jimbo_7071

It was slabbed for the Nicholas Cage auction in October of 2002 with the provenance noted on the label, so the holder shouldn't have been too early, but apparently they didn't have a great process in place for esuring a proper fit. This book can slide around inside the holder as well. I plan to get it re-holdered, but it will have to wait until I decide to drive to Sarasota. I don't trust sending it in the mail. (I haven't been outside of Michigan since 2014, so it might be a while.)

Shrunken head to "Your Head For Mine." Superior horror to Superior horror.

Alien with green reptilian skin to alien with green reptilian skin.

Blonde woman in a red dress sitting in a graveyard to blonde woman in a red dress sitting in a graveyard.

Donald Duck plus wooden figure with a long nose to Donald Duck plus wooden figure with a long nose.

Amazing woman to The Maze.

I mentioned West's Catman 25 as one example. It sat on Metro's site at $1,700 for at least a couple of years (2012–2013) as a raw 9.0; it just sold for $21,600 as a slabbed 9.2. Even the WDC&S books that sold on Heritage over the summer went for staggering prices. (I bought one of them—for twice what I expected to pay.) I'm not convinced that all of these books are as rare in high grade as the census makes them look, so prices like that seem very risky to me. I guess the guys contending for those books can afford the risk much better than I can. The demand for early Tecs and Actions isn't going away any time soon, but for the more offbeat stuff that I like, it might only take a couple of collectors exiting the hobby for prices to come way down—which would probably happen just when I needed to sell, if I were to try to compete. I'm 46, and I know that quite a few GA collectors are 10 or even 20 years older than I am, so I worry that If I try to sell my collection in 30 years, many of the potential buyers for the books I collect might be dead or retired from the hobby. The thing is, where were these buyers with such deep pockets 8 years ago? It seems like there are buyers out there now who will pay whatever they have to to get a book without any regard to how the book has been valued in the past. There have been strong sales before—for instance, the Mile High copy of Target 7 sold for $57,500 back in 2003—but those record-busting sales have typically been limited to major books. Target 7 is an important book in the hobby; Catman 25 isn't; it was always one of the issues with virtually no demand. (That price for the Target 7 still seems mind boggling to me by 2003 standards. I have no idea who the buyer was; if I did, I'd probably try to get him to adopt me. I wouldn't be above putting on a onesie and saying, "Ga-ga, goo-goo" with a pacifier in my mouth.)

With what books are selling for now, I'm ready to call my collection done. I may sell a few books to fund the purchase of others, but I don't want to put more money in at current prices. The prices on key books don't surprise me, but the prices that relatively unimportant books are selling for don't make sense to me. I don't know how to estimate any kind of long-term value for anything.

What I'm wondering is, why are books that no one ever cared about all of a sudden selling for ten times guide? Who's paying those prices?

I was stunned by the final hammer price of $21,600 for the Catman 25. That was never considered a sought-after issue. That book sat on the CConnect site priced at $1,700 raw for a couple of years and didn't sell till it was slabbed. I thought about bidding on it, but it would have been a waste of time considering what it sold for.

I'm holding out for a 9.4/ WHITE without the period.

The four mil Mylars/Gerbers are very rigid, and GA covers are thicker and stiffer than the covers on SA and newer books. The edge of a four mil Mylar can catch the edge of a GA cover and cut through it like a razor. It happened to me once, unfortunately. Once was enough. (I would bet that even a 2-mil Mylar/Gerber could do it, although it would be less likely.)

I'm guessing that either you don't collect Golden Age books or you don't use 4-mil Mylars.

From Plant of Doom to a plant that eats people.

Walking with the dead to shaking hands with the dead.

Yes, great work! So much more important than anything related to collectibles. After all, which sounds better as someone's epitaph: "He helped end the world's 6th mass extinction" or "he spent a lot of money on comic books"?

This question is the reason why I never build runs! I only collect GA, and pretty much everything is expensive, so building a run would mean spending a lot of money on covers I don't like.

"If he had any idea what he was stealing, and how easy it was to trace the comics back to him, he would have tossed them in a dumpster to get rid of the evidence. They would have been lost forever.” I shudder to think about that.

I decided to check out this thread in order to find out what window bags were. (I don't collect autographed comics, but if I were to buy one, I'd want the autograph to be on the splash page, in the margin.) Every time a book is inserted into a Mylar sleeve, it needs to be sandwiched between two backing boards first. I learned that lesson the hard way 30+ years ago.

I wonder what the provenance of this copy is. Another local collector told me that there was pristine copy of Batman 1 that surfaced in the Detroit area in the late 70s or early 80s. I've always wondered where that copy ended up. To be honest, I think that the best copies of Batman 1 were locked into private second-owner collections forty or fifty years ago, so I think that there are still some stunning examples out there.

Bucky getting shot to Bucky about to get stabbed.

. . . to badly outnumbered earthly space invaders.

. . . to web.

Ghost to Spectre

. . . to unlucky redhead.