lighthouse

I’m not really here to sell stuff. And by not giving that information early on I can be more forthright about how things are going (without my competitors having info they can use). But I’m sure I will eventually. Definitely if Greggy makes the trip to look at sweet sweet DCs.

A few more of the more interesting (to me at least) newsstands from that collection. A lot of the collection is less interesting. (I doubt anyone is actively chasing thirty newsstand variants from the 1997 Marvel Star Trek Voyager series). But at least a few were new to me

Finished publisher triage on that collection. Here’s all the Image newsstands. Lot of glare in that second pic. But the upper left is a couple Witchblade 7s and some vol 2 Youngbloods.

Still going through this newsstand collection I bought yesterday (2000+ issues set aside by a newsstand owner from 1996-1998). But here’s a couple I doubt are common.

I mentioned a 2000+ newsstand collection I bought yesterday (over in my other thread). Still going through all of it. But I can’t imagine there’s too many Bodycount #1 floating around.

Here’s a very small sample of the newsstand collection I referenced.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. I had 8 healthy days off in 2019. Worked 332 hours in December and another 309 last month. But there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. Yes it’s been profitable. Though the ROI hasn’t nearly matched what I could still make working for other people. But there’s a point at which the value of the existing back issue inventory climbs faster (without new acquisitions) than the business’ (or my personal) expenses. And that tipping point is probably only three to five years away.

We get customers who ask. And we also get customers who wonder why we don’t slab every wall book we have. But when we consistently sell raw Spidey 300s in the 9.2 to 9.4 range for $350-400, why slab them? We also have quite a few customers who don’t want slabbed books period. Whether it’s storage issues, the desire to make their own decisions about grade, or something else entirely, it’s a common refrain. The slabs we don’t expect to move well in the store, we send to MYCS and move them there on consignment. But if a 9.4 Spidey 361 or 9.8 Spawn 1 comes in, I don’t expect it to stay more than two weeks. If we get in a 1.5-4.0 of most any Silver key where the appropriate price in grade is $300-600, gone within a month. 2.0 copies of Silver keys are the easiest thing in the world to sell.

There will never be another Goth Princess. There’s only one Hammer. There’s only one Bug. There’s only one Goth Princess.

We are offered slabbed books virtually every week. 60% of them are signature series with ridiculous prices requested. I bet we’ve turned down buying Stan Lee SS slabs of at least 30 different comics he had nothing to do with. I lost count of how many Stan Lee NM98s I’ve turned away. Most of the offered SS books are at least someone involved with the book. But it’s “here’s a $100 9.2 signed by Bendis. Would you give me $400 for it?” A signature is like a pool in a backyard. There’s a small group of buyers who will pay extra for the house, but a much larger group who wonder why you ruined a perfectly good backyard. We purchased maybe 25-30 total slabs from customers last year. Most of those were in trade deals, where the customer could feel like they got 80-90% of value but we weren’t in the book that much.

14 total pre-1950 superhero purchased in 2019. Though we looked at a lot more than that. Only one of those was on stands before the end of WWII. A high grade copy of Captain Midnight 35. Probably 20-30 low grade funny animal books from 1942-44. But none noteworthy in any way.

Last update for today (probably). Bought a collection this morning of 2,000 newsstands from 1997-1999. Gentleman owned a newsstand in the NYC area in the late 90s and decided to set aside copies as an investment. Pulled 3-4 copies of any book he thought looked interesting, bagged them, and kept them at home. Lots of Marvel and DC obviously but also Image, Topps, Dark Horse, etc. He never collected any other comics. Just pulled some off his own shelf and kept them. His newsstand stopped carrying comics altogether in late 99, so the collection dies at that point. No real keys that I saw. Multiple copies of Nightwing 1 from 1997 might be the best of the bunch. I’d say the collection averages 9.4 with some better and a decent number he dinged in moving them around for two decades. But there were things I was happy to see. Multiple sets of the DC vs Marvel miniseries (which I can’t keep in stock as direct editions). The 97 prestige sets of Batman Bane, Batman Batgirl, etc which I didn’t know even had newsstand distribution. There are a few dozen Spawn and Curse of Spawn, and some DC animated titles. But lots of stuff that would really only matter to hardcore newsstand collectors. Like Silver Surfers in the 120s-130s. That sort of thing. It’s always fun seeing stuff I never see. Whether it’s worth a lot or not.

In order of copies sold, here’s the top new books from 2019. All these were at least 150 copies sold (so at least 12 a month if monthly). Some titles came out 24 times like Batman and ASM. Some came out just 5 or 6 times like Absolute Carnage and HOX/POX. The top few titles were well over 500 total. You might notice Amazing Spider-Man is there twice. I wound up with a separate item code for issue 1 of the Spencer run. That’s around 200 copies of issue 1 sold during the year. Some of these clock exactly with Diamond’s national reports. Some very much do not.

Still alive. Store still open. Still waiting on Greggy to come visit and look through some sweet sweet DCs. In 2019 we bought 455 comic collections. Totaling just under 70,000 books. Largest collection was 27 long boxes. Most were typical one or two box collections. With quite a few that were just a stack of 50 or less. Out of the collections, roughly 1600 silver age. Around 4500 Bronze Age (with around 2200 of those in 9.0 or better). Around 6,000 high grade 80s and several thousand worthless 80s. Typical large quantities of early 90s drek. Typical minuscule quantities of books from 1999-2003. Roughly 8,000 total from 2007-on. There’s obviously a giant quantity of drek books that we paid a nickel a piece for. But without buying 40,000+ of those, the others don’t walk in the door. A few counts of modern “keys” purchased in 2019: 77 - Spawn 1 26 - Infinity Gauntlet 1 26 - Lethal Protector 1 21 - Spidey 300 16 - Spidey 361 14 - Killing Joke 13 - Wolverine 1 (‘88) 11 - New Mutants 98 8 - Uncanny 266 6 - Wolverine 1 (‘82) 4 - BA 12 4 - EOSV 2 4 - Ult Fallout 4 There are lots of others I didn’t really track. Probably wound up with 8-10 each of the X-Factor keys. Similar counts on Batman Year One and Death in the Family issues. No heavy duplication in the Silver Age stuff. 2-3 each of most every marvel superhero from 1965-1970, heavier on avengers. 3-4 each of Superman titles from 1963-1970. 1-2 each on Batman, JLA, WF. Much lighter on Flash and GL. Virtually no Wonder Woman. I think we bought 9 silver age WW all year and maybe 20 Bronze. It just doesn’t come in. At any given time we are 2-4 copies deep on pretty much every ASM from 103-380. Rarely more than 60 issues total from 401-600. Category breakdowns for 2019 (percentage of gross sales): 32.5% New Books 14.0% Trades and Hardcovers 11.9% Funko 8.9% Modern Back Issues 8.8% Wall Books ($100+) 5.7% Apparel 2.7% Silver/Bronze Back Issues 2.5% Supplies 2.1% MTG Boosters 2.0% Gallery Figures 1.6% Manga 1.5% Statues 1.5% Select Figures 0.7% Pokémon Boosters 3.6% other I’ll try to be back in the next few weeks to answer more questions and tell some more story. I’m just not here on a daily basis like I was in 2003 so months will go by and I won’t realize I haven’t been back. I’ll follow this with a recap of new book title sales.

Definitely looks that way to me. I probably won’t be processing that huge newsstand collection until summer. We buy around 40-45 collections a month and that one’s just not high on the priority list, so it will likely wait until we bring on extra summer staff. But when we do I’ll get all the Oct99-Feb00 books together and confirm whether the $2.29 Cable books are there (and reconfirm there are no other titles with variants in it).

Alright, so I haven't bought the collection yet. But guy just walked in that has FF 23, 24, and 26 all as $2.29 variants. So that's two more checked off the list. I'm now up to 5 previously undiscovereds this month. And yes, the 22 was in the collection and it was regular price. It's a run of 13 newsstand FFs in a row, so I am pretty darn confident that (at least for the $2.29 test market) there was no variant for FF 22. Because there would have been one here. And since I know Donut will ask, no, he has no clue where they came from initially.

This may have been brought up already. But I've never been able to bring myself to ever let a customer buy one. When they show up in collections I make them disappear.

This certainly isn't the worst cover ever... but it has to be the worst editing job ever. Take a look at this beautiful pose for Spidey. Anatomy is great. It's a nice action pose. Costume looks stellar. Really conveys motion. It's everything you could want, really. I mean, seriously. The leg anatomy is fine. Proportions are fine. It's just all good. Except for the fact that his arm is blocking his head from this angle. Take another look. Follow that center line from inseam up the webs of the costume, across his sternum. It's very easy to see where his head would be. But unfortunately, the pose wouldn't show his face. Take one more good look. So you know what happened... editor complained. "Why the heck can't I see Spidey's face???" And the cover artist, who obviously DOES know how to draw Spidey. The anatomy is all there, after all. He takes a look at his "finished" artwork, and says, "fine..." And he takes this: And turns it into this: Of course the book is rotated 90º, so it's "slightly" less obvious. But wow... just... wow.

Unfortunately I don't know. The collection was donated to a charity after (I believe but am not certain) the original owner passed away. And there is little way of telling where the original owner was living during the time period in question, given that it was 19 years ago. I have found some scribbled notes here and there in the boxes, but no receipts, no addresses, nothing so far that would assist in finding a location. Most collections of this size I find several original purchase receipts mixed in, tucked in the backs of bag and boards etc. But on my initial pass I didn't find a single scrap of paper with an address on it. The charity received them almost a year ago but apparently my local competition showed no interest in acquiring them. And the director of the charity made it sound as though the books had been sitting idle for a decade before that, but whether the original owner was still alive at that point or not I have no idea. I did eventually find around 15-20 books that were Direct Editions. And they make no sense with the rest of the collection. There was a Carnage Mind Bomb, and a couple random Avengers from 1997, plus a few random DCs from 2002. Those were bagged and boarded, maybe a random garage sale purchase or something. There was also a dozen Bronze Age books mixed in, including a beat up Superman 233. I'm guessing those were the owner's "childhood collection" and they started collecting again in 1996 but exclusively somewhere that sold newsstands. Wherever it was, the newsstand(s) they frequented had a tremendous selection. There were Bone from Image, several Tekno titles including both the Gaiman and Nimoy series, several late-run Valiants, plus a pretty full complement of Marvel and DC. None of the newsstand books were ever bagged and boarded, just neatly stacked in file boxes. If I find anything with an address (or even a full name) I'll see if there's something to go on for a location. But so far I don't think there is.

I finally read the whole thread (I think... I skipped over some of the initial bickering before the thread got going). I won't be digging back into these books for a few days. But I did finish the initial triage of at least separating publishers, and in the process I found 6 $2.29 variants. There are likely more because I'd already filled a few short boxes with Marvel before stumbling across this thread and starting to search as I triaged. But it will be a bit before I can go back through them. All six of the $2.29 variants I found have the same $1.99/$2.99 indicia. Seems to jive with what was found before, where only the $2.49s had unusual indicia.

Fwiw, the Hulk 11 from this collection is $1.99 This is one of the least organized collections I have ever triaged... sigh...

Alright... I really do need to get to my Diamond shipment... but here's a 3rd one previous undiscovered... Interesting that the 9 (previously found) doesn't have a month in the bar code box. *shrug*

Meh... my Diamond shipment can wait...

So the X-Men 95 from this collection is a $2.29. Both I've found so far were December and both were $2.29. It's a rough slog going through these. 2200 loose books, all essentially unsorted, just loads and loads of fun.