Get Marwood & I

Do you think that is part of the problem though, Randall - the fact that we give CGC Management an easy ride over this, and are reluctant to tackle individuals? I know this is the magazine thread, but I have a small group of books that I want to submit to CGC. One is an AF15, and it seems I have little choice but to get it graded if I want to achieve anything like its worth if and when I come to sell. The other books are a rag bag of obscure variants, that I would get a kick out of seeing enter the system / census. But I face a year or more's wait if I do go ahead, and during that time I face the anticipation of all the things that could go wrong. What would we do in CGC's position? They start a company, and it all starts to go very well. Good product, reasonable turn around times. All is good. Then the submission floodgates open and they begin - naturally - to struggle. You can't magic up an expanded operation, with new, experienced staff to work in it, over night. But what can you do? What options are available, to bring the TATs for 'natural' submissions down to a reasonable level? What would you do? One thing they could do, is to stop touting for new business. Do you get those e-news emails from CGC? They're so full of everything that is great about CGC - all the wonderful things they are doing, in and around the hobby. Here is an extract from the latest one: Now, how many submissions do you think that those signings have brought into the operation? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? What impact do they have on the TATs, do you think? Why would a company that is struggling with volume seek to artificially increase that volume? Does that make sense? It does - but only if that sense is the sense of killing the competition, tying your customers in and keeping the money machine rolling whilst having a great time associating with the rich and famous. So to bring it back to my opening point, where are the consequences? If CGC Management - the individuals - can run the company this way, and face no consequences for what has become an outrageous wait time for their product - a wait time that in most industries would precipitate their demise - why should they do anything other than what they are doing? Get as much business through the door as possible, regardless of the company's ability to handle it. It just keeps coming! Every day that CGC Management's inboxes are not full of complaints, is another day the juggernaut rumbles along without anything changing. Maybe it would help if some of the key figures in the process - the big submitters - started to be more vocal. Why do you hate to point the finger, Randall? If you're upset, angry, annoyed, indignant, dissatisfied - point the bloody finger! The chap below, splendid though he may be, is the President of the company that is facing this criticism. As President, does he not owe it to the customers of the business he is President of to at least respond to that one accusation - the accusation of touting for new business when the existing business is itself too much? Is that a reasonable responsibility to expect him to bear? With great power.... @mnelsonCGC Be honest though, Randall, as you read that last part, a little part of you is going "Oooh, he's having a go at Matt", isn't it. And a little part of you thinks it's wrong for me to have made this post, doesn't it. Petty, somehow. Unprofessional. Rude, even. If so, that is why this problem will continue. That is why they win. Because there are no consequences for bad performance and the owners are under no pressure to do anything about it - let alone explain it.

I have all eight of your prizes chosen as follows Andy: Prize #6 Star Wars (John Tyler Christopher covers, mostly exclusives) group of 9 - Chosen by @pastandpresentcomics Prize #7 Avengers 4 (1993 reprint) CGC 9.6 (bottom right corner is cracked, sorry) - Chosen by @jbpez Prize #8 Broncho Bill #s 5,7,8 (western Good Girl Art covers) - Chosen by @jbpez Prize #13 All American Men of War 5-pack #86, 87, 88, 89, 90 - Chosen by @Motor City Rob Prize #14 G. I. Combat 5-pack #122, 123, 125, 126, 128 - Chosen by @Squirrel Guy Prize #15 Our Army At War 5-pack #170, 171, 172, 174, 175 - Chosen by @Frederic9494 Prize #16 Our Fighting Forces 5-pack #76, 77, 78, 80, 81 - Chosen by @Motor City Rob Prize #17 Star Spangled War Stories 5-pack #138, 139, 140, 141, 142 - Chosen by @HighStakesComics @CGC Mike

Maybe they stamped the UPC area to invalidate the barcode?

Nicely done.

And if it helps, the book doesn't look natural to me, in your two pictures, one of which is out of focus. I'm not surprised the buyer is unhappy, based on what I can see.

I can tell McFarlane art anywhere. It's that awful.

Hulk 340

Indeed. Although I think he meant fucsillymes

He's authentic, I'll give him that. The only terrifying rabbit I knew was the one in a story that I wrote in school. The teacher wanted us to write an alternative ending to Of Mice and Men. I had a 100 foot rabbit arrive and kill everyone, shouting "I will have my revenge!" That was quite scary. I don't know why I'm telling you that, though, so here's a horse, instead.

Or the cover artist was having a hypo, the silly diabetic!

Mee? Ow? Here's the Goodwill Batman #237, reprinted by JMC Press for distribution in the Philippines by Goodwill Trading: I've not seen that NBS stamp on any of the Philippines reprints myself, let alone the US originals. Ganni will know more.

That we are

What a terrific post that is, Reggie, tucked away out of sight on this forum. Recap or not, I love it

Here's a question then, for those that know better. If these blank UPC books were meant to be in Whitman bags, hence the blank UPC, how does a bloke in England find boxes of them loose in a sweet shop store cupboard? eBay Listing text: 5x COPIES (From a discovered batch Of 125 copies) Of MARVEL COMICS ISSUE #271 THE MIGHTY THOR (MAY 1978) Great condition for comics 43 years old (ex newsagents stock unused/unread) So here’s the lowdown on THESE particular comics for sale..... During a recent house renovation/clearance a box was discovered stored away in a room containing a batch of 125 identical copies of this comic issue #271 of Thor ALL in amazing condition for their age (published by Marvel 43 years ago May 1978) The comics originally belonged to a gentleman who once owned/ran a newsagent and the box containing these comics were all part of his excess stock, they have been sitting in their boxes/containers for over 4 decades now and so was an very exciting find to say the least!

If you have a lot of comics and want to reduce the number to maintain and invest in a smaller, more focussed collection, then by definition you have to let some go. Your options are to give them away, sell them or trade. The first option is out, as you want to invest in new books. So you're down to selling or trading. In my experience, it is difficult to trade, say, ten $1,000 books for one $10,000 book. You need a buyer who values your ten books over their one. That's a hard situation to engineer. And in trades, you often have to offer more to get the 'better' book that the other person has, and you want. And their one will almost certainly increase in price faster than your ten, individually. It only woks well when you have two books, of similar values, both with similar future potentials, which doesn't help you reduce the collection size. And how often does that pan out anyway, though? So the obvious way to do it is to sell. That clears away what you can 'live without' and gives you funds to reinvest without the complications of trading. You gather funds, you see a book you want, you buy it. For certain books, likely the ones you will want, it seems a certainty now that the prices will increase year on year until we all go up in a nuclear explosion or because the missiles fail to stop the massive meteorite. Or someone mucks up royally in a lab. This is why many say 'don't sell'. Only a fool sells! Thing is, if you don't sell at some point, you one day end up dying which can be quite inconvenient as far as your collecting habits are concerned. You have to accept that a book you sell today for $5K may get you $10K in a few years. If you wait a few years and sell at $10K, a few more years later and it's $20K. So you have to get over that inevitable escalation conundrum, sell, and be happy with it. If you want to put your thread plan into practice that is. It's really, really hard to see a book that you owned go from one figure to another quite stratospheric figure, usually shortly after you have sold it, after years of modest increases. Welcome to the hobby. So my advice is to work out if you have the stomach for selling that which may later quadruple, to fund your smaller, focussed collection strategy. If you do, crack on with it. Sell what you don't want, and use the money to buy what you do. If you do it wisely, any losses on what you sold will be offset by the increases of what you buy. Unless what you buy is Charlton. Which is what I did. But look, I'm wealthy in so many other ways, I like to think.

Well, I saved an email about the 26-27th Feb 2022 event some time earlier in the year and then forgot all about it. I found it again at 12:30pm on Sunday, and thought 'sod it', threw on my glad rags and hopped on the train. 50 minutes later and I'm in Olympia, in what was a considerably scaled down event, if the last two were anything to go by. Funny to see those 'No Time to Die' stands in the 2020 report. I only saw it recently (three times, as it goes. Good mood in that film). Anyway, no lengthy report this time - I wasn't in the mood - but there was a massive dinosaur in attendance, which might explain the lack of people: There were dinosaurs of other types too, looking glum behind those masks I daresay, as the queues for autographs failed to build: I resisted the urge once again to ask Sylvester what he thought of the current pile of unmitigated horse sh that masquerades as Doctor Who. I suspect he may have shared my view privately, but publicly would have mitigated the unmitigated. Talking of the destruction of the building blocks of ones existence, I toyed with lining up for a photo with Richard E Grant, who was one of the star attendees along with the Whitterer. I wondered to myself on what planet can those two people could share a venue where he hasn't played the Doctor, and she has. That's modern planet Earth for you though, isn't it. Always confounding expectations. CGC were there. Well, the UK contingent: I nabbed some freebies and a price list (UK Price Variant): I'm planning to stick the GEM 10 on a rusty stapled Charlton VG and sell it on eBay for six million. I'll let you decide six million what. Now, those who know me will know that there are elements of the CGC empire that I'm not overly enamoured with. But it seems I have no choice but to use them, if I want to finally sell my AF15 for top dollar. Pound, sorry. That's a task for the spring - send that in, and a few other oddities that will become the only copy on the census. For a laugh, really. I might do an unboxing video and take the Caine accordingly, sometime in 2025 (which is when I'd likely get them back). The comic content was low again, this time, but I did snag two nice upgrades of the Golden Key variety while everyone else was scrumming over Marvel keys: Gotta love a six pee gee key Talking of which, I saw a man open a door with a big nose at the venue. He'd forgotten his key. Shut up. So, that's that. It was a beautiful day though. Clear blue sunny skies all the way, and a pleasure to be out. It's nice to see all the kids dressed up. Not so nice to encounter the Chelsea fans on the way home though, on their way to an eventual 11-10 penalty loss against Liverpool. Rowdy they were, on the way there. A touch less rowdy on the way back I'll wager. See you next year. Or time, whenever the next one is.

This is a nice dual sticker: I suppose I should have posted it on Twosday, though.

CGC Mike advised me that the announcement is another 2-3 weeks away so we're looking at the latter half of March at this rate. Re your point, Beyonder, it will be interesting to see to what extent the submitter can influence the labelling, if at all. If you didn't want your book to be titled as something else, I mean.

Splendid. Not an easy book to find, that one. It will have an undated L Miller & Co indicia, if you didn't already know. Post a pic when it arrives

It was the loop to look at the rosette pattern of the printed screen dots that made me wonder. It had an air of reversing the polarity of the neutron flow about it.

Here's my old UK copy: The book is one of the Jan~April 1961 books which have the distinction of having the UK Thorpe & Porter distribution indicia details in all copies - pence and cents: