FlyingDonut

Sent in a bunch right at the beginning. Unfortunately they're all gone - I could have paid for my car if I waited two years:

GS X-Men 1 9.4 White

Incredible Hulk 181 9.4 White

ASM 121 9.4 White

ASM 129 9.4 White

Green Lantern 90 9.4 White

Star Wars 1 35 cent 9.2 OWW

MINE is bigger!

No, MINE is bigger!

No, MINE is bigger!

No, MINE is bigger!

THere's a pretty good discussion about that line in the current CBG. A reader wrote in that GL should have told the guy to blow, because he saved the world a bunch of times and didn't discriminate on skin color when he was, in fact, saving the world.

I'm surprised Metropolis isn't suing crusty.

I'd be looking for raw Hulks from about 210-315 for the following reasons:

1) They are HARD to find in grade

2) NOBODY bought them (Peter David talks about how when he took over Hulk with there were NO letters to the editor)

3) Right now they are VERY cheap relative to other Marvels in the time period. You can probably pick up a full NM run for maybe $150-200 (if you can find them).

Doubling or tripling your money is a lot easier when you're paying $2 each...

you should give Supa one of your NM Daredevil 81s!

Just to clear it up, here are my reasons in order of importance:

Shipping damage, improper packaging and cost.

I agree with you - but here, buy from who you know and you shouldn't have any problem. If you're buying from some slappy who has a 4 feedback, they won't know how to pack books. You could always buy from ME, or sully, or drbanner, or darth, or anyother number of people who know how to ship. Personally, if somebody says "zoned postage rates" for a single comic, I don't buy from them. Also, shipping a single book to Canada is CHEAP - approximately $2-3. A CGC book to Canada runs about $8 (US shipping $6.95 with delivery confirmation).

2) Insane Price Spikes and Drops (NM DD 131 - $40 at shows, and $500 online).

Yes, but there's also the converse - if you're looking for solid mid-grade Silver Age Marvels, just as an example, you will pay 50-70% LESS on eBay than you will at a show. Trust me on this. Unfortunately I am well aware of this discounting. Also, you're only referring to the super-hot "book du jour" - when that pops, other books tend to drop. For example, I'm putting together a mid-grade run of Crime Suspenstories for myself. I just picked up a VG #1 for $125, which is a $400-500 show book, so I'm pretty happy.

3) Over-Grading compared to Seeing the Comic Personally.

There's not much you can do here, again, buy from people you know and trust - I won't buy from anybody without a picture, and unless I know them or they've got bigass feedback, I won't buy a NM book AT ALL. That being said, every now and then you get lucky and a book comes UNDERGRADED. That NM 9.2 Star Wars 35 center that didn't meet reserve at $3,049? I sold it to the seller for $1380. I paid $220 because it was raw graded a VF.

But overgrading is a problem - and for big books, I might almost agree with you that a show is the better way to go.

4) Price Resistance to "Comic Show Book Flippers".

Not sure what you mean here. I'm a "comic show book flipper" - buy stuff at shows and sell it online. Is that what you mean? Again, just don't buy from people you don't know.

5) Scammers (vast majority can be avoided).

Agreed.

I think what eBay has done to the comic market is to dramatically drive DOWN the price of mid-grade books, while pumping UP the value of high grade books. I don't think the people on this board (and I'm sorry for the generalization) sell/buy enough NON-CGC books to see the price fluctuations that I see daily.

Also, the day of pure "comic" shows are almost over. Its all "multimedia" now - read some of the horror stories about San Diego, for example. Don't get me wrong, I love shows. I just don't like paying three times more for something at a show than I would online.

The board's gotten too damn serious

A little levity - how about some titles that just couldn't get published today...

like this one:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=714613817

or this one:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=715812410

or of course, from my personal collection:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=716475881

just a bit of funning. Any others?

Rom....

Three more:

Sandman 50 - by the way, what ever happened to the guy who was supposed to be selling all the art for that book. There's a page I really want and there was a listing a while back saying all the pages were going to be listed. Curious.

Swamp Thing 53 - I'm cheating, but the whole Batman "get the F@#$ out of my city" bit is tremendous.

And, I can't believe I forgot this, the best Superman story of all time: Superman Annual 11 (the Alan Moore "birthday" story). GO AND READ THIS BOOK.

1) "The Death of Captain Marvel" from the Marvel Graphic Novel series.

2) "This Man, This Monster" from FF 51

"If you were buying comics in 1975-76 you would know this and quickly realize that the New X-Men is a Modern phenomonen that had little or nothing to do with the Bronze Age."

Sorry, CI, but on this one you're wrong. At least in the Chicago area, the "New X-Men" were the absolute hottest thing out there from at least X-Men 96 on. As an example - I had a booth at the Chicago Comicon in 1977 (I was 12, that's a whole other story) and my friends and I sold all of our X-Men for 3x and 4x Overstreet Guide (which, admittedly, at the time was about $2 each).

I can tell you stories about buying and selling X-Men 94s at Chicago shows for good money before Byrne came on board. Here's the bad one...I passed on the original art for the cover of X-Men 94 in 1980 for $200. Too much money for my 15-year-old wallet... .

But I agree that GS X-Men 1 is too late for the Bronze Age. I'd go with Conan 1. I'd put the end later than most, Crisis 1 and Secret Wars 8.

Amazing Spider-Man 121 - the end of "innocence" in comics. I can't go with the Conan/Marvel Spotlight concepts because they didn't really go anywhere. The beginning of the Bronze Age was the change of an era.