MAR1979

I sure do wish that registry set had pictures The Enterprise Logs NN, actually all volumes are just as scarce in 9.0 and above as the 2, 3 photo-back covers. For the reason I mention that see my sig pics

On some of the Comic Book threads on this forum there are folks who have waited 8 weeks for Heritage to ship. Now imagine you waited even as little as 2 weeks to pay them? Heritage would be slinging threats and perhaps even threatening legal action. If they are short-staffed then plain and simple they need to hire more people. Heritage brags incessantly about how much money they are making in their emails, on their website and other advertising. If they are telling the truth about their auction revenues then they can easily afford to hire a few more shipping people so their customers are not waiting a month or more to receive their purchase. OK now its time for all you Heritage lovers/defenders/apologists to launch your attacks and tell us how their customers do not deserve to have the merchandise they paid for and how a Powerful auction house which operates in Texas is entitled to do whatever they want. P.S. My first rule of collecting is don't use Heritage, however last year I did break that for an item and paid for it via wire-transfer first business day after auction ended. I called them after 15 business days had elapsed and stated unless my item was shipped in 48 hours I would be opening a fraud case with my large financial institution (they also happen to be my employer). The item was shipped later the same day. Heavy handed on my part most definitely but well within my legal rights to do so. If more of their auction winners took same type of action then perhaps Heritage might not be so stingy and hire a few more people for their shipping dept?

The preUnity Valiant was excellent. It was like being part of a new universe, pun intended. Wasn't same for me after Shooter was dismissed. Then worse the wizard fan boys and speculating flippers jumped in. Then style over substance ruled. My favorite issues were: Solar 1-10 Shadowman 1 X-O 3,4 Harbinger the XMAS issue i forget the number

Perhaps. Still given your statement what the reason to purchase their slabs? Lower re-sale value? More difficult to sell even with an initial lower cost price tag? I'm looking at 3 of their 9.8 slab's in my hands right now they are 9.4's on good day at best. I want to be wrong as consumers benefit from strong competition but if the books in the CBCS slabs I own will be a difficult lower ROI sale if I ever need to, they why bother with them?

At this juncture however I've not seen that, although I will be very glad if the market ever reflects that. If that does occur I'll be glad to sub them books and again consider purchasing theirs P.S with only 2 exceptions, every 9.8 CBCS I've viewed in hand, at least 150, I've easily found they deserved lower grades. With CGC the thousands of 9.8 CGC's I've viewed in hand I feel that occurs approx 50-60% of the time. Which IMHO is still far too much. Still as mentioned I welcome a paradigm shift.

Yeah my speling sucks... You must have field day with "kav" I truly wanted them to not only succeed but take the lead. It will never happen. Perception among collectors is their grading is very lenient. I agree with that although over least 5 years CGC perhaps has started to seep closer to their level. That type of perception is virtually impossible to change. The only way would be for the other outfit to do that is to make a drastic and ruthless changes in grading. Drastic to the point that 9.4's would in effect become the new 9.8, with 9.8's being a difficult grade achieve compared to CGC (or in effect what PSA now does to their non-large submitting entities and non-sister businesses) . That will cause a loss of business for quite a while as perception very slowly changes. They will never do that! Nope I'm not an insider however does not mean I'm not insightful....I've interacted with Borock (happy with that spelling?) enough times over the past 23 years to see that perhaps he should be doing other things at cons other than trying to or bragging about a quick flip of an art piece or comic for a few hundred dollars. I truly hope one day there is competition that creates a paradigm shift in Comic Book Grading. Borock's current outfit had their chance and IMHO blew it. Whatever they have now or had already reached is their high water mark in terms of hobby perception.

A good example of this comes from Trading Cards. For Trading cards the early 90's was the "Junk Wax Era" for Comics it was "The Glut" which in effect was a "Junk Comic Era". Junk due to huge press runs, not in term of production or artistic quality although all could apply on some books. The 1990 Fleer Jordan PSA10 hit a pandemic high of $1000 it's now down to 275-325 and sinking. Will likley be under $200 by end of year and could even approach $150. Sure card dealers are still happy to get $299 for a high pop previously low demand card issue of which they are sitting on stacks of, with many more in the PSA queue, however those who purchased it at 500,600,700,800,900,1000,1100 are fiscal losers. Many of those who purchased the 1990 Jordon the last 18 months, by most accounts, were novice card collectors. I see 1991 X-Men #1 (and Spawn #1 and X-Force #1) as same thing as the 1990 Jordan, if you got 'em sell, sell, sell now to the rubes before they eventually view a population report or notice how many are always concurrently up for sale on eBay.

"I'm not a Boy Scout..." -Bill Mastro, 2021 You are a convicted felon! Literally a criminal. My only question for Bill Maestro is how the prison experience was on his hole that begins with an A

You post reminds me of all the places around my home i have planted hardwired NAS' Love the part about under the Kid's beds although can not imagine that being "safe" for most

I don't de-slab and space is an issue. At first I got creative with existing space but that lasts only so long. I now get rid of other stuff I was storing like DVD's (after ripping them full iso style w/multiple backups) to make space. At current rate of consumption my guess is all space I'm willing to use will be depleted by 2023. To slow that down I've decided I will halt my submitting of Comics to CGC (150 books in 2021). I don't sell comics and no longer feel the need for validation of what I own. That should extend my need for space until 2025/2026. As for reading comics it's 2022 there are other ways to do that without touching my books I've been doing it since 2010 actually. On a 12.2 Tablet its very similar to having a Comic in hand. My Chromebook is somewhat like having a full sized magazine in hand. I also can pinch and stretch a touch screen in order to adapt to my optical shortcomings. Its very rare when i can't find a Digital Copy of book I want to read be it "official" (approx 75% of the time) or through a more dubious method

Agreed. In 2021 I sent in one book that had a COA. Then placed it and the original sleeve in back of the slab's sleeve when I got the book back. Logically I don't understand the COA in the case of my book. I mean it's pretty obvious what it is if one has the book in hand.

Even $7 would have been waaaay too high. Raw Mid-Grade of an easy to find book - perhaps it has WP

Huh??! How am I blaming the publisher? Its a comment on the Comic market and that DC is not undervalued. DC and Marvel to best of my knowledge have zero concern with the value of their Silver age back issues. The memories are old and I was very young, it could have been #69 as I recall it was a Kingpin 12 cent cover and obviously no idea if it would graded same as the JLA? Still even a standard run 1967-1972 ASM would have been a wiser choice than a 1968 JLA, even if the ASM was 9.2 or 9.4 vs 9.6. Most major Marvel character tiles non-key issues from 1968-1970 also would have been a better expenditure than the 1968 JLA. Which brings us to: My only point is for folks not to fall into the trap of thinking DC high-grade "scarcity" equates to being undervalued. DC is appropriately valued for its demand, which is significantly lower than Marvel. P.S. At least when I moved to Comic Art most of what I picked up early on from 1999-2002 was 70's Marvel. I figured correctly that the DC stuff would stay lower in price and when the Marvel stuff jumped I did pickup a decent amount of DC. Now all 60', 70's Marvel art is sky-high and still rising and much of the DC is doing the same, at least for "name-brand" characters or artists. 80's stuff is now becoming insane as well. For me luckily the lessons learned stupidly buying DC books in the 1990's allowed for intelligent choices with Comic Art as that decade ended.

As part of my on-going ( off anf on) comic and trading card slab scanning project the box containing my Machine Man's (or is it Machine Men?) floated to the top. #1 was self-submit of $2 raw purchase I made in 1998. It can't been seen in the scans but the gloss and on this one is amazing so I could not care less that the wrap is not perfect. I do wonder if the slightly oc wrap did prevent it from receiving a 9.9? Its one of the nicest books I've ever submitted, razor sharp, glossy, perfect spine and flawless back. #10 My favorite Machine Man cover. While the title was before my time it was my first childhood Machine Man In the early days of the CGC census I noticed there was only 1 9.8 copy and hoped it would come up for sale - well it did, 15 or so years later... I ended up winning it for less than the expense of grading. Perhaps the OW/W pages turned off the WP crowd but to have the only 9.8 in original old school CGC Slab Label is priceless to me.

Technical grades do not equal how nicely a book may present. For me personally a Perfect Spine is more important than a "Perfect Wrap" or White Pages (if pre-1980 books only)

I think it's great news for collectors. Hope there are more and more a comin'. I want to see enough out these and for sale that the book going rate is $98 Canadian Dollars or less

I use E Gerber 914M2 - expect pandemic super-gouging on these. Perhaps it's bit OCD, but I feel slabs do look great in them

Yes pics are very welcome. thanks

Thanks I missed "drawer" part I used Collection Drawer boxes for raw comics for few years and so did my Buddy at my LCS (I recommended them to him after I first got mine). The problem we both had is after about 18-24 months they bowed out. Which then made them difficult to open and made them look like . Given the cost it was very disappointing. On mine they were only stacked 2 high as well and they advertise you can safely do 6. When my buddy closed his shop (my LCS) to semi-retire he found a 4 collection drawers that were unused. He gave them to me. I figured I'd give them a 2nd chance. The pic represents the first that started to bow outwards and it was after just 6 months. Note that its only stacked 2 high and it is the top box.

Its the E Gerber box that is Branded for them using their large logo - think White Label type deal. I personally like my stuff as free from advertising logo's as possible however most other people don't seem to care Although I can drive to Hotflips' Warehouse so the convenience is really nice.

I like the heavy plastic BCM bins great for stacking these will take the weight. These are 'The Cadillac" of Graded boxes IMHO: https://www.bcwsupplies.com/graded-comic-book-bin Please note the due to pandemic interrupted supply chains Vendors on Amazon and Ebay are heavily gouging. BCW is out of stock. These bins in most cases are double or triple what they were last year which in itself was much higher than 2020. The expectation is these will have a lower cost late in 2022 although even BCW for the ones they will have in April are asking 2x the 2020 price...:( Last time I purchased the BCW it was Nov 2020 and I paid $129.99 for 5 w/free shipping. The first one you assemble may be a bit of nightmare, for me everything after the first was easy-ish. There are also the eGerber graded cardboard boxes: https://www.egerber.com/catalog_comicBox.htm Personally I'd think risky to store these more than 2 high but I do lean towards overly cautious Again expect pandemic related gouging. Lastly in the cardboard arena https://www.amazon.com/CGC-Graded-Comic-Storage-Boxes/dp/B01M213QU4/ref=sr_1_7?crid=2ZC52W5DLZ1Y3&keywords=Graded+Comic+Book+Bin&qid=1643991354&s=office-products&sprefix=graded+comic+book+bin+%2Coffice-products%2C71&sr=1-7 I picked up some of those. They comparable to the Gerber and are made in USA. No logos a nice clean box.

Pressing not mentioned in the post. Is that speculative or confirmed? P.S. Agreed its horrible service, not customer service.

Yes but the TAT's last April (2021) were half what they show now. So it is customer terrible service as fast track books received by CGC April 2021 are not yet returned by Feb 2022. Has been noted CGC has a mere 20 graders, it's now 2 years of record submissions and record profits, the number of graders should have be doubled over a year ago. Seriously they are in a rather low-wage state and staffing-wise are seemingly operating in total austerity mode! How cheap is Blackstone? They did get more warehouse space but that is a literal (given their location) and metaphorical low rent move that provides no true value for the customer, if anything it lengthens TAT's. Because Blackstone cares deeply about you the customer and your future business </sarcasm> This is what happens when you have no true viable competition. We can thank Borack's flipper mentality for that as with a proper business model instead fast cash grab his new outfit could have been at same level as CGC at this juncture.

I changed the thread title to: "Fantastic Four 199 Marvel Special Market Edition distributed by Whitman" Marvel Whitman or Whitman Variant is much less wordy even it technically not 100% accurate. I really don't see "Marvel Special Market Edition distributed by Whitman" catching on. I think folks are going to have to deal with the easier to use 2 word terms and expect to see them stick which I believe they have done already

Peter Parker Spectacular Spider-Man 90 never gets any love On-Sale Same day as MTU 141. Peter Parker 90 is my favorite Milgrom Black Cat cover. While I'm not the biggest Milgrom fan I do have a soft spot for his Hulk covers. Specifically in the 230's, 240's, and 250. Something about them is comforting to me in that Grilled Cheese Sandwich with canned Chicken Noodle (or Tomato) soup kind of way.