they have the best.

I have dreamed about owning the Black on Magenta stamp since I was a kid in grade school in the late 1970's / early 1980's. Wow.

It's important to note that the copy that sold for $55K was not only a Pedigree copy (and Peds generally fetch top dollar among collectors) but it was also a perfectly centered copy, which also fetches top dollar among collectors. So it's REALLY hard to compare the $55K to any other copy until it meets these two criteria.

It's really easy to play with other people's money. I doubt it.

This is a really good observation / theory. You're saying that since comics are no longer a fringe hobby, demand has multiplied while supply has stayed relatively steady. Combine that with $1TRIL in crypto profits removed from the crypto market, trillions in stimulus money floating around and relatively low certification population (especially compared to baseball cards) and you have a perfect storm.

Nah. I stated elsewhere that I'd post a pic of myself with my undies on my head if it went for a mil. I figured it would be about a $750K book.