jimbo_7071

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.

Old codger on drums to old codger in a tuba.

Red flames to red mist.

Locked in to "let's get the **** out of here."

"It was re-covered by the publisher, Rural, without page 1 of the first story." The first page of the story was probably on the inside of the original front cover. I think that that was common with early '50s Fox books.

Any hobby that is connected to pop culture has a shelf life. I do think that comic books will eventually tank, but it is very difficult to predict when. I don't think collecting comic books will still be a mainstream hobby fifty years from now, but it might have twenty good years left. I think of the money I put into comics as money spent on a hobby. Some people spend money on hobbies such as travel, horseback riding, hang gliding, etc., without expect to recoup the money that they've spent. I'm single with no kids, so I don't have to worry about what my assets will be worth after I'm gone. (Even if I had a family, I'd consider myself free to put a little money into my hobby, but I'd have to put more of my money into safer investments.) The comics that will tank first are the Bronze, Copper, and Modern books that are fetching hundreds or even thousands of dollars right now. There are too many raw copies out there. The supply will eventually be much greater than the demand, even for key books like Hulk 181. When I seen books like ASM 252 or ASM 300 selling for hundreds of dollars, I have a good chuckle. Every collector that I knew was hoarding multiple copies of those books when they came out—bagging and boarding them right off the rack. The number of high-grade raw copies out there must be staggering. Most of those copies won't find a market at anything close to current prices. GA superhero books will survive the longest, but only the ones featuring mainstream superheroes like Batman, Superman, and Captain America. The auction houses see the writing on the wall. They're already transitioning out of comic books and into video games. The collectible video game market won't last forever, either, but it's much earlier in its life cycle than the collectible comic book market.

April of '41 to April of '41.

That copy appears to be low grade—probably a 2.0 based on what I can see in the picture. I think that that comic book came with paper dolls on the inside. If those are intact, then the book is probably worth around $20. If the dolls have been cut out, then it basically has no value (except maybe $2 or $3 as a reading copy).

. . . to Veronica and Archie and Betty.

My original point, though, was that many people aren't bidding with respect to the "value in the marketplace." I have lost count of how many times I've seen a book sit unsold with a buy-it-now price only to have a comparable copy show up in an auction and sell for two or three times as much. There are many buyers out there who view auctions as competitions that they can "win." How else do you explain Gary Keller? I have no other explanation for why he was willing to pay as much for the Mile High Green Lanterns as he did. (I'm not sure who the underbidder was on those books.) For instance, I believe that he's the one who paid $11,352.50 for the #13 in August of 2007. The next sale of that book was in August of 2010 for $7,468.75. The next sale after that was in May of 2014 for $4481.25, and then it sold in February of 2015 for $3,824, 33.7% of the price that Gary paid for it. In the 2007 sale, I strongly suspect that only Gary and one other bidder went past $3 or $4 thousand dollars. And whether they were aware of it or not, I would submit that both of them were bidding because they wanted to "win." In Gary's case, "winning" likely provided some temporary gratification but ultimately cost him a lot of money. Any time you bid in one of these auctions, you would be well served to remember that you may be bidding against someone who wants to "win" in order to satisfy some kind of insecurity and who may not even be considering the likely resale value of the book. I've gotten pulled in more than once, but I've paid ridiculously high auction prices often enough that I've learned to walk away and wait for the next copy any time I see a book going above my honest pre-auction assessment of that book's value. I should say that I am able to walk away most of the time; it can be very hard to do during an auction—especially in the Heritage auctions where you only have a few seconds to decide whether to bid again, and you have a red warning light flashing in your face. The psychological manipulation in those auctions is obvious yet still effective because the HA folks prey on people's desire to "win," which is rooted in the insecurities that most of us harbor.