jimbo_7071

CGC has always been a little lenient with dust shadows, and I've seen books in at least 9.0 or 9.2 with significant rust on the staples before. What really got me was the way more significant defects, like rat chews and significant spine stress, were penalized so lightly.

They're nice books, but they're graded too softly. Most of them are at least two and usually three increments over what they should be. I bought a couple of them: one just to make sure I had an example in my collection, and then another one that was tough enough to find in high grade that I went ahead and bid despite the soft grading of the collection. I see fairly common issues selling for extremely high prices, which I really don't understand. The books are nice, but they're not fresh enough to justify the multiples that they're getting.

Red winter issue to pink winter issue.

Striped pants to checkered vest.

White gloves to white gloves.

"Mom said if i didn't have anything nice to say . . . . " Your mom stole that from Thumper!

January 1955 to January 1955.

Dirty old robot!

They wouldn't! Those are nice examples. It seems like most of the ones I've seen have pages that were in the Off-White to Cream-to-Off-White range. So maybe I'm remembering wrong, or maybe those are above-average examples for those particular pedigrees.

No idea! It could've been done by some random in-house artist or an artist from the Iger shop whose name has been lost to time.

It sounds like a fun goal. I sort of have the same goal for GA pedigrees but with a few caveats. The Allentown, Denver, River City, and Rockford collections all have page quality that doesn't thrill me, so I'm not sure whether I would want to include those. Also, I haven't seen many Carson City or Vancouver books that would be a good fit for my collection. I hoping that there are some, though. (I haven't seen any lists of what books are in those collections.) 1 Bethlehem 1 Big Apple 1 Cookeville 1 Cosmic Aeroplane 1 Crowley 3 Dell File Copies (2 GA) 1 Diamond Run (Diamond Run is to pedigrees what Pluto is to planets) 1 Lost Valley 4 Mile High 1 Ohio 1 Pennsylvania 2 Promise 1 Spokane 2 White Mountain

The label says Matt Baker art; I don't think it's a Matt Baker cover.

Dangerous moose to homicidal mouse.

Abusive S.O.B. to a couple of S.O.B.s getting manhandled by a woman.

I've never seen prices spike this fast on such a broad spectrum of books. I've seen bigger spikes on books tied to movies that had been announced, but nothing across the board like this. There's often a bit of a dip after the hype for a movie dies down, so we might see a similar dip. I don't expect prices to drop down to pre-Covid levels, but we might see them level off somewhere in the middle of what they were then and what they are now. It probably makes sense to hold off on purchasing readily available books. I have some want-list books that show up so infrequently, though, that if one were to surface, I'd feel compelled to go after it despite the current high prices. The one good thing about high prices is that they tend to bring some nice material out of the woodwork.

Psst . . . I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend that the grading on these Promise books might be a little soft. But you didn't hear it from me.

Most of the time I get distracted and forget to bid on an item I want, but sometimes I remember at the very last minute and frantically try to log on. More than once I would have been too slow if I hadn't been saved by the extended bidding. Most of the time I get outbid anyway, but there's nothing worse than forgetting to bid. Comiclink's format is a bit difficult to time. Several years ago I attempted to bid on a must-have book and waited too long. Even thought the timer said that I had three seconds left when I clicked submit, the system told me that my bid wasn't in time. I was using very fast internet, so three seconds should have been plenty of time. The book sold for substantially less than my (attempted) max bid.

Slapping an annoying sidekick to protecting an annoying sidekick.

What in tarnation is crossover grading?

Were they really in direct competition? I think of pulps as being exclusively for adults and comics being mostly (though not exclusively) for kids.

Fantastic to Fantastic and Alex S. to Alex T.

Merry X-mas!

Hands to gloves.

Neat! I've never seen that one before.

That one might be the be in the lead, but it has some competition close on its heels. The 9.6 Catman #29 was no better than 8.0 in reality.