EastEnd1

The underbidder bid $80,000 so there were at least TWO people that took it to this level!

LOL

Here's an example... this Superman #199 just sold for $13,750 !! Now while I appreciate the nifty Superman vs Flash fastest man alive storyline (which if I recall correctly didn't solve the issue of who was faster by the way) and the difficult black cover, you could have bought a true NM+ copy for at most a few hundred dollars back when I got my copy!

Not that I'm complaining... if you were collecting these books in the 70s, 80s, 90s... frankly even the first 10-12 years of the 2000s and had stubborn enough collecting habits to have kept them, you're sitting on quite a valuable collection today. Many of these books were collector's targets back then as well, just a whole lot cheaper!

It's just incredible what so many comics are selling for these days.

...and it suddenly struck me how many books closed for over $1000... many for multiple thousands! It's become such a common event these days that I'd never really stopped to take note of it before. Never in my wildest imagination could I have thought this possible when I started collecting in the 1970s. This hobby has come a LONG way!

This is very helpful... many thanks! I have some SA books that have this defect and am deciding whether to submit them or not. Funny that you mention pedigrees... I recall sending in some SA Big Apple books which commonly have this defect in the early CGC days and they hit the books harder than I was expecting... though admittedly at that time, I and many others were still "adjusting" to the CGC grading standards. It was that experience that's causing me to ask the question now. Thanks again!

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Won't hold you to it... just trying to get an idea. Seems to me to be a fairly common defect on older books...

I've been hearing the doom and gloom arguments since the 1980s. Back when I first discovered comic shops in NY in the 1970s, the typical shop devoted 90% of their floor space to back issues and maybe 10% to new issues. By 1990, that floor space allocation had largely reversed, quite a few shops having given up on selling back issues entirely. And I remember all the panic then that the back issue market would be gone in a few years. And yet here we are nearly thirty years later and the back issue market has somehow survived this downturn and a few others as well. In fact, I'm not sure that the back issue market has ever been stronger, at least not since I've been collecting. For me, the back issue crash will come only when the superhero itself loses popularity. Regardless of the medium that keeps the superhero popular (whether it be comic books, movies, tv shows, video games, holographics, or what ever unforeseen medium emerges in the future), there will always be a sizable enough population of fandom that will gravitate to the original source material because the superhero was birthed in comic books and is synonymous with them. For these people, the required nostalgic element that will drive them to the back issues is the superhero itself, not the comic book. I also think the long established and fairly measurable market for back issues will provide the glue to keep them there for a good long time. Once you discover it, it's just A LOT of fun to play in the back issue market, even if you didn't read a lot of comics as a kid. Anyway, that's just my two cents... I'm really not worried at all about the comic back issue market evaporating in my lifetime. Then again, I'm nearly 56 now so my horizon may not be as long as others !!

I think so long as the super-hero is popular (regardless of form of media) there will always be a smaller segment of that fan base that will gravitate to the original source material. Even for me as a kid fifty years ago, I became a Superman fan from watching the old George Reeves tv show, well before I bought my first comic. So I think that nostalgia factor will still be there... it's just a bit different in how it works.

Hi Folks, quick grading question for you... assuming a conic is in otherwise NM+ 9.6 condition, how much would CGC downgrade it for light, moderate, and heavy inside cover edge tanning, respectively. Thanks in advance!

Interesting that the collection was found roughly 30--35 years after publication... just like finding a hoard of pristine comics from 1983!!