Get Marwood & I

Hear, hear! Thanks also to CGC for stumping up $850 in prize money and to all those people behind the scenes helping with book selection, spreadsheets and other stuff As I've said before, you need two things to do well in these contests - judgment and luck. Judgement will get you to within a grade increment or two of the CGC grade, assuming that they haven't made a total hash of it. And then it's just luck - the toss of the coin as to which grade you cross out and which you submit. Anyone who gets an overall score of 20 or thereabouts - a one grade over/under average - has done fantastically well in my view. Good luck to everyone still in the running for the top three places

My only note of caution, born of experience, is to not sell if there is any doubt or if there is no pressure to (space, money, interest, ill health etc). Hold each item in your hands, and see what it says to you. What does it mean to you. How hard was it to obtain. Is there a story attached, a connection. Could you get it again if you wanted to (unlikely with OA, being single existence items). I've applied logical premises to selling things and have been utterly convinced in the moment that it is the right thing to do. Then, sometimes years later, someone comments on that thing that you once had and all of a sudden you can't fathom why you sold it. All the reasons that you wanted it in the first place come flooding back and you feel a frustrating sense of loss. A big part of collecting is the thrill of the chase. Sometimes the significance fades once you've got it. But it can just as easily resurface once you haven't, and are then reminded of it. I doubt there are many here on this forum that don't feel like complete idiots for selling one thing or another, and not always because of subsequent price escalation. I've sold thousands of items that I purchased in the pursuit of something that I hadn't really thought through properly at the time. I don't miss 95% of them. Just make sure that you don't eat too far into the good stuff - selling can create it's own excitements after all, that you can get carried away with - and then realise that you've sold the very things that you actually, deep down, loved. Good luck.

Ta. I never finished the <100 run in the end but the 100 x 9.4s looked a treat. Wish I'd kept them now. Indeed. Study each book carefully, Bick. I won quite a few 9.4s from Comiclink and other sites back in the day that looked worse than some of my 8.5s when they arrived. And CGC can't grade for toffees nowadays, so make sure the book in the case makes you happy. It's a hobby, albeit an increasingly expensive one, but it should always be fun. Good luck!

One out of two aint bad! Glad you finally found it paq

This one

Lots of things to consider here BickO, and money and availability will of course play a part. Some people like uniformity in their slab collections. By that I mean the OCD type of need for, say, every book to be an 8.5. Some people prefer to get the highest possible grade they can afford, regardless of how it looks. Some go for eye appeal over grade. It's up to you really - there are no right answers. When I was putting a Spidey run together, having completed the raws, I went for 9.4WP for 100-200, 8.5 for 50-99, 7.0 for 20-49 and so on. I couldn't afford 9.4s for the early books but the 8.5 run especially looked lovely. Lets face it, a properly graded 8.5 looks more or less brand new anyway so why pay those enormous, disproportionate increases for each successive grade increment? If you hold it in your hands, and it gives you satisfaction, you've done good. Do what gives you satisfaction. Unless you're Mick Jagger of course in which case you won't get none.

That's Sherrie Hewson isn't it? Where's Mollie!

I only stroked her, your honour!

I got points and a warning for that once

As the former resident of 221B once famously said, "Once you have eliminated the impossible, start Googling"

How fast do you think you'd have to run to lose a comet then? Pretty fast I would've thought. I'm not sure he's up to it to be honest. He's not even wearing trainers.

Det er endnu et fint rod, du har fået os ud i!

I was going to say "That's no way to talk about insert artist's name's art" but I couldn't find out who the artist was. The GCD let me down, Daphers.

Sorry if it has already been mentioned and I missed it, but has anyone tried ringing them?

I'm hoping it's him, firstly so paq gets closer to being reunited with his old comic story but also because Samm did some of the pence variant covers that I've posted about

Mrs Slocombe worked at Charlton!?

Samm Schwartz? "Schwartz's style is distinguished by his loose, rubbery character poses and skinny, simplified designs." "Schwartz, who pencilled, inked, and lettered much of his own work, specialized in stories featuring Jughead" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samm_Schwartz And Saam isn't too far off Stan in the cloudy memory....

It's annoying, isn't it, that fragment of a memory that you just can't place. A quick search revealed a Monkey's Claw, that granted 3 wishes, but that was far too late. My only exposure to Archie is in relation to the UK Price Variants so I don't have any real experience to draw upon here. I'll just be Googling the same terms and periods that you undoubtedly have. Maybe these two might have a better idea of who the artist might be, if not the specific story, from your thinner description @archiecomicscollector @ArchieComicsMan

I'm happy to have helped but it's the owner of the Flickr page below that deserves the credit, Eric: https://www.flickr.com/photos/56781833@N06/5864273406/in/photostream Liking a challenge, all I did was interrogate the images of the book on Google and track them back to source. Most tracked back to 'artist unknown' pages but one image tracked back to that Flicker page with the answer. So the Steve who owns that page deserves the credit (although he may have picked it up from someone else of course). Once I had the name Leo Morey, I Googled further, found more of his work and tried to compare the signatures. The signature on the book isn't the clearest you could hope for, set against a dark background, but you can make out some of the characters when comparing it to other signatures of his from around the same time. I'm no expert on this era, or on identifying artists, but I could see the similarities in some of his work. So I'm glad you got your answer Eric. I'm Steve too, but the Steve who should get the credit is the Flickr one. Looking at his photostream, he looks like the sort of chap you'd want to invite to your FB group / IG pages: https://www.flickr.com/photos/56781833@N06/ Good luck if you decide to send him a message

@ericjmz Does this help, Eric? https://www.pulpartists.com/Morey.html I think I can see the three line M, O and Y if I compare the Dying Earth signature to another piece of his work?

This:

I can only say that the variations exist in the NDS date window - I didn't ever go down the road of ascertaining whether different versions appeared in the same book. Being in the UK, it was hard enough for me to obtain NDS/MJIs in the first instance, let alone multiples for variation checking. Maybe @awe4one might be able to confirm this.