Glassman10

looks just like my 9.4

8.5 upper left spine and slight dusting on the back.

I had an ASM 16 CGC graded that was only slightly nicer and it was a 9.0 Mine did not have the very small chip on the right, some tiny ticks and a very small color break but otherwise, ...What's to not like here? Bob Storms was happy to get it.

Higher Grade? Not likely from what I now know. start following the board for " Buddy can you spare a grade". It's fairly brutal but it will key you in to reality. Follow it closely and you'll learn a ton. . I had my entire ASM collection downgraded by a pro I really respect today by a full point on every one based on page color. Hard, but real. I sold every book I had except an AF15 which is consigned. I kept my JIM and Thor for my son. I feel enormously relieved and sad at the same time. In my mind , it was a lot of books. True for some, not for others. I bought every one off the rack for the most part as a teenager.

the market has really been the final arbiter on the grading companies. Reality has said that the prices paid for books graded by CGC seemed to always command a better final price. Stripping it all away, a consistent grading helped determine the monetizing of the book and eliminated many disagreements as to true grade and relative value. Once it was perceived that CGC was being accepted as the widely accepted judge, based in verified sales , the toothpaste was not going to easily get back into the tube, regardless of what promos might be offered by the competition. Now that's not to say that any of the graders can have a bad day, or a varying day. I see books with CGC grades on them that have me scratching my head quite frequently but all in all, CGC is stable in its assessments. I would simply say that two points is a lot, but it's also not that much. Better to always buy the book, not the grade. I think I would prefer a harsher grade than to to get into an argument that wound up with the book returned.

3.0 -3.5 The photo doesn't show the spine and the book is seriously rolled. The "A" in Amazing fantasy is actually going around the edge. The color breaks are really numerous. I don't see that book pressing.

8.5-9.0

My father in law insisted we were "stewards" not really owning but carefully preserving . I like that notion, not unlike the Hippocratic oath "First, do no Harm." The people cutting up AF 15's for ebay sales bother me, I have to confess. As a kid, I just bought what I loved off the stands. All that stuff is worth a lot now but it will never replace the infatuation of a child. The contrast? Some of us never threw out anything. Woo Hoo!

My mom did that too in the latter 1950's. It's why all these books are so valuable today.

I found mine in a box of comics in a school bus in a wrecking yard in Santa Fe in 1967. Other notables in that box were a bunch of X men, an Avengers 4, an ASM 14 and a bunch of strange tales. Remarkably the AF15 was in very nice shape and slabbed out as a 5.0 after being cleaned up. The Avengers 7 was in far better shape as was an ASM 16. Most were kind of ratty but there must have been 50 books. The yard owner knew I liked comics and said to just take them.

you're bad

well, I get that. I view an off center cover as a production flaw as I view staples that either failed to attach or were never there in the first place or were crooked as production flaws too, but I know how that gets treated up in the magic world of 9.0+. SInce I see AF15's such as the 5.0 Bob had as phenomenal examples of the book as a 5.0, and I see 6.0's littered with chipping down the entire cover page, I have to assume the perfect looking one had some serious other flaw bringing it down. It could also be the case that the grading fee is based on FMV and the more that is, well.... the more that is... In older books, grading gets peculiar anyways. AF 15 is just the posterchild. I have an ASM16 9.0 and it's a really nice book but I can't help thinking that if it was printed in 1975 that it would not get that grade. In the Corning Museum of Glass, there are bottles from the roman 1000 AD period that everyone marvels at. I think in reality they have survived this long simply given the fact that so many were made at the time that a few surviving is not that big a surprise.

And Bob is the one selling the book. He'll get the physical copy when San Diego is over but the description is up on his site. . All he has now are my iphone shots which are marginal. I really enjoyed our conversation on the phone ten days back. I believe he's looking to drive up here to see the rest of the collection so we can consider what else to slab. Great references!

Money is a very strange thing. At this point, the $8000 dollar rolex is still dead in the water but the $250K rolex is two years backordered. Some people buy stuff just to show someone else that they can. That's a strange mind game. Back in December, my son finally asked me if he could see the collection that had been in the house for 45-50 years and I said it was fine. He asked if he could read the unslabbed AF 15 which is the one I found in a box and I said OK. We took some pictures of him reading it and he put them on Reddit. He had 800 responses in one hour, most claiming it must be a reprint. 800 in one hour tells me the book is in no danger of crashing at all. Back in Dec, I think an AF15 (5.0) slabbed was around 25,000. Last month a 4.0 went for 35K. That doesn't sound like a crash to me. The part I continue to not understnad with the book is how Marvel chipping as extensive as some of these books have it can pull as high a grades as they do, especially when there are many non chipped examples around. But I don't think Hulk 181 can ever be compared to this nor can Iron Man 55. It was a very innocent time in comics. The story line was ridiculous, the villains not very villainous but Marvel tapped something that no one else had touched. Super heros with emotional issues. Hal Jordan never had no stinkin issues! There's no crying in comics! Oh wait...

well, with a good presser, they stay together if the staples are sound

you get it now. It's a closed loop. What happens next is determining who says what FMV is. Is that GPA, or CGC or... what?. I had my AF15 graded and it's a 5.0. In January that was estimating at about $25K with GPA and seems like a long time ago. The group that is selling the book for me says it's actually a lot higher and the auctions aren't even a good indicator. No matter how you look at it, it's going to cost you a lot. By the time you've looked at pressing, which does something similar and then grading along with the insurance costs sending it both ways, , then add on the auction house fees which in some cases include both a buyers and and a sellers premium, you're going to see a lot of barnacles on the underside of your boat.

At this point, it might be nice if CGC issued a formal statement on this board about what happened and what measures are being taken to insure that it doesn't happen again. In grading my best understanding is that once a book is graded, that grading is double checked by someone else and affirming it. Maybe they should think about process on shipping using the same methodology. At one point in Santa Fe , We sold a sculpture for over 7K and our employee dropped it going out to the parking lot. You have to ask that person exactly what they were thinking about when there should have only been one immediate thought in their mind..

well, my point is that comics from the '50's are already pretty pricey since the mom's of America determined their relative scarcity by chucking the vast number of them into the landfill as they were printed. . . There are indeed key runs that retain value and appreciate but I think just storing them in a box is a great way to have a sad surprise down the road. Mice ,Water, Heat.fire, every one gets mentioned here as a sad demise. Buying those comic runs will not be cheap. Buying recognizable comics in great shape and slabbing them seems to be the way to go if you're looking at it as an investment. Slabbed books aren't much fon for a kid. I don't quite know where you might find a loose box of comics that just happened to have a lot of keys in it. You can try yard and estate sales but it's not easy at all. Then you can be amazed at how a perfect book has great value and a dog eared one is close to worthless. Oh and I left out Mildew...

Bob has it right

If well stored, they probably won't go down in value but there's a lot of ways they can. Water, fire, mice, humidity, warmth,nuclear holocaust blah blah blah... Making the assumption that things will go along without care is no guarantee of spiraling profit from the venture. Before Moms were caught throwing this stuff away, your proposal had merit but even those Mom's were busted by 1970 and there just weren't a lot of scare surprises out there. If it's the case that the child will be totally pleased with the simple time capsule, I like it. If you think it's passing on a nest egg, not so much.

4.5. It has a lot of issues. I don't think it would be wise to slab. The color breaks are probably the worst but the spine ticks are substantial as well as the corners. It's pretty dirty and also poorly centered. It too is one of my favorite books.

I'm with you on this. I fail to understand what the point of putting someone down gets you. Peole aren't required to comment here.

the corners hurt it. There are some issues around the upper staple both front and back but they're hard to read. I would think an 8.0 . I sold an 8.5 recently that was perfect in every way but for a tiny back cover stain. I had two copies I bought back to back off the stands and never noticed the tiny stain. They were both graded at the same time. The other pulled a 9.4 and it's pristine.

I would say value first and condition second. It's not cheap to send a book off for slab. At the least look in Overstreet and see what the value could potentially be. Another source would be any of the retail houses and looking at their listings of what they would sell it for based on condition and slabbing as well, Personally, I see no point in slabbing a book that sells for $30 dollars but people seem to do it. Hope springs eternal? I'm inclined to think it has to have a $100 dollar minimum value or you're just churning money- and then you can't even read it.

really important to remember that GPA does CGA books almost entirely. There's another world out there. Go to websites for places like Metropolitan, Comiclink, HighGrade comics, sources like that. If I sold an AF 15 (which I'm current;y in the process of setting up) it will never have it's sale recorded in GPA. It's outside that system. Many people don't want to have to pay buyers and sellers premiums and you have options. One auction house charges 8% to the seller and 19% to the buyer as the premium. That's a lot of money.