The Less Blob

The slab says 9.8. I guess sell it and eat the fees and find a copy you love or live with this? Just give good front and back scans.

The OP was referencing an article on the general fine art market. While I don't think OA and "fine art" are completely independent and excess money influences both, I am not sure if a softening of demand on six figure work (which can happen independent of easy money) necessarily filters down into $500 OA or even some $15K grail OA art. On the high end art market, it is a weird balance. If the stock market is doing 25% folks who might be interested in acquiring more big time art have more funds for it, but on the flip side, why tie up $500K in some painting if you're making 25% in the market? Hard for me to grasp as I am so far from that.

I'm not sure if the art market for $75,000 abstract or pop artists is really running in line with OA. Maybe a few of the same people, but not likely. Yes, a sense of "I have extra money" permeated both groups I understand folks like to show off their OA collection on line and stuff, but at the end of the day is it just a lot easier to have "enough" OA? I've bought my fair share but at the end of the day the good stuff should be displayed and how many of us have unlimited wall space? So I have 50, 75 pages of OA and almost nowhere to display it so I stopped looking. I sold my kirby and steranko pages because I needed money, I'll never be able to afford those again. I've always wanted a decent John Buscema Conan page and now the most lame ones are like $800 from his "I don't care anymore" later work. i guess that isn't happening except via trade.

I'm somewhere in the middle. 98% of my collection was bought for $3 or less, 99.99% of it after 1993, mostly under $1, not so much in bulk, just by 30 years of trying to cherry pick cheap-o boxes. The books I have money in probably wouldn't go there other than some mid-grade SA I probably paid too much for when I was starting. But my mid-grade Spotlight 28 or what not type$40-80 books I paid $1, particularly if I have 3 copies, might go in the box. I'm just not ready to get back into shipping stuff and stressing about whether someone will complain that my F/VF grade is no good and demand a refund and am completely not interested in that if, as I am hoping, I return to private practice by this time next year and my time is actually worth something again. At the very least if it is all a failure and I get the books back I suppose I have paid $4 a book + shipping to receive some tight grades. Maybe I will learn something.

I get it, I know there is another thread for that here, I am just in the process of trying to decide whether it makes sense to park a short box of books over there, maybe ones I don't care as much about, and try to generate some passive income and am trying to collect any info I can. I am just not in a position of starting selling again and shipping 20 books a week or whatever, but I need another income source.

At the end of the day isn't it more about what you can sell them for there rather than the grade they assign? If their Fines sell for 2X as much as a Fine would on ebay then maybe it is not as big a deal if you thought it was a VF. On the other hand, with them hammering the grades it makes it harder to hit that $50 figure in your head and the commissions on lots are pretty brutal (and I completely understand why they are).

Yes, high grade on 135 is spensive, I'm just thinking from a collector's standpoint looking for a BA semi-key within a low budget, you can get a presentable copy for not THAT much. And I have always liked the cover. Will that VG/Fine copy appreciate? I dunno, but let's face it, not that long ago a 5.0 (raw) copy of 129 was like $50-60 if you went to a shop pricing by OPG. It was 2-3X much on ebay. I made 3 flips of 129 buying it at guide from shops and then here or on ebay. Wish I had kept them.

Are they slabbed?

They do in a lot, I think, not so much individually. They're a little weird, I tried to consign the full art to Lobo 2 from Dell (of note because it was the first comic series devoted to a black hero, but Heritage just viewed it as 23 pages of generic Dell art, didn't see why anyone would care about the historical significance) and they would not take it because they did not see it cracking $750. Needless to say I put it up on ebay and it quickly sold for about $2000. And for years I have been getting inquiries about it (probably because I posted about it here). Probably worth $5000 now. Auction houses are weird. I have two signed large photos from Lord Snowden (Anthony Armstrong Jones) -- Princess Margaret's Husband who was featured in some of these crown bio movies -- that were gifted to my mother eons ago. I figured they'd be an easy $1500 a pop based on his other sales but none of the auction houses in NYC wanted to deal with them on their own, they probably would have if I had 10 more though. I actually have not tried Heritage, dunno how they are on photos.

Is there something about that collection or any specific issue in that run? I agree, a lot selling like that for guide is pretty wild if they are just a bunch of rando 5.0 books. I have a long box of romance books like that.

yup, I sold on these boards one of those gerber "you never see these" books and if I remember correctly the reaction was "where the F did you find that????".. low grade, a whopping $150, bad market then (mortgage crash I think), so maybe $1500+ now, but still, it was a one shot book, aside from rarity, nothing that special.

It is supply and demand, not an "inflated artificial value" unless someone is manipulating the prices short term. "Supply and demand" is what drives your Morgan values too. Of course, the print run is not the same as copies in circulation for these older books. DC in particular had many books not sell on the rack. Those were returned, pulped, destroyed or wound up being carted off to some warehouse fraudulently.

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.