Terry E.

Hi, I am in Australia and am doing Emerald City next March. Apart from bringing stuff to sell off when I arrive (mainly car stuff) one of the reasons was to get some high grade or high value Silver age DC's graded. I noticed that the form for applying at a Con is up for Wizard World New Orleans (I think it is January) does anyone know if CGC is doing ECC and if so do they have a limit on how many books they can take and roughly when will the application for the Con approximately be up online. Any thoughts appreciated. Thanks Terry

A dealer offered me a 7.5 a few months ago and I hope he still has it. (For his sake not mine) At the time I was after a really nice Iris page with her hair up like Infantino originally drew her so declined. Saved my pennies. It looks like an outlier but I grabbed a nice SC 8 of the same dealer back in July. It made me cry to pay it but I sent him and email just before another buyer and he came through. SC 13 is not just third Flash, but if you don't call the Challengers superhero (more of an adventure Sc-Fi crossbreed) then it is the third Silver age book. I was out at $6.2K but it was much stronger than I would have thought, or had hoped for. Those early DC's have very low numbers when looking over 4.0s. anyway enough of swimming with sharks and whales I will head back to the Goldfish bowl

Very nice for a 3.0

I had the top bid on that when i put in a tracking bid. I then looked at it and started praying I would loose. The Comic Link 6.0 today was much nicer and I just missed. I would have loved it but my wife would not have understood. Bought too much lately.

Yes, to both of those. Does it change my behavior. No.

In recent years with the significant person signing so much on a day the signature can look a little messy. The one above is great, but so many written across the middle of the cover in a rush. What does it really say?

A question to dealers or anyone else who knows. I am in Australia, so like many foreign buyers I have used dealers catalogs and now ebay and auction sites. I have noticed in recent years with top 50 SA books that often asking prices on ebay for BIN from dealers are above the curve for GPA or prior auction sales. Sometimes these books take a small discount to the price, sometimes they sell to an offer. Many times they disappear from the listing. Same dealer will then list others of that particular book (eg Flash 105) at different grades and then after a while they too disappear from the auction listing. These for example do not turn up on ebay as sold. So a question to those who know. Has the dealer found a buyer at a Con or from a want list, or maybe to another dealer, or is he just sitting for a while for the market to move up a little more ?

and of course by the time Marvel secret wars 8 came out you got to order them by the box.. for 30 is was 60c each but if memory serves by the time you ordered 100 is was at 30c each I remember a dealer slashing prices on Miller Wolverine 1 for a A$1 and also Spiderman 252, but lets not talk about some of the others I bought .. Ambug Bug anyone ..

Congrats. I hope you took some time to give it a good look. Let us know what it comes up as. and maybe the start of a small Flash collection.

There is also heaps of high grade DC non key stuff going though. If you are a DC collector there is lots to interest you (or in particular me).

Wow that is going to be fun to watch..

Yeah that "supply is plentiful" but those hoarding them and buying them up were buying anything. Bob is also talking 1960s vs 1940s, where many key books were just near impossible for collectors of that day to find. In the 1970s -1980s collectors had no idea how much 2.0-4.0 was out there until ebay arrived. Many dealers in the 80s were still amassing huge stocks of low grade silver age waiting for silver age to boom, which it did in the 1990s then it adjusted and is still adjusting. The dealers would not pay , much for it but were waiting for its time, which appeared to arrive late 80's spurred on by ever rising values in OSPG. Not sure if for these books the OSPG was creating the market rather than reporting it. Unless in very high demand, ASM 1-50 FF 46-52, Flash 110,123,139, Tec 359, you can still pick up low grade at a very affordable price. But not high grade. Yep people were chasing them but I am not sure about buying multiples off the rack as happened in the 1990s. I think looking after them so much better came in around 1968-1970. Which gave rise to a common dealer statement that "nothing after 1970 will ever be worth anything (comparatively) as fans had started to buy with the intention of keeping and not just buying, reading and junking. and final comment, I think in 1964 if you offered a fan 5 copies of ASM 14 or a 4.0 EC classic I am pretty sure which one he would grab. Even the people making Super Hero comics were waiting for the next crash, and never thought it would last. That may have been why it took Marvel so long to get on Board. Even Archie came back before Atlas/Marvel. Anyone just some thoughts from someone on the fringe of the big city scenes.

Seriously as someone who was reading super hero comics from around 1959 forward as a child and had friends at primary school then at high school I would say I had never heard of anyone buying multiple copies. Many waited until they hit the second hand shop and you paid 5c instead of 12c or gave them away. I was given a very good X-Men run from 1-10 and some early under 25 Spideys, and I passed them onto a Marvel friend who gave them away to a younger fan who sold them for 3c each to a second hand comic shop and then bragged about how smart he was. Alter Ego has a really good issue on the 1965 NY Comic Con which had professionals give a panel. I know Wessingher was one, I think Otto Binder was another, Roy Thomas was moderator, Marv Wolfman was in the audience. Stan worked a few blocks away but was too busy to attend (how times changed). DC gave full covers to the winners of the Masquerade (First Comic Con Cosplay contest) and I think eventually every contestant took away a cover or splash. Most fans were 20+ and although interested in the new super hero explosion, many believed that the high point of Comics had come and past with pre Code EC. Also most of these books even if you grabbed them new off the racks you were lucky if they would grade as a 9.4 on the day. Those racks were not friendly to such disposable materials. In Australia every now and then I find Australian editions that are 9.0 to 9.6 and I am amazed. There were rare individuals all over the world who really loved this stuff, and went to great lengths to make sure they had great books, but I never met one personally neither did my friends or did I ever hear about anyone meeting one. Sure I have read about them but never met one. I think what started to happen was that many readers as they grew older stopped lending them to friends and started to look after them in a more mature way. I am now glad I gave my early 1.5-2.5 comics away as when I came back in the 1980s I grabbed the best grade I could. Hard to do just from catalogs but the collection is way better than what it would have been if I had held onto that stuff. As a reminder I have kept a JLA 38 from when I bought it off the stands. Read by countless friends. A true 1.5 - 1.8 at best. It is a reminder of what comics in the 60s were all about. And I would not get excited by those hundred thousand print runs as in the 1940s Captain marvel was counted in the millions. Anyway interesting topic.

I was thinking about this in another way over the weekend. I was looking over the top 20 for many on that list the last high sale was either quite a while ago or it is a one off way over guide, 150-175%. Yeah the guide for many of the rare books (very few over 8.5) that are on the list is way off. Funny thing is the experienced dealers seem to have a better feel for these values than the guide shows. It may also be why so many books on ebay sold by dealers bear no relationship to the guide. The lesser experienced guys don't want to sell too cheap, so whack a high price on it and then wait for the guide and other auctions to move market expectation higher. and on another note about overseas buyers. A certain dealer makes regular trips here bringing slabbed and unslabbed big dollar books (at least $10K+ figures). There has to be a market here or he is not going to waste those airfares. I have also seen books routinely turning up on our local ebay or at Cons that were never sold here new. 10 years ago they just were unknown but they have now been here in such numbers that the are trickling into our second hand market. Not nose bleed dollars but gradually getting there. There are now 2 top 25 on our local ebay that were never sold here and they are not costed at guide either. So final point, the ranking is pretty close but the dollars are only a guide.

Thanks for that. My thinking is that Broome's villains, starting with Cold were super powered and Infantino added the eye appeal. Superman's villains were thinkers. Toyman Luthor, Batman's were also thinkers, warped thinkers but thinkers. Villains in the 40's and 50's were supported with a team of crooks, the hired muscle. Cold was a stand alone guy with a super gun. It took a while to take root, (was it Schiff's) Batman were still fighting aliens on strange worlds. Marvel's villiains followed that path. Vulture, Lizard, Sandman, Dr. Ock, Dr. Doom. The villain was front and centre. not a gang leader. Kanigher's stories were right out of the world of Wonder Woman I think that run of Cold, Mr. Element, Dr. A, Mirror Master and three issues of Grodd, was what made Flash a success and separates him from his 1940s counterpart. That Flash - super-hero, vs Captain Cold, colourful super powered crook was the formula that so much of what followed was based on. and whether Marvel would have done what they did without the Success of the Flash we will never know. apart from that it would be 105 then 123.