The Less Blob

That sent me off on a tangent looking stuff up -- crazy world back then. my friend's older brother worked at marvel for a while, starting as an intern in high school and then was hired as an assistant editor/occasional inker/occasional writer/occasional penciller/colorist, etc.... I assume he was in college at the same time? All very confusing. A few years later he goes on a long vacation and another brother, who was in high school doing an internship, was allowed to fill in for him for like A MONTH as an assistant editor/jack of all trades. So Marvel had 17 year old unpaid assistant editors in 1988! Marvel had a program with our high school, I feel like such an insufficiently_thoughtful_person not having tried to intern there, we all did internships our senior year (I am surprised pointone did not as we were in the same school and he was a fantastic artist) .... of course, all that access to free comics would not have gotten me newsies, so maybe off topic

Back of the napkin calculations, there may be 2x as many 252 newsies out there as directs if they sold out at the newsstand... and if they showed up at the newsstand after they showed at the comic shops, is it possibly extra were printed to meet the likely demand (shadroch or someone who actually owned a shop at the time probably knows). ... as a kid I know most of our new spideys were bought at the newsstand despite a nearby comic shop (my older brother did most of the buying). Depressing I had no interest in comics in 1988-90, one of my best friend's brother was an assistant editor, part time inker, part time letterer at marvel and got all the comics he wanted free. I never bothered asking for him to hook me up.

337 I could understand, walt simonson was not a big deal and Thor was constantly introducing new characters nobody cared about, but if shops were told in a preview spidey would be getting a new black costume you'd think they'd bite ... OTOH, I feel like around then spidey was maybe a little bit "down" (obviously he was still big, he had 4 titles, but I remember regularly getting spideys of that era in the 3/$1 box (including a 239) at my shop, so it seems like he had overstock he couldn't sell for cover price or $1) so maybe shops were not viewing it as a speculation book yet ... all eyes being on x-men, byrne books, frank miller and whatever else (NTT maybe)

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=marvel+presents+guardians+3&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1 It is weird, the set seems to be doing as well as ever, but #3 is down. Of course, I have like 7 "almost" sets (these books I never passed on in a dollar box after they crashed in the 90s, I figured they'd come back one day, and they did, for a hot minute)

please let those bounce back, please, please, please....

These two are very rare and should be worth thousands: All kidding aside, they have lovely covers and I liked the X-Men stories. I can't remember the Elektra one right now. If Claremont had gotten his way with Sara Grey, #27 would have become a big deal (it is not her first, but it is the only story that gives her some three dimensionaity), but Marvel rejected him, although as Jean Grey's origin story it should mean more too. The Nightcrawler story has an interesting look at the Multiverse before that was a "thing" (ok, it was a "thing"with the publication of What If?) #28 has some great art, elektra's first solo story, a coupe of first appearances that never went anywhere. With that said, I guess folks saw those covers and loaded up as there are a fair amount out there. I have always thought they were lovely and own a bunch of each. The market has not yet agreed with me (these are not cheap in 9.6-9.8, but magazines are tough to get in those grades, I think mine are mainly 9.2-9.4

The comparison needs to be to a book that is a big deal because of the cover and not the story. While there are some pre-code horror books that are really expensive because of the awesome cover and not so much the story, I am not sure what in the SA would qualify. So we are really talking about Batman 227 and 251, None of the superman iconic covers or archie innuendo covers are in that stratesphere and i can't think of any Marvel BA books that are insanely expensive because of the cover. Gil Kane seemingly did half the covers of Marvel's BA and nobody is getting that excited about them.

Vastly more 252 newsstands were printed. This issue was a BIG DEAL at the time if my 12 year old self can remember. I am going to venture to guess unlike most months, where 50% of the newsies went unsold, nearly every copy of this book was hunted down by collectors in comic shops, newsstands, wherever they could be found (shadroch's tales of thor 337 would indicate similar things happening) and preserved... I dimly remember both 252 and Thor 337 going up on my LCS walls for ungodly sums like $15-20... Which could get you a real SA key in 1983/4. What I do not know is if 252 was underordered by shops/was a suprise (like shadroch says 337 was). So.. all the hype on ebay about these common newsstand books from the 80s is just that when it comes to books that were hot when they came out, but may have not been anticipated by comic shops. Your regular book that took years to get hot because some character developed and half the newsstands went unsold and many of the others got trashed on the rack.. different story. Mind you, my 12 year old brain also remembers my LCS putting Thor 333 up on the wall, pushing Dracula/Thor and maybe Bill Sinkw for silly money. Dracula was probaby a favorite of older customers who maybe would have spent the $? Does anyone remember that book being hot for a minute or was that all my local shop trying to push a worthless book?

This is true. Anthology titles would often have back-up stories that sometimes premiered a character. usually they tried to get a better sense of whether they would succeed before giving them their own book and the backup became a regular (putting aside Spiderman in AF 15), but teen titans had already been around, this was just a re-boot with a few new characters. Image did this a lot though, but 20+ years later. Gwenpool in HTD as a backup story (but she didn't get her series right away). DC actually did the same thing with captain carrot in 1982 in teen titans 16 and then he got his own series. DC Comics presents was sort of like those anthology titles (maybe I am not using the right word), except it was Superman's "team up" book (like B&B became Batman's), but it often had non-superman backup stories in it, although it does not appear that any of them had character debuts that quickly became a series.

hah, see about the going blind part? ok, early in the run most of them are still not so expensive, and some other issues, I guess "it depends"... clearly venomized wolvie gets folks excited even though the regular copy does not so much: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=new+avengers+newsstand&_sacat=0&_sop=15

oh lord, another thing to go blind looking for, yay! I am not going to read this whole thread, but golly, what was the financial incentive for this? how many were they possibly selling a month per book, 200, 300, 500, 1000? I understand the UK, bigger country (and I see plenty of pence copies here, they are no doubt low print runs*, but not close to 30/35 cent variants), rains a lot, lots of indoor reading time, I can understand Canada .. the land of John Byrne and frozen comic nerds ... but Australians are out and about playing sports, doing outdoor stuff, riding kangaroos, cooking shrimp on the barbie, swilling fosters...I don't think of that being a place for comic nerdery. * with that said, it occurs to me that unlike the U.S. where 50%+ of the copies at the newsstand went unsold and many were pulped, what happened in Canada, UK, and Australia? It would seen crazy to me to ship 1000 copies of some comic a billion miles away to Australia and then destroy unsold copies ... OTOH, these being hard to find (perhaps?) perhaps they had a very good sell through rate?

Prices on those new avengers newsies are all over the place. it seems like later/cool cover/key is critical to big bucks, this one only went for $11.50: https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-AVENGERS-11-MARVEL-COMICS-2005-NEWSSTAND-ISSUE-RONIN-1st-APPEARANCE-/143898203595?hash=item21810055cb%3Ag%3AsVYAAOSwjudf5kne&nma=true&si=BZbpsjZvXBDBh7scMVfgI%2BAabNw%3D&orig_cvip=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557 with that said someone who busts that up may double or triple their money unless all the books have a lot of little dings not showing up in pics

Not my book, but the "genuine facsimile autograph" for the Bob Feller pic is funny

I was not either, but it does not give me the option to send for some I have watchers on and I think i sent them a while back I put some decent stuff up and it has sold. dracula, werewolves, and moon knight have done well. I priced them near the top few sales, negotiated down to prices that were roughly average. i got the usual mix of solid offers and offers for 1/3 my asking price. it's fine, karma for low offers I might have made in life. it's just that i am not taking $25 for somethin that has multiple auctions already over $50 in the same or worse condition.

That pretty much looks like my exercise routine lately, except mine has less exercise

I had a book sitting there a year+ with a watcher. So I knocked 20% off (yeah, i had it priced aggressively as there are very few on ebay, but it is a bit obscure) and, poof, sold. I was more wondering whether I can turn off the feature that does not let me make any new offers to watchers. Some of these I may have made an offer a year ago. anyway, i just got a slew of them, but they were all low dollar books and the shipping would have cost more than the comics. I'd buy every one of them at the offered price if I did not have to deal with shipping and sales tax.

See, if you like getting them, why not send them? It never hurts to ask. I dunno, the book eventually sells like 25% of the time maybe.

She is day to day hot, and I think ditching the magenta wig helped, but I think they needed someone hotter. Just my opinion. I don't know who that actress would be, maybe Zendaya, but less skinny? (Not that Zendaya would have stopped to this sort of show):

I am not surprised, I am just thinking a 9.6 may be more than 2X as much as 9.2?

Is WInnie the Pooh joining the MCU or Star Wars? https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=winnie+the+pooh+1+comic&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_sop=16&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=winnie+the+pooh+1+comic&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_sop=16&rt=nc All the copies listed on ebay are $300+. I used to have a supply of these at $1 in nice high grade and they were very good $25+ ebay flips in 2007-2010 or so and then it died, so I stopped listing them. Need to find the ones I kept!

The #3s were stuck in that $20-35 range for a long time, they seem to have settled in at $100+ now. Getting them out of my LCS 50 cent box and quickly flipping them for $20-$25 on ebay in 2005/6 seemed like a smart move an I needed the money then.

It all depends on what he did with the money and when this was. Also, a 9.2 FF 52 just sold for $13K (I can't figure out if there was an offer, so it may be less, the "TaxE.." thing did not work). The 9.6 maybe worth more than $25K... just saying...

Does anyone the make an offer to watchers? I do it, will get a sale out of it now and then. I get a lot of them on books I did not think I was even watching. But if you have made an offer and never got a response, is it set so that you can never make an offer again? I have books that have been watched for years. I know people watch for lots of reasons.

Smaller scale for me and most of my books were not slabbed, so hard to be certain Raw copies of FF 5 (4.0-4.5), Strange Tales 110 (4.0), TOS 39 (2.0), X-Men 1 (1.8), B&B 28 (5.0), DD 1 3.5 (slight resto, slabbed) ), JLA 1, FF 48 (many copies 3.0-6.0) all for about 1/10th what they sell for now. ... I can think of very few key SA books I have ever sold that have not appreciated a lot other than maybe some of the Inhumans and Warlock stuff BUT, more recently, and I've cried here before...3 bagged copies of UF 4 for $35 (shipped) to a boardie (forget who) ..I can't guarantee what grade they were in, but they looked pretty good. I did get them out of a 25 cent box. Copies of Walking Dead 9, 10, and 11 in absolutely pristine shape for under $3.50 each (also sold here) also did not look like smart sales a few years later. 10 copies of Saga 1 for $300 anyone? Literally, by the time my media mail shipment actually arrived they were $100+ each, indeed, the boardie who bought them from me was selling them for $100 and up here! (Good for him) (Never mind that I had sold other copies for $15-$20 each, but just one at a time, when they had an FMV of $35 or so I figured there was no way they could keep going up).

they also messed up the casting on starfire. i understand they don't want an orange lady wandering around, i get that, and she is attractive, but if they were going to do what they did they needed someone insanely hot for the role because half the tension is Nightwing continuously crushing on her and we need to believe that and her sweet disposition, which this actress did not pull off (I like the titans show though, don't get me wrong, and I am going to have to accept a hot, but not other worldly hot and orange, starfire with a mean streak)... and they had better find a way to resurrect wonder girl!