EastEnd1

When I first discovered comic book shops in the late 1970s, all the rage was John Byrne "New" X-Men and Frank Miller Daredevils. Oh and I remember a clamoring for Neal Adams to get back to comic books and when he finally did it was Ms Mystic from Pacific Comics (and it hardly had any Neal Adams art!)!

From the Heritage catalog... Amazing Fantasy #15 (Marvel, 1962) CGC FN- 5.5 White pages. Probably the most controversial Amazing Fantasy #15 we've ever offered. Yes it does have one major flaw, a 1.25" tear in the right edge of the front cover. But goodness gracious, look at the rest of it! No Marvel chipping or really any other defect of any note. If you haven't secured a copy of the single most important post-Golden Age comic issue, time is your enemy, as its value continues to soar. It's currently ranked #1 on Overstreet's list of Top 50 Silver Age Comics by a wide margin that continues to grow. Herein is the origin and first appearance of Spider-Man, and it's also the first appearances of Uncle Ben and Aunt May. Jack Kirby cover. Steve Ditko started his classic run on Spidey right here. Overstreet 2021 FN 6.0 value = $38,400. CGC census 1/22: 105 in 5.5, 299 higher.

I'm somewhat of a completist and have always enjoyed the hobby quite a bit... still at it since 1972, so I'd definitely consider myself a collector. Having said that, since I learned that some comics had value around 1978 (when I walked into my first comic book shop), I have purchased them with the expectation that they would appreciate in value someday. That's why I started to read them more carefully and bag and (eventually) board them. Wouldn't call myself an investor, but it sure has turned out to be a good AND FUN investment!

Investment firms usually try to sell first. Taking the entity public is usually a back up plan if they can't find a buyer(s) willing to pay their price. An outright sale is clean... IPO's are heavily regulated, take a long time, and are subject to the vagaries of the market. Publicly traded subsidiaries are neither illegal nor uncommon. Large company's tend to avoid them because you give up some control and they add regulatory complexity and cost. You often see it in situations where a sub is doing really well while the overall group is sucking wind. The idea is to make the underlying sub's success more visible to the market and hopefully drive it's stock price up. If the sub goes up, then theoretically the parent, as majority owner, should be worth more too.

Virtually all of my raw eBay listings are priced off of GPA graded prices. I don't find it that difficult to get GPA less a discount for grading costs and the situations where I have to discount more than that are more than offset by situations where I get full GPA or better. I had two just sell overnight in fact, one discounted less than grading costs and one for more than current GPA. I did about 300 comic transactions last year and about 70% of my overall listings sold this way. It's rare that a comic of any significance doesn't sell for me. What hasn't sold after a year, I mostly consign to a local auction house to liquidate. If there's anything a bit more pricey in the leftovers, I will send those into CGC so I can consign them with Comiclink. Admittedly, it does takes time to build your reputation to get results like this. I've been at it on eBay since 2014, but over time have amassed very strong feedback and a pretty good reputation for grading and service. I used to submit books worth over $200 to CGC prior to listing them. Now I only submit books worth over $1000. This is just my experience..

During their experimental years... 1966, 1967... the Beatles were purposefully making music that COULDN'T be played live. Strawberry Fields was just one example. I remember listening to an old Billboard top 40 countdown this past summer on Sirius. It was from 1967. Some great songs came up... Bernadette (Four Tops), Happy Together (The Turtles), For What It's Worth (Buffalo Springfield)... even "This is My Song" (Petula Clark) and "Something Stupid" (Frank and Nancy Sinatra)... catchy stuff, but stylistically such typical straightforward 1960s pop. I remember wondering what the #1 song for that week was going to be... and then it arrived... Strawberry Fields Forever... my goodness, peppered (no pun intended) among that list, it sounded like a song that landed from outer space... so ridiculously different from the rest of the list with swirls and sounds that had never been heard before on a record. The Beatles creative output really can't be over-estimated. Competing musicians from the 1960s themselves have commented that they waited eagerly for the next Beatle album "to see where music was going".

The two bands get compared a lot and are often thought of as rivals but they were actually pretty close friends. Paul McCartney gave the Stones one of his throw away songs "I Wanna Be Your Man" when the Stones were still a blues band trying to break out. It was a modest hit for the Stones. The Beatles later released their own version sung by Ringo. Mick Jagger later appeared on the Beatles global broadcast of "All You Need is Love" singing backgrounds. And John Lennon returned the favor a year or two later appearing on the Stones TV special "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus." I think both bands were products of the British invasion, and it's true that there may not have been a British invasion without the Beatles, but I agree that the Stones did evolve ultimately from a blues/pop band into a rock band, while the Beatles really remained at their core a pop band throughout (though they obviously wrote some great rock songs, along with many other genres).

I've actually done a few experiments with young people on The Beatles. At a company holiday party, I was chatting with four of our younger staffers and I asked them if they could name a Beatle. Not one of them could. I then asked them if they could name a single Beatle song... only one young mom was able to identify "Yellow Submarine"... interestingly a kids song... that's it. Have to admit, as a 58 year old Beatle fan, I was left scratching my head. Sometime later at another after hours gathering I had some of these same people together and the subject came up again and we started going down the youtube rabbit hole of playing Beatle songs. I asked them a very simple question before I played the songs... "tell me if you know this song". This went on for about an hour and at the end of it they were able to identify 80 SONGS... which is probably more songs than they could identify from any single artist from any era! So it wasn't that they didn't know the songs... it's that they didn't realize that it was the Beatles that had done them! And that frankly is their legacy... the Beatles are still pervasive and likely always will be... they were a once in a lifetime supernova (they were only around for 6-7 years) that didn't invent popular music, but showed the generations that followed what it was capable of.

I used to submit books to sell in my eBay store that were worth over $200. Today I only submit books that are worth over $1000 to take advantage of the express TAT... like most, I find the TATs for the lower tiers unreasonable. I list the books that I would have previously submitted to CGC raw on Ebay now. It may take a little longer to sell them, but I have a pretty good reputation for grading and service on eBay (and a high 100% positive feedback count) and I haven't had much issue moving these books raw for a reasonable price. So CGC has definitely lost business from me at least. Whether the purchasers of my books are submitting them anyway is another story.

That makes sense... thanks.

Thanks for the input. I'm curious as to CGC's thinking behind the conserved grade vs a universal grade. On the one hand it would seem that carefully wiping off rust would be no different than gently rubbing off soiling which gets a universal grade. But I guess in the case of rust, you're actually removing oxidized stapling (ie, an element of the original comic itself) as opposed to an external element that has migrated on to the comic??

How has the market been viewing conserved labels? I assume somewhere where between restored and universal? But closer to restored?

Hmm... checked the CGC Labels and Grading Scales pages and looks like I found my answer... cleaning staples gets a Conserved Grade (ie, Blue/Gray label).

Not sure... would defer to the experts. But not if it would be treated as restoration.

Quick question for you guys... does CGC consider dry cleaning of staple rust restoration? Or is it permitted for a universal grade like any other cover dry cleaning?

I totally agree on the collector vs investor aspect. In the mid-2000s, I bought a CGC 9.6 Crypt of Terror #17 (Gaines File Copy) for about $11,000. It was a significant sum at the time because Heritage was flooding the market with Gaines File Copies and the prices on them were tanking. And they stayed comparatively low for quite a while after that, only truly recovering in the last few years. I really didn't care at the time because for me, that comic was THE DEFINITIVE EC KEY to own. Today you rarely see a Gaines book like this for sale... few collectors will part with them, and I'm sure the book would go for multiples of $11k. About a year ago, I bought a CGC 8.0 X-Men #4 for $9,500 to complete my high grade run of X-Men. I knew I was likely overpaying for it at the height of the Wandavision craze. And sure enough, the book cooled off as soon as the series ended. Again, it really didn't matter to me... the purchase completed my high grade run of X-Men. And with time, I'm certain it will appreciate again. As a collector, I never really think about selling any of my key books down the road other than to perhaps upgrade them... and at that point I'm just really trading one like book for another price wise. Ultimately, the plan is to leave the keys to my daughter. I also feel that I've gotten so many GOOD deals over the years that if I overspend on something I really want as a collector today, it's just absorbed into the overall pool of good deals.

About once a year for the last two years I've pull three short boxes of pretty much unread 1990s stuff and gone through them to sell. I've averaged about 30 9.8s worth a $100 or more. I use CGC's prescreen service and have been pretty good at picking the 9.8s... the first year I only missed on one and this year I missed on two (CGC didn't even charge me for the misses!). I put the 9.8s up on Ebay and they pretty much all sell over a few months. The rest of the books, say about 350-400 books all bagged and boarded, I sell in one lot through a local auction house and both times I've gotten about $1.50 a book. In the old days, you'd get about $.15 a piece for these, but that isn't my experience anymore... especially so long as the runs include the mainstream Marvel and DC titles... and yes you can even have some Valiants in there! All of my 1990s stuff I bought from Westfield back then at about a 30% discount. So my experience has been that I can make a decent amount of money on the graded 9.8s and I probably even make money on the drek (at worst break even). Is it enough to put my kid through college? Probably not... though maybe at a state school with a partial scholarship!! But I do remember thinking when I was buying those books back in the 1990s that I'd never make money on them because they were so common and so unlikely to appreciate. And I have to say, I've been VERY pleasantly surprised that that hasn't been the case so far.

That's what I did when I had this same situation recently and it worked out just fine.

A thief can't pass legal title so no refund. You can always sue the thief though.

Yes, prices of graded comics skyrocketed across the board soon after the introduction of CGC around 2000, reaching jaw-dropping levels for the time (not unlike what we've seen in the last year)... and a few years later began to correct substantially as census figures (and the emerging prevalence of pressing) showed that high grade books weren't as rare as originally thought. I have run books that I bought in that period that still haven't recovered. The true keys, however, did not fall back as hard (as one might expect), and have since obviously reached even more jaw-dropping heights.

Now THAT is VERY COOL!

No problem... file copies are original publisher stock.... copies that the publisher either intentionally kept or never wound up distributing. They generally are not pedigrees (though the Gaines EC file copies are). Not sure if this has changed but back then, CGC generally required some paperwork of provenance to give a special designation, though often the books from a particular origin will have certain characteristics that CGC recognizes and the paperwork might not have been necessary. My recollection with this one is that I submitted a receipt... and it had the characteristics of a Dell file copy. Hope that helps!

I also have the Northland copy of Yellow Submarine (yes, I was, and still am, a huge Beatle fan!)... tried to track that down for you guys too but my collection isn't the best organized right now and I couldn't quickly locate it. It's a gorgeous 9.6... think I got it from Heritage so you can probably find it in their archives.

Oh, and the back cover doesn't get as much attention but features a pretty neat pin-up...

That is a very nice looking 4.0 Jaylam! Here you go on the file copy... I picked this up raw at one of the New York City conventions many years ago and it was one of the first comics I submitted to CGC when it first opened up. It's neither pressed nor cleaned and for quite a while it was the highest graded copy...