PopKulture

I've seen a few references to changes on the Bay recently. What are some of the big ones that affect sellers?

I found a copy of number 6 at my local Half Price Books for ten bucks, a fine enough value itself. I torture myself, however, with the notion that there was a no. 7 there as well amongst all those ten-dollar books that someone was too lazy to look up, but that it sold to the guy who walked out just as I was walking in...

Well, in fairness, this is my first public foray, dipping my toes into the tumultuous and treacherous sea of this long settled orthodoxy, so there's that! And I wasn't here for the Great Tamping of 2005, so as a reinforcement for the minority, I am woefully late in arrival and equally under-armed in resolve. But, that having been stated for the record, I will honor my family's good name and humbly accept my flogging with dignity and resignation.

Tony Iommi?

Ha! We were simultaneously writing about many of the same points and hopes for the future of the hobby! Trust me, I look forward to being proven wrong!

I think this is mostly correct. First, there are few kids that collect anything anymore. It used to be when I was a kid, there were many gateway collecting avenues. Almost every kid collected coins, stamps or baseball cards. Some even collected rocks and arrowheads, or made animal paw imprints! Point being, once you've been bitten by the collecting bug, it usually follows you around and you're most often a lifelong collector. So, yes, there's that dour point: for the most part, we aren't creating collectors anymore. Further compounding that, very few kids actually read comics, so there's never going to be that organic curiosity about the comics that came before them, i.e., back issues (the very crux of our hobby). The Fantastic Four was one of my favorite titles as a kid, but I was too young to have read the Lee-Kirby books as they rolled out originally. No worries, that Buckler/Sinnott stuff was quite satisfying in its own right. And, sure, I got a glimpse of that Lee-Kirby greatness with that first FF treasury edition which reprinted none other than the Galactus Trilogy, in all its splendor. If I wasn't hooked going in, I sure as heck was hooked coming out! I read that oversized edition to death, and when I was through reading it, I traced over and colored in a bunch or the pages with markers. Nothing beats the moment, however, when I was at a family friend's house and we were rummaging through a box of his older brother's cast-offs, hoping to find some old comics in there. When I first held a tattered FF 43 in my hands - Lo, There Shall Be An Ending - I was beyond mesmerized. This was a concrete link to the past. It instantly connected me to his older brother and everybody that ever grabbed a copy off a spinner rack back in the day. But... back to what was to be my main point. I think into each generation there will be kids born with a curiosity about what came before. I collect the Jetsons and the Flintstones, and Howdy Doody before them, even though I was nary a glimmer in my parents eye when he debuted with Clarabel and Buffalo Bob. I also hunt Captain Video and Hopalong Cassidy, even though those are equally removed in the rearview mirror of history for me. Same goes for Roy Rogers before them, and Tarzan, Tom Mix and Flash Gordon before that. Add to that Fatty Arbuckle, Hoot Gibson, the Katzenjammer Kids, Billy Bounce, the Yellow Kid - it's all Americana, and I'm interested, even though most of that stuff is light years removed from having any relevancy or current viability nowadays. So, will there be enough of these aforementioned kids born into subsequent generations to keep the flame burning? Probably a few. Enough to bet on these artifacts continuing their upward climb? Frankly, I'd be amazed, but I'd love to be proven wrong. One thing I'm pretty certain about is, despite my better efforts, they won't be my kids.

Which rock star?

Wow, for just your sixth(!) post, there's a lot of wisdom here! Personally, I can't believe prices will continue on anything close to their current trajectories after people start going out to restaurants and baseball games again. We won't all be sitting at our computers feverishly buying anything and everything we're remotely interested in just to assuage our boredom. Couple that with all the stuff that will be coming to market if when the economy softens. And then there's people getting old and cashing out, dying off and their heirs cashing out, them getting disheartened and cashing out... That said, I plan to continue buying antiques and collectibles for as long as I can. I stick to a modest budget. If stuff goes up, great. If things crash and burn, my exposure is limited. If prices come waaaayy down, I might be able to buy things I can't even think about buying now. There's a lot of upside either way. And to your point, I NEVER got into this to make money. If I do, great. But all the things I've read and learned along the way and all the people and interesting stories, all those brisk walks around the fairgrounds - well, I can scarcely think of time better spent. The thrill of the hunt, that unexpected diamond in the rough, finding that last Kid Colt you need for your mini-run. At the end of the day (or each or our days), it's still a mighty crazy cool artform!

That's a great point! I've had a copy for a long time, and I knew H. was skulking about back there, but I never made the connection that it pre-dated (most if not all?) his comic cover appearances.

Yes, it's restoration by definition. You are literally trying to restore the book to a former state, a more favorable state. What we refer to as restoration is often repair (ex. tear seals, pieces added), or at the most mindful, conservation (ex. staples cleaned to prevent staining) . The semantics of this was not as well thought out at the dawn of third party grading as it might have been, but let's be honest: by now it would have probably... evolved.

I appreciate your devil's advocacy, as it's well presented and I believe well-intentioned. What I find fascinating, however, is your parenthetical note dismissing the main premise of my post, the crux of which is the systemic manipulation of some of the hobby's most hallowed books. I asked if anyone seriously believed that pressing didn't have a deleterious long-term effect on comics, and you are admittedly in the camp that it likely has "zero consequence" on its lifespan. Now, since neither of us has offered any scientific evidence specifically regarding pressing, we are each offering up a slice of our intuition, to which I freely admit. Proceeding from an extreme case, however, I lightheartedly offer that enough heat and pressure create a diamond from what is essentially worthless carbon. In practice, pressing utilizes enough heat and pressure to cause observable structural changes to the paper. I find it to be a stretch of the imagination that those structural changes shall be limited to wholesale and observable macro-changes (and decidedly beneficial). Do you think it so improbable that structural changes are also happening on a less observable, micro-level, or even a chemical level? That's a little like saying leaving a comic in the attic for the summer will have no effect. Oh, but that's ridiculous: I'm comparing months to hours you could offer in response. Yes, and I'll reply that my attic is cooler than your press. If we plot temperature as a function of time, at some point we will throw our hands up and the argument will collapse to a delta dirac function, for the math geeks among us, and truth be told we don't yet have enough information to declare pressing to be harmless. Until we do, I think it prudent to err on the cautious side. (Further, I propose the following experiment: find two or three nearly identical copies of an unlucky issue of Looney Tunes, and press one of the books ten times - heck, twenty times if it has zero effect - and leave the other as found, with any additional copies pressed a few times and one only once. Place the books in mylar and store them together under the same conditions, then revisit the books at regular intervals as time passes to see if there's any discernable differences. I suspect Ernie Gerber would've happily done something like this or likely grander.)

And, really, I don't want to be that guy...

Ugh. The evolution of this thread makes me ill at ease, as the curtain is pulled back further and further. All the hoopla surrounding each and every "new" roll-out of retread books with their higher grade means that the current practices will surely continue. And expand. The financial incentive is there to take THE BEST copies in our hobby and bastardize and damage them. They told us over forty years ago - cool, dry, dark. We drank deeply from the new cup of knowledge of paper preservation, learned from other fields like rare documents, and wondered how it applies to comics. Remember all those charts that started coming out in the late 70's and really proliferated in the 80's and beyond about the physical aging of pulp paper, the acid content, the effects of UV, and so on? Now, on almost a yearly basis it seems, the best copies of the most important books in our hobby are subjected to a barbarism of manipulation. Does anyone seriously believe this does not have a deleterious, long-term effect on the books, especially pressing?? Aging them beyond their years just to squeeze every last cent out of the book? And, on some level, I get it. These practices mean the price difference between a shiny new car or college for all three kids. Or even a summer house, in the more extreme cases. The auction houses are in on it, the grading companies seem complicit, and I believe too many of us tacitly encourage it. In the rearview mirror, the purple label proved a great deterrent to this unseemly practice. Now, that barrier seems at least as circumnavigated as the Maginot Line.

Good eye. It is a masterful composition.

I will also take Defenders 3

Take Green Lantern 30

Take Adventure 431

Take Don Winslow

That should probably scare a lot of people. I know it gives me cause for concern, even though my budget is comparatively modest. As the core group of those of us in our 40's and up (much older in many cases) loses interest and cashes out, there's bound to be a glut of material. I do believe there will always be buyers for the very best stuff, and perhaps at even higher prices than current levels, but when I look at kid after kid after kid who collects nothing, I can't see enough people filling the void to maintain anything near current price trajectories. Paradoxically, I think the covid phenomenon has helped the comic market stay surprisingly robust, even though that same anomalous force may prove a great makeweight in softening the overall economy tremendously, thereby leading to a vast market correction. Time will tell.

I remember those!! Didn't the Spidey have a yellow circle and wasn't the Hulk shown mid leap? I have a Thing sticker somewhere that was a full-size sticker on the back. The front ones I used. Edit: I found these from a completed auction on the 'Bay:

Excellent info, but I believe 13 ounces is the cut-off for first class packages, unless they changed it.

Great artifact! There can't be a ton of those around - Elvis on a 78. It's a perfect transition piece, as 78's represent more the big band and swing era and Elvis was a harbinger of the next great phase: rock n roll. I bet it sounds wonderful to hear, age-related wear and all.

Stellar books! They bring back memories for sure. I have quite a few of the ones you showed, but in very loved and well-read condition. They certainly present better in your grades though. I regret not picking up more in the 80's or 90's when I'm sure NOS copies were quite cheap. Do you have to pay up for copies like this? I only ask because I was shocked to come to these boards once upon a time and find that collecting high-grade Marvel picture frames was even a thing!!

First off, congratulations on a mad quest fulfilled! That graph is pretty remarkable! In that timespan, you could've bought two 9.0 copies of Action 1! Can it be Redskin 8 is really that scarcely traded?? I guess it's just one of those statistical realities that something needs to be last (like a high number Buzzy for Ian Levine to complete his DC collection). Why did you choose March 1952? It can't be something as simple as a birthday... There were so many books in those pre-code Atomic Age years - 426? You sure picked a doozie!

There's not a book you showed that I don't like! Great stuff.