jimbo_7071

I'd still call it high. Talk to some teenagers and ask them if they are familiar with Mighty Mouse. I grew up with Mighty Mouse—I had a "Mighty Mouse saves Dinky Duck" record that I used to listen to—but that character is no longer important. Pop-culture status is inexorably ephemeral.

The Planet 64 went up. It seems like the low-grade and mid-grade copies might be doing better overall.

I'm not seeing this one on your spreadsheet. It dropped from $2,340 to $1,431 (which was still too much considering that it has the worst cut of any copy of that issue that I've ever seen).

Those "sides of beef" look like dogs.

Rescued from Nazis to rescued from Nazis.

Happy couple consisting of a man in a suit and a woman in red to aghast couple consisting of a man in a suit and a woman in red.

I made a tepid run at the 6.5 Ibis #4 tonight but bowed out. It's a tougher book than the others in the run, but my interest was lukewarm. It sold for the same price that the Promise 4.0 copy sold for. It was actually the highest-graded copy; I think the cover stock on that issue was crummy.

I treat books like that as PLODs regardless of the color of the label, meaning I wouldn't buy one unless it was a scarce book and there was a significant discount relative to an unrestored copy in the same grade.

I am seldom at home when FedEx comes to my house, but the times that I have been, they have never asked me for I.D. I had to pick up my last FedEx package from a FedEx location, and when I pick up, they always ask me for ID. The girl at the drug store where I picked up the package initially refused to give it to me because the package was addressed to Jim, and my driver's license has James on it instead of Jim. She had never heard of Jim being a nickname for James. Everything else matched the package. They eventually released the package to me—after the shift manager called a higher-up for permission.

How was someone able to steal that big of a pile from your table? Were they all together in one box? Could they have been taken by another dealer, accidentally or intentionally, after the show?

Horror movies I like—the scarier the better. I guess I'm able to put those in a "fantasy" box, so the violence isn't real even when female victims are depicted. I grew up in a household where my mother was abused by her live-in boyfriend, so that's probably where some of my distaste for domestic violence comes from—but not all of it. I've also seen a few too many stories in the news about women being murdered by their husbands. Much of the bondage is in superhero comics, and you know that the victim is about to be rescued, so that makes it different—at least to me. Like I said, it's an emotional thing, not a logical thing. Violence against animals also bothers me. I don't like covers that show animals being killed.

Fish Men, Fish Men, Roly Poly Fish Men! Fish Men, Fish Men, eat them up! Yum! (Yeah, I know, it was Fish Heads . . . but Fish Men still works.)

Part of what bothers me is that the hobby seems include a misogynistic element that seems to especially enjoy and seek out depictions of violence—including sexual violence—against women. (I'm not referring to anyone on the GA boards.) Those people are probably the main reason why the general public has a negative view of comic collectors. I'm not thrilled to have people like that participating in the same hobby that I do, but I try my best to maintain equanimity when it comes to things that are out of my control.

Wicked female to wicked female.

Man-on-man violence doesn't bother me. I'm talking about a visceral reaction to realistic violence against women, so I couldn't care less about trying to defend my views. Violence against a woman via some zany contraption or violence against a woman perpetrated by a monster or creature doesn't bother me, either.

Knowing how many women have been murdered by their husbands is why I would never want a copy of that particular book. I'm fine with gruesome imagery that's fantasy-based, but I collect comics for enjoyment, and I don't derive any pleasure from viewing depictions of domestic violence.

I wouldn't know how to measure the consistency of the page quality determination. I suppose I could use an OWL card to evaluate a large number of books and then look for a correlation. Contrary to what some people have stated, there does seem to be a pretty good correlation between whiteness of the paper and suppleness, so I'm OK with going by the color. To run the same kind of experiment with books graded in earlier eras, I'd have to buy slabbed books from those time periods and crack them out (which I'm not about to do). This video makes it seem like page quality evaluation is fairly subjective.

The grading in 2021/2022 makes the 2011 grading look tight as ****.

When was it originally slabbed? CGC loosened their page quality standards in late 2005 (and made it known at that time). Based on the books I've submitted and the recently-slabbed books I've purchased, I believe that they must have loosened them again a couple of years ago even though they haven't said so.

I respectfully disagree. Many of the nicest second-hand collections in our hobby were built up in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and are still intact. As @Robot Man mentioned, most old-school collectors have not slabbed their books. Heck, many of the Mile High books are still raw. Some of those collections will be passed on to heirs, but most will be sold off eventually. By the way, I would think that the print run would have been MUCH higher than Whiz 2, but who knows for sure (someone here probably does).

Earth in the background to Earth in the background.

That's par for the course with Fed Ex. I have basically stopped buying anything expensive from CLink because they refuse to use any other shipper. Heritage and CConnect, on the other hand, both allowed me to select USPS as the shipper even though both of them have Fed Ex as the default shipper.

Airborne bad guys to airborne bad guy.

I haven't been paying attention to prices, but if low-grade copies are selling for that much, that's insane. They must have gotten hot, but I can't see that sort of price as a good value. I guess recent auctions have been yawners for me because none of my personal grails have shown up in the grades I'm looking for. The only book I thought about bidding on last night was the Church Planet #58, but I decided I wasn't crazy about the wrap on it. If it were a scarcer issue, I would have gone after it, but that issue is extremely common. It really comes down to opportunity costs. I'd rather save my funds so that if one of my personal grails does come up, I'll be able to go after it. I wouldn't touch a Fox book right now; it's silly for those books to be selling for the prices that they've been fetching lately.

Those books are interesting to people who have copies or hope to buy copies; I don't watch books like that because I don't swim in that end of the pool and don't ever plan to.