Michael Browning

Completely agree with both of these comments. I tend to discount 'great stories' in favor of 1st appearance books of key and semi-key characters. That's just where my collecting focus has been for the past 20 years. And Spawn #1 was the beginning of the Chromium Age in my book... Having been one of the people who thought they were going to retire on those 1990s premium books (yes, I'll admit it), I think the age after the modern age should be called the Fool's Gold Age.

Yeah, that's definitely one I have never seen in the wild. Nice! And, while I know it's not entirely new to look for these scarce 1990s issues, it isn't something done widely in the comics collecting community, at least not like collecting first appearances or silver age or things like those. I enjoy finding out about these scarce comics because, eventually, there will be a wider audience collecting them and I want to be able to say I was on the ground floor for this niche.

A lot of the books that have been listed on this thread as tough to find are books I run into a lot at comic shops that have back stock from the 1990s. In most cases, I find them stuck in boxes that haven't been looked through in awhile and in 50 cent and dollar boxes because most dealers don't think 1990s and early 2000s comics are worth anything at all. Those are the shops I like to hit up. Usually, I find scarce 1990s comics in them and trade paperbacks and hardcovers that are rare. At shows, I like to visit the booths that have tables and tables of comics for 50 cents each because there are usually a lot of scarce comics in them, especially because this is a fairly new collecting niche (I mean, who'd have ever thought 1990s comics would EVER be worth anything, right?) and those of us who do collect these rarities make up a very small community -- right now. I usually make my money back on traveling to a show and the ticket price by finding hard-to-find comics like the ones in this thread for cheap and selling them, either on eBay or to webuycomics.com. --- A couple notes: I buy Ghost Rider 93s every chance I get. It wasn't until recently that I noticed they are selling for upwards of $50 on eBay. I have also noticed that those GR 93s - and 94s - are getting harder and harder to find. And who would have ever thought Adam: Legend of the Blue Marvel would sell so high? A shop near me in Kentucky pulled all four of the issues out of their 50 cent box and just sold a set of the miniseries for $140!

Wow, I passed one up in a dollar box recently. I bought the later issues and left the 100...

They are printed to fool Batman/Miller fans into spending money on what they think is a cheap piece of Dark Knight artwork.

No, not a reseller sticker. I've seen a bunch of these. They're out there. I've owned at least one of them.

Actually, the color separations are NOT color guides. They are color separations. Color guides are xeroxes of the original art that are colored by the colorist during production. And, only the 3M transparencies are the real transparencies. The transparencies on ebay are fakes that have been produced recently. Buyers beware!

K Card Companies in the 1990's seemed to create errors on purpose to build up false hype Comic companies don't get any aftermarket money. ...but they do get people, the "speculators" buying. It's simple marketing. Many opt to do "short yet unstated print runs" only to in later releases, once the collectors drive up the prices of previous releases, then crank the presses full steam ahead and flood the market, so capture the greedy money from folks who horde. Comics saw that with Jim Lee's X-Men #1 and the whole 1990's speculation, sports cards saw that in 1987 through the 80's, 90's and Y2K, and later turned to the "elite" marketing of scarcity where single packs of cards can sell at retail for $500+ and there's a "chase" insert of potential cardboard gold, so to speak. It came to a point where with the "chase" cards, collectors bust open cases, boxes and packs, sort through the cards, pick out the one hot card they're looking for and dump he rest in the trash. Comics did that with the whole bagged sketch cover thing DC did this year or last year, and with these variants with 1:10; 1:50; 1:100; 1:1,000 etc odds that a retailer has to order tons to get the one rare book. So, a lot of time the common books go straight into the dollar bins. So, the comic companies are indeed raping the industry with short term greedy decisions instead of building a stable fan base and earning loyalty. There's less single collectors of books and more speculators who never read the books, buy multiples to resell and encase 'em in plastic. Comics are a commodity not to be manhandled and enjoyed by children of all ages, and it's mainly grown middle aged men who are the day traders. You're realllllly stretching. Like I said, they DO NOT get aftermarket money. They may get shops ordering more than they normally would for a variant but those (Shop owners, can you chime in here) situations are either purely personal in what they think will sell (speculative) or because a pull customer made an order for the variant. Comic publishers are in the market to sell comics and make money. Them putting out a weird variant does nothing to make the average person HAVE to buy a book. Most people don't (this place is not even remotely representative of comic buyers as a whole). If it makes people buy more, well...that was their decision. But, back to the specific example that started this (The Green Lanterns error), how would they be putting out fake errors and how would that benefit them AT ALL on a scale that would make even a dent in their bottom line? It's a silly conspiracy and that's why my response was dismissive. When the Justice League 51 error happened, I found 10 of them and bought em all. Did I make DC/Diamond/Books a Million some money? Sure. A tiny fraction of the money I personally made from flipping those, though. So again...NO...comic companies do not get to enjoy the benefits of the secondary market in any meaningful way. It might not even be DC, it might be the guys running the printers. Either way it's happening a bunch and someone eventually ends up with the copies they can sell. Maybe it's a pittance bonus for the employees... "here guys go sell some and head to town next weekend with the wife" .... who knows. Either way the value of that book will only be decided by speculators because there are no hardcore Green Lanterns fans as I said, the writing is garbage. The guys running the printers probably don't care what comes off the presses. Having worked in the publishing industry for nearly 20 years, the pressmen don't usually care what rolls off the presses, nor do they stand around hoping that a certain comic will be pulped and they can save a few copies to sell on the aftermarket. Most pressmen have so many printing jobs going at any time that they just look for errors on their part and they send everything through that looks good. All the bad stuff is called "spoilage" and is tossed into garbage dumpsters, either to be pulped or to be recycled. Here's what really happens: Occasionally, publishing officials order a few early copies for reviews and those are pulled so early that they are already out in circulation when an error is discovered. That's how these error copies get out into collectors' hands.

One crossover that I never see listed is New Warriors #73, in which Rom makes a one-panel cameo in a flashback of the original Torpedo's life and death. I do believe that it is his last Marvel appearance and his last appearance in his armor until the new IDW series came out. Here is a link to the original art to that page: http://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1339807

One of the biggest problems with finding and buying 1990s art is that MOST dealers disregard art from that decade and won't even sell it. Right now, 1990s comics do get a bad rap for being some of the worst ever published. But, they really aren't. But, heck, I've seen dealers turn away 1980s art -- if it isn't Frank Miller, John Byrne and Dave Gibbons -- simply because it is "too new". I know a lot of the older dealers are used to selling 1960s, 1970s and 1980s art, but I think they are really missing out when they turn away great 1990s art that is offered to them. I buy 1990s art when I find it cheap, because, one of these days, it's going to be for some collectors what silver, bronze and copper age art is to us older collectors. I do think there is a lot more of the 1990s art out there, but I think most collectors just think it's not worth anything and don't offer it up and dealers don't deal in it much.

Why would there be pencils if Janson light boxed it?

Re: My DD #181 page -- There are pencils that are on the board that you can see that fall just outside the inks in a few places.

My Daredevil 181 page definitely has Miller pencils underneath the Janson inks. I'm glad it was cleared up that Miller did put pencil to the board and then those pencils were inked by Janson on DD 181.

Vision #4 may be tough, but Vision #4 Second Printing is way tougher.

I thought so. I knew I'd seen that Linsner Thor had been posted several times. Michael Browning