the blob

some of them have cool covers...

Think about it from their perspective ... if they sell a consignment book you get paid. If someone returns it do they take the money away? So they want to make it highly unlikely anyone returns anything. So they hammer the consignment books on grade, at least from our perspective. In an efficient market folks know those books are probably tighter than cgc grading, so they buy accordingly, and don't assume the typical ebay overgrade. I have never bought anything from there that I thought was overgraded (albeit I have probably not bought anything they graded at higher than a VF+ and I don't think I have bought any consignment items that are not slabbed).

brain fart. my wife is convinced the blood thinners are giving me brain damage.

But what are we talking about? 100 $50-75 type books? Or 20 $250-300 type books? Or 10 $500 type books? (Will HA even do the 100 $50-75 type books? I don' I don't think they do well with lots?

Savage Sword 1. Sorry. My link to "this should have been higher" was a Savage Sword 1 that went in the $200s.

absurd prices. both of them!

I get it, it's just that a $25 slab fee (and I know there are discounts) in the hope of getting a $50 book pretty much wipes out any profit if you guess wrong on a few 9.8s, which is really easy to do. I guess you need to still be profitable at 9.6 to do that regularly. Ouch, this was a hot book, I guess it didn't get a season 2 on Prime: https://www.ebay.com/itm/175881296136?hash=item28f3579908:g:c4UAAOSwStlk73Nr&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAA4ExXuvZ12vPvk2liBoNTnDW1SgNBjDgXkyvj5TYu7Gxqm88Zk6CApoRGmtjSowR3tFXzqyxG946ys5khaKo6ND1OVkd2FokS3pKif3J4%2F%2Fqe4EHnZVW5p86VzHQVLndDuFKlJb7MhFRhU9dhPsCelyEdxk0JcqMGaOdn3K1JunRMS0iyY4pQ0LBKOdslJmDLKPwBKzLNq5eVX%2F5MA1Tfkfg98jtUCyJ%2B4V6CAP74Xq%2FL7pfN8QEFSxbPF9Ir0t2EJJ%2FFASoWoovT9XuC%2B1tQ9c76UxpLhmPQH61iKkiISkTj|tkp%3ABk9SR6DH0aTTYg

Which makes me wonder, with the market so soft would CGC ever considering lowering slabbing costs or have they already done that in a less public way for big submitters? If they are still doing big volume I guess they have no reason to. There ought to be a better accepted mode for sub $100 books than $25-42 a pop, even with a 15% discount, but I understand there is a lot of overhead and employees need to get paid.

Auctions can be weird, not everyone is hunting at the same time. That same Savage Tales 4 might go for $150+ out of a store. 8 and 10 in 9.6 sold as BINs for $125-150. In June a Savage Tales 1 in 9.6 got $410 and I don't think the market has krapped out more since then, has it?

Yes, that's just silly to me with a slab fee that high. I feel like this should be higher: https://www.ebay.com/itm/204401242366?hash=item2f974370fe:g:-GwAAOSwQhNktx-u&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAA0NaAnNqkIKiSCBtJyZ2DiJG8a7TeqxiOaKtFBwI85CquU68%2BGUeQQ%2BXy2MzHm5WgJ68tyW3kF1pastkLHqA0XZZEIoKu%2BMTXh8bDC%2FiQszTB6Rp1kKY5umSj95wCHqa3cBhpA3Z27iu0xGsCZzT2BIhEg3KRMHShpeIkblLv%2F6vFWIl9zlpxqPt8iSH%2F3y0DX6swVW95sj%2FzIpz%2BosyKwrrIhv8k2qInO1JogGkSFN46VILFLo9od5yU9vjT%2Br8w2w1%2BDhx%2FnTbd8qLdlSeOFgM%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR97avaHTYg

Huh? It has always been a desireable cover but there are copies under $20 on ebay before shipping that look decent.

That's a pretty big investment to make for a $50 sale hoping it comes back a 9.8. $9 added for the pre-screen/reject (do they tell you what they would have graded it on a pre-screen?)

I don't mind much because over the years I have assembled a collection of inexpensive "exemplars" to assist in my grading.

Not my intent at all. I live in NYC, it is just part of the landscape here, nobody looks twice. Folks stopped paying attention years ago.

cool stuff. don't get me wrong, I doodle/sketch plenty on random pieces of paper. I didn't go three years in between anything "artistic" (not saying you are doodling, that Red Sonja could be a pinup in Savage Sword), just getting the paints out is more of a project for me. I am constantly terrified of knocking over the dirty water container on to one of the rugs we just spent $300 cleaning.

I go in and out of it. I started painting again late 2020 because I was trapped in the house. This summer i went back because I was getting planted outside by my wife unable to move much while she enjoyed her summer at the beach, pool, etc. with my kid. I was sitting in the outdoor lounge of our beach club and needed something to do. I start getting sleepy after reading 5 pages of a book apparently.

Agree on 204/205, but 195 has been overlooked a long time too, maybe bumped a little lately. ASM 172, 1st Rocket Racer as well. And 135. And I know 135 is not a cheap book, but you can still get a decent copy for under $50 if you try hard enough. Ionic cover, etc. if you are priced out of 129.

archie art, even decarlo, was always crazy cheap. I have bought a nice chunk of it over the years, including directly from DeCarlo on ebay. But I don't think a cover. I have like a 5 page archie tarzan spoof I believe from the book below and I am pretty sure I paid under $100 for the whole thing (this was early 2000s though). It is pretty funny and I had the idea of framing the whole thing, but then the cost of properly custom framing them dawned on me and it was like 5X as much as the art cost!

I got into these during the pandemic (2020), but within a tight price, of course, so I never could get a 1st print #1 or FQ 1 within budget.

Hoarding !

I have a question, looking at my 25 jokers up there, do folks think the white backgrounds on some are ok or should I re-work them to have background colors or something like on some of them? I am a little torn and it is always a weird one going back to a painting 3 years later. My goal all along was to mount these on a larger backing and have a really big painting, so from that perspective it feels like a lot of white.

I have been buying them for a long time so long as they were cheap. During the pandemic I definitely bid on some higher priced ($50-100) type archies as well as 10 cent cover price cheaper book lots and won and I bought a pretty nice stack of 10 cent cover price archies from mycomicshop, almost all under $10 each at the time. I just like the corny covers and admittedly read them sometimes in the 70s when i had nothing else. There does seem to be a big price difference between 10 and 12 cent cover unless the 12 center is a great gag/innuendo cover. And I guess that's true for a lot of books. My friend who owned a shop loved 60s - 70s archies because he could buy them for next to nothing at shows, etc. and he would make them $2-3 in his shop (1990s) and while the comic guys didn't buy them, women who wandered into the shop would -- either just checking out his store or with his kids, he only had a few regular female customers -- and he'd sell them out fast. So are you selling them at more general collectible shows, not comic shows?

I think those sorts of books while maybe they got aided by bidding/shopping boredom during the pandemic (heck I decided at one point to chase 40/50s archies, though generally not at that price point), they were not really part of the hot book/key books/movie/tv hype type buying that climaxed during the pandemic. Frankly I am dubious that the Riverdale show really had any impact, maybe Sabrina did on the Sabrina books a little, folks buying those old Archies had probably been collecting a while or had some emotional connection to it

Just keep working at it, maybe do something other than line drawing. Ever try pastels? You can actually smooth them out with a brush and turpentine and it is like oil paint except dries a lot faster.

Believe it or not every stroke of those two was very intentional, these were a little bit more expressionist