grebal

In please. Thanks Andy and Shin.

Congrats!, bud. I'm glad your great book was appreciated for it's strong attributes despite that tiny defect.

^ Agreed, with the movies they could have gone in so many different directions and still kept the core aspects that made FF unique. As members have pointed out, the whole 'who owns this property?' has certainly complicated efforts, but the scripts of every FF movie ever made have been mediocre, at best. Could've gone with Super Skrull impersonating people (look at how well Mystique has been treated in X-Films), invasion from space (Avengers already did it, but since when has "already did it" mattered to Marvel?), Wyatt Wingfoot the athletic American Indian (meta him up a bit), Agatha the old lady au pair Witch (needn't be as trippy as Doc Strange to turn witchcraft into a subplot B or C story), a villain team-up of Subby and Doom, or Frightful Four. Sure they don't own Inhumans or Warlock, but heck they might have blown those anyway, look at how unimpressively they depicted Galactus, or lackluster Surfer was. Ken: I must read Hickman run, thanks for the recommendation. When I said '90s or last decade' I mean the decade preceding this one, not the past 10 years, thank you. No Man: I think most of the Lee/Kirby run is pretty solid, which I'm pretty sure runs through the early single-digit 100s. But when it comes to stand-out great, you picked a good start: some really fun reads starting with the mysterious Inhumans showing up, although there were very few outright duds prior to then (Infant Terrible in early 20s comes to mind). Oh, and Steppin Razor, in that other thread speculating on future demand, I meant to say "contains (what may be flawed) assumptions", not "flawed assumptions." Oops, but you got the point of my guess, so no harm done.

A couple of thoughts of maybe why FF has so lost it's roots. With most successful comics I've noticed a good blend between the 'soap' parts, and the story/sci-fi parts of. Peter Parker had his love life and Flash Thompson, DD had his Froggy and Karen, etc. Imo, with FF they lost sight of the soap part of FF that used to keep the story together and interesting - the core family aspect. I never minded the substitute muscle for Ben Grimm, like Thundra or Medusa or as things went on She Hulk etc., because the family aspect remained central to story. And poorly depicted some characters and villains - e.g. Doom is a good character that's been poorly handled in the movies and blundered with the Reed-Sue-Victor love triangle or overdose of teen angst. For FF most of the storylines/villains tended to draw more from sci-fi and monster, than the usual comicbook fantasy (galactus eating worlds, annihilus/negative zone, watcher), which might not translate as well to film. Anyway, the movies s u c k e d pretty bad, and the FF comics in the 90s and last decade that I've skimmed through also were pretty mediocre, as I recall.

I've read this argument before that the total number of comic collectors will dwindle in the future, even believed it a while. but find some flawed assumptions - 1 fewer people will have the 'collecting gene' or the future collectors will pick something other than comics, 2 a smaller % of population who collect comics will not be offset by growing size of potential people who might become collectors - e.g. more women collectors, more and more people being born, more and more non-US people buying comics, etc.

Lame. Please don't delete me. : (

Quarter of a million just for one comic book? nobody does that! ; ) Nothing much new to add what's already been said- my budget at the time and recognizing (or being lucky) a good opportunity has impacted my run collecting the most. When I'm "on", and buying, I'd shop on ebay for auctions ending during dead times (Monday morning through Friday morning) and buy opportunistically even if the auction lot had more books than I needed. I ended up with lots of extras that I later had to sell, but crossed off many from my run-list needs. "Keys," know the rough market range for prices, and buy when the grading seem accurate or dealer I knew from past experience had strict standards. I've since added this board to ebay for my shopping, and also checked a few local shows with mixed success. "Runs," have become easier to fill in in a collecting universe with fewer run collectors, but on the flip side it's harder to sell my doubles and other "extra" copies I've accumulated. I have money now, but when I didn't have so much (or was so conditioned to being a cheap a s s since I grew up in 70s with at most a few dollars a week to spend) I focused mainly on value and what I could afford at the time, so by the 90s I had most of my runs without several keys. After I got a real yob by late 90s I found ebay wild frontier at the time and filled in many of my gaps and even bought a few unnecessary (small) collections. When I returned to collecting a year ago I filled in a lot of the remaining keys, sold off a few doubles, but even today still have a few runs that are incomplete (e.g. no FF 4, ASM 1 or AF15) or have Golden Record Reprints of a few (like FF 1, or JIM 83). Maybe I'll shop for the missing early JIMs still on my list (87, 91, 92, 94, 95). Those are hardly keys, but each would set me back a hundred or two for decent upper midgrade (or 20-50 for lower grades). And e.g. I love X-Men but still don't have 1, 3, 6, 8 and a few others to 42. I think at times I avoid completing all my runs; knowing myself, it could prompt me into new and expensive fields.

Pressed?

Wow, congrats, bud, it deserved it. !

Pass please. : ) Greg

He only did the inks, but you can see some Bernie in there.

^That's what I think it is, kryptoSpidey. But wait for pros, I've gotten stuff like this wrong before.

20 20 20 20 15 bonus (3 or more bulls) total 95, I though. Sending in grades now, Blowie, thank you!

Heh. Good thread. Sorta. I'll bite, too many copies of Grimm?

I'm with the others, Flash looked 6.0 until the back cover stain (supposedly CGC "hammers stains") so reduced guess to 5.0, and had the DD pegged right at 9.2 but reduced guess to 9.0 because of the math behind the scoring as a sorta 'hedge.' And the splits and missing corners and tears on the FF struck me as an avg. copy. Bummed that comicdey didn't participate (he won or placed high last tounrey).

When you click on image and get popup image, at bottom left is "full size". Click that button and then image opens in new page (for me, or it might remain on same page some browser). Then click the new image to see actual full size.

Every time I've used refund part I got back a % of the amount refunded, although I don't always do the math, and I've only used it a handful of times since I started in Nov (just the one big round). Also, every time I've reduced price via the BO/BIN price from a bulk buyer to avoid the extra shipping charges, the fee was proportionately lower and I don't think I was penalized - although again, there was just a handful of these. I'm not that big or active.

It complicates things, which is never good, but you can work out the policy of refunding the double-dip on ship charges, or changing a BIN to BIN/BO and accepting an offer from multiple-buyer that reduces cost of second item by ship charges. To combine auctions is a bit trickier, usually I'll just offer free ship for auction winners that also buy a BIN listing (shows a dedication that I'm willing to eat a few bucks for, and generally leads to higher auction totals if they try), and work it out with the invoice, or the part-refund approach. I dislike the added complexity, but like the immediate payment approach to BIN. The real problem that can't be easily 'fixed' is that to maintain "top rated" discounts on FVFs the clock starts ticking on the ship-time once they use the BIN, which means they can't wait a few days for auction or you fail the "upload ship tracking" metric (think it's 90% on time) and risk losing the discount.

I bought a copy from Dale Roberts (thread last Dec) that was graded VF+" and I agreed. Here's a link to the scan. http://boards.collectors-society.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=9698358&fpart=115 Your I'd guess 8.5+, maybe a bit better.

5.0. Good luck. ! Never can tell with key bumps or strict/loose phases.

I thought Rob Moore sold that book here, did you sell one too?

Amazingly, while poking about I came across a list of the TOP 100 AMERICAN COMIC BOOK ARTISTS that omitted any mention of Jim Starlin. http://www.acomics.com/best10.htm

Didn't work the first time, tried again. Sorry for the duplicate, didn't see the SME 16 already posted - and my SME 15 is too deeply buried at the moment for a scan. So instead here's his follow up to the Drax and Thanos intro:

After the sagas you left us the odds and ends. But that's cool too, here are some:

Well chronicled in the AF15 thread, not to put a damper on your enthusiasm.