jimbo_7071

You might want to reconsider that "wow" after you've looked at the high resolution scans. For instance, the "9.8" Tec 167 has multiple printer's tears on the back cover, including one that's an inch long.

Moon craters spewing a slimy green army to moon craters spewing a vertically-challenged green army.

Yes, didn't he have to sell some things in order to keep paying his employees during some kind of disaster that caused a temporary closure of the store a while back? I seem to remember something like that.

That book is all about the cover, so I think you could still get a couple thousand for it as long as the cover is intact and presentable.

Most of the original Promise prices were bonkers! I was watching that one last night to see where it would end up. ($705, right?) I don't know if @MasterChief is still tracking Promise re-sales; it seems like there might be too many to keep track of a this point. The Promise grading was soft, but I'm seeing that soft grading on non-pedigree books now, too. The staple tears on the Boy 28 bugged me a bit, but they're not as bad as the ones on the non-pedigree 9.4 Tec 179 that's on Heritage right now. I cannot believe that CGC graded that book 9.4 or even 9.2. I could see 9.0 if it was perfect otherwise. (It isn't.)

Army staff sergeant destroying a tropical paradise with flames to navy commander and navy lieutenant about to be boiled over an open flame in a tropical paradise.

Bizarrely high prices don't faze me any longer. There are certain people out there with no patience and no impulse control. If they want a book, they want it now. It only takes two guys like that bidding against each other for a result like this.

Young Romance #1 You can't always trust eBay sales as a reliable indicator of a book's value. That was a buy-it-now price, not an auction, which means it only took one bidder to pull the trigger and buy the book. It's difficult to predict what it would have sold for at auction. Three much nicer copies sold of that book sold on Heritage in 2021: The pedigree Promise Collection copy sold in 7.0 for $2,400 (and people were paying a huge premium for that pedigree at the time). An 8.0 copy sold for $2,640. An 8.5 sold for $3,360. The kicker is that five months ago a 9.4 copy sold for $28,800, which was a bizarre price; I don't think many people expected that result. Now people are seeing that price in GPA and pricing lower-graded copies higher. If you want to sell, now is probably the time to do it. I don't think the bump that books are getting from that 9.4 sale will last forever.

I thought the off-register red on the #3 would hold it back. I was interested, but I wasn't willing to go above the $7,200 that it fetched last time. I thought that I would have a shot at it at that price.

Operative word: supposedly. I think the only reason why they caught Jason Ewert's micro-trimming was that they before and after scans of some of the books. I very much doubt whether they can catch micro trimming at all. That doesn't mean that this particular book has been trimmed; there appears to be a little more artwork showing along the bottom than the other copies, so it might be untrimmed.

Book of Death to Register of Death.

#10 horror comic dated '53 to #10 horror comic on the stands in '53 but dated '54.

There are a number of things that concern me when it comes to the legitimacy of books, slabbed or raw. CGC had a very hard time catching micro-trimming; I doubt very much that they can catch it 100% of the time now. And what about micro-color-touch? It's just a matter of time before a Mark Wilson or a Jason Ewert comes up with a method of color touching spine ticks that will pass a black light test. I would not be surprised if that has already happened.

That was an early auction, but they had already made a splash with the Nick Cage auction in October of 2002. (I still have that catalog, but it's low grade at this point. )

That blurb was somewhat disingenuous. CGC was still fairly new in 2002, and the foks running HA's comic auctions back then had to have known that there were many nice raw copies out there. The eBay sellers are still doing the same thing: slabbing $5 comics that most people wouldn't even bother to bag and board and touting them as "single-highest-graded" copies. I always take advertising with a large chunk of salt.

Is it something new that HA allows that? They wouldn't let me re-route delivery of a comic back in 2018 or 2020. Both times I had to drive to a FedEx warehouse, which was extremely difficult to manage with my schedule. One of the two times was in the middle of one of the worst snowstorms we've had in recent memory. It was my only chance, though, because it was a Saturday—the only day when the hours they were open corresponded to times that I was off of work—and if I had waited until the following Saturday, I would have missed the deadline to get the comic, which would have been sent back to HA.

Man! I've heard about list-making as a common feature of OCD, but that's taking it to a new level! Are you sure you're not on the autism spectrum, @sfcityduck? LOL Just kidding! I think all of us collectors are a little OCD.

Were those packages sent registered mail, though? Any carrier's packages can be stolen if they don't require a signature. With registered mail, if the addressee doesn't show picture identification and sign for the package, the package doesn't get delivered—full stop. You've mentioned that you live overseas, so your situation may be different. When I worked in the corporate world, we always used DHL for shipping outside of the US.

I addressed this issue with them just last year. This was their reply when I asked why the shipping costs were so high: "I see that you have not purchased anything over $1500 since 2013, which is now our value limit for shipping via Ground service. Since this order exceeds that amount, Express delivery service, which has proven to be more reliable than Ground, is required." I then asked them about why they weren't using the post office because FedEx was known to be unreliable compared to the U.S. Postal Service: "That hasn't been our experience with Fedex. All of the carriers have issues from time to time unfortunately but we've had the best luck with Fedex overall." They did not offer the option of using the post office even though I made my preference clear.

I've had all packages from Heritage and CConnect sent to me via USPS for a long time now. CLink only ships by FedEx (and they charge $65 to ship a book if it's over $1,500), which is why I've deprioritized CLink as a vendor.

FedEx and UPS are both bad, but FedEx is the worst. Registered mail is many orders of magnitude safer than either. The safeguards they have on registered mail are very strict. Parcels are signed for and put under lock and key every time they move. Even priority mail from the U.S.P.S. is safer than UPS or FedEx. We've all heard of U.S.P.S. employees throwing away junk mail on occasion so they don't have to deliver it, but that's extremely rare. The U.S. Postal Service doesn't hire just anybody. If you have a criminal record, you can forget about getting hired, and they don't hesitate to fire people for unprofessional conduct. You can even be fired for "conduct unbecoming" when you're not on the job. FedEx and UPS do not screen people to that extent. So far as I can tell, they'll hire anyone who breathes.

Redhead on a white horse with red-and-black feathers to redhead by a white horse with red reins and a red-and-black halter.

This isn't technically graded, but it says "Brand New," and to me that means NM, and I see some flaws that could take it below that. Walt Donald Duck and Friends

Dark brown pages are kind of rare, so there's that . . .

I'm usually working till about 7PM CT (8PM ET where I am), so I wouldn't be able to put in any live bids on the earlier lots. I could always put in proxy bids, but I don't ever remember being the high bidder on a book when using a proxy bid.