jimbo_7071

Drill to drill.

My advice would be to disregard eBay sales when looking at GPA. I don't even trust the ones that stick.

You're preaching to the choir!

Gorillas to gorillas.

Running away to running away.

Menacing shadow on the wall to menacing shadow on the wall.

Menacing shadow on the wall to menacing shadow on the wall.

I seldom read comic books, but I don't collect for profit. I enjoy looking at the cover art, and I can enjoy doing that while the books are safely protected in the slabs. In an ideal world I'd have a high-grade slabbed copy of every book and a lower grade raw copy to go along with it so I could look at the interior art. I have damaged raw comic books before even while trying to be careful, so I don't like to handle anything expensive or high grade.

This one was a Gerber white-space issue but it isn't rare; there are 24 copies in the census. It does appear to be uncommon in high grade.

You guys are talking about the eBay sale like it's definitely a real sale. The operative word is eBay. No one knows whether any eBay sale is real; eBay is full of fake sales by guys who want to pump up the prices of books or who want to find out what the legitimate high bidder's max is so they can set a buy-it-now price on another venue. It could be a real sale, but I would never assume that. Again, it's eBay.

Blasted with a weird ray as a blonde looks on to blasted with a weird ray as a blonde looks on.

Bow ties and and sweater with a letter to sweaters with letters and a bow tie (skipped Ernie) AND shackles anchored to the wall and floor to gymnastic rings anchored to the ceiling (Weird Tales).

@lou_fine is that you in the red cape?

The Nelson Rockefeller of comics to Dwight D. Eisenhower on a comic.

Last issue to last pre-code issue.

Tunnel to underground maze.

Shooting at an octopus to shooting at a vampire.

There were a few of books that I was interested in in the last ComicLink auction, but I skipped going after them specifically because I didn't want to deal with FedEx. ComicLink doesn't offer any options other than FedEx.

One man bound in a car to two men bound and about to be in a cauldron.

The list keeps getting shorter. https://www.clickondetroit.com/entertainment/2023/04/10/al-jaffee-longtime-mad-magazine-cartoonist-dead-at-102/

I posted this one in the Mac Raboy thread, but don't think I've posted it here. The seller in Britain didn't ship it in a box. It came wrapped in bubble wrap sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard, so of course the slab was damaged and will have to be replaced eventually.

Yes. I don't venture over here to often, but Rob Liefeld is such a polarizing figure that I couldn't resist. (I can't say I like his artwork, but it does stand out—I have to give him that.)

Prices were manipulated once a secondary market sprang up—and they continue to be manipulated—but the collecting of comic books began when some collectors started buying them off of the stands in the late 1930s, before a secondary market even existed, when most people were just throwing their comic books away. That's the difference. In the case of Signature Series books, CGC basically invented that hobby by creating registry sets, giving more points to Signature Series books than to Universal books, and declaring that books with autographs on the cover were not to be penalized grade-wise whereas no one 30 years ago would have considered a comic book high grade if it had an autograph on the cover; it would have been considered defaced. If you had told me back in 1993 that you had gotten the cover of a comic book autographed, my first thought would have been that you had some actor or actress autograph a dollar-bin comic with a photo cover. No one would have sought an autograph on the cover of a valuable book. (I'm sure someone here could post an example to prove me wrong, so let's just say that it would have been very uncommon, shall we?)

Villain with red skin to villain with ghastly white skin with black splotches.

It's entertaining, that's for sure. It's amusing to see how easily people can be manipulated into wanting and spending money on things that it would never have occurred to them on their own to want. The market for collectible comic books developed organically, but the market for autographed comics didn't. It was basically created by CGC's marketing team. Thirty years ago most comic book collectors would have been disgusted at seeing a comic book autographed on the cover. If someone wanted an autograph, the person would have gotten it on a splash page, probably in the margin so that the artwork was unaffected. (The thought of a comic book cover being autographed by someone other than the actual cover artist or an actor appearing on a photo cover would have been considered absolutely absurd.)