The Less Blob

Reece is one of the few high end dealers I have actually bought from (aside from cheap books discounted at the end of shows). And I have sold to him. I think he got a good deal on the X-Men 1 I sold him. Wish i had kept it. someone in the BA thread posted a clink auction that was 400% a current BIN on ebay for a cgc book. just stupid. yes, the clink book was a nicer looking 9.6, but still

well, he wanted to be an engineer before the war, but after 3 years he came back and didn't, so he was dabbling. Majored in history. Not very practical, but he was an Ivy League guy, good looking, WASPy, veteran, and the U.S. was going to have an economic boom, so he always found work until he was about 60 and they decided he was too old and, effectively, unemployable.

What we have for $5 in the states is usually pretty terrible. In Europe $5 can get you a decent bottle. But I suspect I'd be unable to differentiate between many $15 bottles and the $500 one.

pollock did it first. and you're wrong. pollock's works are far more complex and interesting than anything junior can currently produce. the thing is, there is little about them that a grown up can't figure out how to emulate pretty well and, perhaps, better with time as they may not kill themselves by drunk driving only 9 years into their career as a drip painter. but pollock did it "first" (see below) my dad had just returned from WW II and in 1946 and decided to take an art class in college (now that the GI Bill was paying!) and he invented his own drip painting technique before anyone had seen a pollock (who i understand started drip painting in 1947). the professors told him it was garbage and he should focus on figurative work. he stopped all together. maybe better for me as I would have never been born if he had struck big as a painter.

why would you have had to file bankruptcy? did you lose your job? I took a massive 65% pay cut in 2004, but in exchange, got a job with a ton of job security, so while I was feeling broke a times, at least I didn't have the spectre of outright unemployment worrying me. i was worried about furloughs, which, thankfully, were small.

I just think that a lot of people around me will see that and think i am equating flags and skulls and think I'm a QAnoner or something. My wife has bought me super hero themed / dad themed shirts and stuff like that. "The Incredible Dad" (with a pciture of the hulk). I wear them.

$20K for an IH 181 is a deal compared to what a banana taped to a wall goes for.

I won't be travelling until 2022. This is a stay at home summer. Luckily I live near the beach. I am spending $3K on a beach club, sure, but I would have spent at least that much on camp for the 9 year old. But yeah, it could very well be $2-6K of travel money per affluent collector has gone to comics, although I'd think a lot of our spouses would have something to say about that.

what you don't understand is that he used his time machine and went back to 1991 and has already sold all of them for $500 through an ad in the buyer's guide he paid $400 for and used the $100 profit to buy 215 shares of Apple, which are now worth $140,000, after numerous stock splits. so who is the smartipants now? (to understand this you need to have reader werner's post about his selling experience)

$838 seems reasonable in this market. those square bounds are tough.

raw sales seem to be mostly $5 and under, so it doesn't seem to be working.

I am convinced seeing a billion copies of some book in the dollar box is a super quick way to kill any interest in regular issues of the title moving forward. Better to give it away or age it in the back for years. If the title actually becomes a smash hit then the now worthless books are sellable. Who pays to return 965 unsold copies of this book though when a store orders 1000 of them?

actually, right now that would be no fun

you can market the real stinkers as great books to practice pressing on. I actually have a magazine box of books like that i had been putting to the side. i have like 10 warped copies of iron man 59 I don't know what to do with.

"I thought it would be fun and not much risk to buy it sight unseen and see if I could get $500 out of it." Fun is blowing $500 at a strip club. My wife wouldn't let me in the house with a box of books like that. I'd have to play with them in the garage.

yuck. the spook 27 might not be able to pay for the whole thing. an ok looking 3.5 just sold for $175. there are a couple of decent books in there (defenders 10, etc.), but if you are grading heavily water damaged books as 2.0s you might have some unhappy buyers. it is all subjective and I don't know what CGC does, but when I see that stuff I avoid like the plague. anyway, maybe you get the $500 back, maybe turn a profit, but it sounds like work. maybe the next 50 or whatever will be better.

I don't think the "bored rich" are folks fueling the spike in $20-100 raws and the zillions of minor chase keys. they're jacking up four and five digit key slabs. And i don't think they're going to a con for the most part. I'm selling those raws to other comic collectors or maybe flippers/speculators, who knows? People who seem to be buying and selling a fair amount of comics based on their feedback (just like my feedback looks like now that I only have 1 active ebay account). They haggle me on price, but understand that the last month or so of ebay sales are relevant. I just sold a bunch of Marvel horror themed BA books (Drcula, Werewolf, Morbius, Blade) for really nice chunky prices and these folks were collectors. Ditto for the Star Wars comics and so on.

some 32 year olds who were 21 when they put their tip money into bitcoin in 2010 need somewhere to park their hundreds of millions in profits

paper value. meaningless long term unless your plan was to sell the house in the short term or use it to take out HELOCs and live off the equity. that's why i was unphased in 2008-2012 by this stuff. I bought at the end of 2006. I had no intention of selling any time soon. of course, that is the opposite of comic flippers.... If people laying out $20K for a nice IH 181 are doing so as keepers/collectors want a cool iconic book for the long haul, there is hope

"Everyone knows that real estate goes up and down, and there’s a proven track record for it. Ironically, no one saw the 2008 crash coming, but by your logic, people would be just fine today if they had held onto their property, because we’re now at a high (was it worth the wait?)" Almost everyone saw the 2008 crash coming. They just didn't necessarily appreciate the scope of it or how long the funk would last. Or they weren't in a position to do anything about it. Believe me, here and on the lawyer chat boards I used to inhabit, there was plenty of talk about all the impending crashes.As for "holding on to your property"... if you need a place to live, isn't that what most people did? The people who primarily got burned (and lost homes) were buying properties they could not afford in the first place or could only afford if their circumstances never changed (two earners continued earning 2 incomes). $60K family income taking on a $500K mortgage only made possible by a lot of creating b.s. on the loan application put in by the mortgage broker. I don't know if these people thought they could flip and make a profit in a rising market or just keep ion refinancing as prices went up and use the cash back to pay the mortgage or whatever, I have no idea. I admit I miscalculated my future cost of living and future income a bit when i took on my mortgage, so things were rough, but we managed. But seriously, I had a cousin who thought I was an insufficiently_thoughtful_person for having equity in my home. His view was that I should refinance to the maximum I could every year or two and extract every bit of equity out of it. That would have left me with a mortgage in 2008 I could never pay, rather than one I could struggle with. And no doubt the cash I had pulled out of the house would have been spent on B.S. or not invested all that well. I didn't take financial advise from him given that I know he had declared bankruptcy three times! Anyway, it will be interesting to see if more shows opening up in the summer impacts things.

While I don't know about certain hyped markets in Florida and Las Vegas, haven't most things bounced back? The housing crash was aided and abetted by an incredible amount of outright fraudulent mortgage financing, not just loose credit, which I don't think was fully appreciated by folks at the time. Anyway, I bought in December 2006. My house went up another 10% before the crash brought my house down to purchase price give or take 5%. It is now worth 2X that (and was pre-pandemic as well). So, while you can go wrong short term in real estate, long term is another issue, although some areas do die horrible deaths that can take a long time, if ever, to recover from, and yes, some pricing in those crazy bubble times in Florida might not be duplicated... I am not sure where the market is now down there. At the time I really wanted to buy a cheap condo in Miami or somewhere, but just didn't have $50-75K in cash sitting around, the credit score to get another mortgage, or the resources to pay HOA/taxes on a place I couldn't rent and would only use a little. oh well. I wish i had money during the crash to buy real estate (or anything), but I was squeezed with a lower paying job, young kids, etc. then. every month was a scramble to pay bills. oh well.

I was in school in 1994. $12 was big money! In comics that was 9 new marvels or so. That would be $36 now. Citing a general inflation calculation is deceptive. Comics had their own rate of inflation

So I went through my 3 boxes of Cap books and yanked a stack of ones that have heated up. Praying that these find a reason to heat up.. (I found another 174 later)..[I always liked 172 - 174 as it was one of the rare X-men team-ups where most of the team showed up between the title going into reprints and getting the new team)

based on one issue? movie studios aren't completely stupid, if you can see the numbers for what they are in 2 seconds, so can they. i think it is more likely the value of any such deal has to do with reeves being involved. but seriously, netflix seems to throw $50-100 million at anything nowadays. and we think comics are inflated?

so the company was looking to have a glut of unsold books? no better way to destroy interest in a series by showing people hundreds of unsold copies on the rack