VintageComics

If you don't need capital there's not a reason to be in a hurry to sell.

Wasn't there some controversy about 'Grinder stating he didn't have money but was buying books? Something along those lines. If it wasn't him I apologize. He contacted me recently (can't remember which venue I was traveling) and I didn't reply because I was unsure of the past history).

Should? No. Will they? Maybe. Not all of them. There's something to be said for seeing a book in hand and walking home with it with little to no risk. You also can't compare online books to seeing a book in hand for inspect flaws. Some dealers will hold for their price regardless of what is available out there. Bottom line? It's a relatively free market and there are no hard and fast rules except for supply and demand.

You're a lawyer (in the NYC or NJ area if I'm not mistaken) so I'd defer to your judgement. So what about the security report that was attached to the article? How does that play into this?

An 8.5 just went for $155 and the 9.2 @ $450 must have been an outlier since a 9.4 went for $450 just a few months earlier. How much more should a 9.0 have gone for? Before the $450K 9.2 sale I'd have put the 9.0 right at $250K

Well, I spoke to someone at DA Cards and apparently Carbo has been exonerated by the NYPD and all involved. Maybe he will be in Seattle this weekend.

I don't believe DA Card World has any association with Patz except for the fact that they are both in NY State and are both in comics. I can't comment on DA's relationship with Carbo other than he was their primary buyer. Since ECCC is a Reed show I don't know whether Carbo will be there under the current news.

It's most likely one of two things. 1) the Molten Man is being speculated on for movie rights 2) someone thinks the book is going to upgrade. 3rd possibility is that someone is just overpaying because two people want the same book but I don't understand why when it's not a rare book in that range. As far as the color breaking creases, it can be really tough to tell whether a book is undergraded from just a scan. In my experience, especially on black covers scans can make books look worse than they really are.

I think it happened well before GOTG. It's been happening for years before that.

The 'personal swipes' are a correction to show that you attempt to rewrite history and say that people have said things they didn't. Both a no-no because...well...you are NEVER wrong. Initially, when the discussion first started years ago people were saying that they would pay more for white pages. I agree that this alone is anecdotal and could go either way. But ultimately, the discussion evolved (as all discussions do) and all anyone - everyone really, except for you has really has been saying is that all other things being equal, people will choose a book with better quality than inferior quality. And that includes page quality. And the direct correlation is that better quality books sell for more money than lesser quality books, regardless of what that quality is. I'm happy to agree to disagree but you reframed the discussion to move the goal posts, which is why I called you out on it. And now I will drop out of this specific conversation out of respect for everyone reading this thread. And agree to disagree.

The link to the main article no longer works. Someone must have wanted it taken down. It's said often but not often enough. Comic people are not naturally business people. Having an emotional attachment to your product works the opposite way that a business mind does. It's common sense marketing 101 that you would advertise in these places but I guess it's not so common.

From what I can see that does look like a sharp copy for the grade.

This is proof. That is, unless there are an equal number of comic collectors willing to seek out books with inferior page quality, and pay more for them. I wouldn't bother. I just take a moment to point out how ridiculous his arguements are for the sake of noobs who may not have seen the discussion before and then back away. After 40 years of collecting (and probably a decade ore more for you from what I understand), for someone to say that people don't pay a premium for superior quality anything (PQ, QP, miscuts, chipping - WHATEVER) is just a walk away moment for me at this point.

You're just assuming everyone wants to have the same skills. Some people just don't want to be bothered. Or can't. Or won't. That's why life is full of services being offered for every facet of life. I was a mechanic for 22 years but I can't be bothered to fix my own car anything beyond simple things so I pay for someone else to fix it. It's more profitable for me to have my car repaired by someone else so that I can keep doing my thing.

It's not like this service offers nothing of value whatsoever. I think most people would rather have a raw that a grading company graded at 8.5 than a raw that just some random ebay seller said was 8.5. It may not be a 100% resto checked grade but it's something. That's exactly the point. If you want to buy an E Class benz but can't afford one, but the C class was too cheap and lowly you could buy a CLK at one time, which was an in between model. This isn't about all or nothing. It's about degrees of market share. CGC would have been smart to offer something similar.

I didn't choose to pick one data point and state it supports my argument. You did. The fact is that two comics, with all other things being equal, but one having nicer paper WILL be more desirable to the majority than the one with lesser page quality. If you want to argue that you may as well insert yourself into Stephen Strange's reality and bend all reality to your will.

You can't talk logic with someone who frames their reality to suit their own biases. The ST #110 sale is no more an indication that PQ affects the price than the counter argument that it doesn't affect the price. There are too many other variables involved including auction fatigue, time of year, movie bump decline, other visual factors. One data point does not a trend make.

Gone are the days when you have 3 or 4 models of cars to choose from. When I first got into the auto industry Benz had maybe 4 or 5 models to choose from. Now they have 15-20. The current trend is to fill as many niches as possible with your product as the pie slices are getting smaller and the products more diverse. And that's what's happening to grading.

A scammer will take any legitimate product and find a way to spin it to their advantage. That's not the fault of the service. It's the fault of the scammer. The same rules always apply. Buy from reputable people if you're risk averse and you'll never go wrong.

You can make a counter argument and argue that grading has made collecting expensive. There are still plenty of run collectors but they're hard to quantify because you don't see their collections (you only see what is for sale in the marketplace). I can see the raw grading option increasing run collecting for people who don't really like slabbing because it reduces cost, it appeals to a large portion of the old school market segment that rejects slabbing (and there are still many, even 17 years in) and it makes books easy to get to for people who want to read (I hear many people afraid to crack slabs).

Yup. A fabulous tape pull smack in the center of the front cover. It was about an inch long.

Sorry Lou, typo. What I do now to navigate the forum is to open multiple windows (one for each thread) and reading multiple threads at once just increases my room for error and typos. I thought that the book was a bargain sitting in a CBCS 8.5 holder. Early CBCS books seemed to fetch less money than CGC books. That has changed since they've tightened their grading and modified their image. So the book went for a bargain. because I had a strong feeling it would easily regrade at least an 8.0 through CGC.

What I'm saying is that the book was a bargain sitting in a 7.5 holder. I thought it would regrade at least an 8.0 upon resubmission.

Past performance is not an indicator in this market. All Star #8, Showcase #4, Detective #225 - all former books that nobody would shell coin out for and now they are 'hot' and sought after. Whiz #1 was a monster book. Then it fell behind in value. Now it's a big book again. All that matters these days is movie rights.

Actually, the FF Cartoons I watched were in the late 1970's.