The Less Blob

yes, not high grade.. i am usually looking at a $20-25 reader and trying to figure out if the price is good. i usually decide to pass or get outbid. they're cheap, but there's enough demand that they never go THAT cheap, I just don't see bidding wars on these lower grade ones like you see on some of the PCH.

I knw when I see them I price them out and there are always a bunch for sale of any given issue. That's all.

5 years later prices had gone way up. i remember my dad took us to a convention in 1977, he came back with a few things. unfortunately, he didn't know the difference between ASM 1 and ASM Annual 1, so he would up buying 2 mid-grade annuals for $10 each. Not terrible, but my guess is that the $20 could have gotten something more substantial.

No. It is pretty expensive. It is often hard to get even a beater of a third tier title for $50. Some of the pre-hero, but post-code Marvel monster books are not too bad, but many are surprisingly "common," as an there always seem to be 5-10 copies of a given issue for sale.

And for $20 in the early 70s you could have gotten an ASM 1....

I wonder if two activities can get merged? I am a budding portrait painter of imaginary psychotic clowns. Those art materials cost money. Needless to say, there isn't a market for my masterpieces. Not yet at least. Should clowns and comics all be merged into one business, creating even more deductions, or do i have to keep the clowns and comics separate? Does it help if the original inspiration for the clowns was the Joker?

https://www.kiplinger.com/article/retirement/t054-c000-s004-retirees-no-tax-deduction-for-hobby-losses.html In sum, yes and no. I am guessing now any year where claimed expenses wipe out all sales could create the claim you are a hobby. I think the net of this is folks who do a few thousand in sales a year and get a 1099 should probably claim some profits, and, if necessary, pay a few bucks in taxes. Like I say above, there is no reason to assume high profit margins when you have entire industries like supermarkets operating on a 2% margin. I'm just annoyed, for a solid 5 or so years I paid $200-300 a month for a storage room, but that was almost 15 years ago. Realistically, every book i kept in storage then should have those costs attached to their cost basis. documenting this is a whole other issue. and that's the problem with all of this.

that's how they would go after you in the past. show a loss, particularly the majority of the years, and they'd call you a hobby. so, now, we want to be avoid being called a hobby, at the end of the day you have a $10K 1099 and claim $50 in profits, you might be raising red flags. But $200 or $300? That is 2-3%. That's a pretty normal number for a relatively low profitability business like grocery stores, which are 2.2% -- https://www.biz2credit.com/blog/2020/05/22/grocery-store-profit-margins-and-how-to-calculate-yours/ Given the way most comic shop owners live, I'd think comics are similar low profit centers. Of course, they're imposing a huge record keeping PITA on folks to collect an extra $0-30 in taxes if the person is not a high income earner, maybe $60-90 if they are.

I still haven't figured out how Bloomberg has such a high net worth. His company has $10 billion a year in revenues, but I have no idea what the profits are, I can't imagine even half of that. But i guess that would justify his vauation. I am amazed he can still rent out his terminals for so much per month, and that is 75% of the revenue. You'd think the same information could be gotten cheaper elsewhere. But if you are a trader making billions in trades a year you don't want to cut corners on something like that.

ok, I've been bargain bin diving pretty regularly since 1993 and, yes, this is the sort of thing that CAN set off alarm bells if the owner is looking at the books. there's no reason to buy 20 copies of something unless they made a huge mistake pricing it and if they see 20 copies this might turn on some lights in their heads. i agree, most comic shop employees are in a fog, but just recently I got quized on a pile of 50 cent books where I had pulled 3 copies of one book. Mind you, it is like a $5 book, so it wouldn't have been an issue, i just think it has potential. so, yeah, usually you're right and they just want to unload, but I'd approach a potential $1500-2000 windfall very carefully. It might be worth buying some other books to pad the pile to not raise questions. and no, i don't feel guilty at all, I've spent plenty of money on dollar books that are worth a dollar. it all evens out.

wow, that totally looks like a book my old LCS would have ordered too many of and had to dump in the dollar box.

"But even so, 20 copies at once takes some brass ones mister! Good for him!" I'll be honest, I always worry that doing something like that might be a red flag if it is the owner or manager counting them that a book might be hot and they decide to look it up and decline to sell it to me. So what I've done is probably buy a lot more stuff than I might otherwise and mix the books in with the other stuff, so when they're counting it they may not be as aware that I have so many of one. It is one reason at my old LCS I would always try to get an employee to count my books and not the owner. I didn't want him seeing what I was buying if i knew there were some diamonds in there. To mix things up, if there was a day where there was nothing all that interesting in the boxes and I was just buying some whatever, I'd take the books to the owner. (This particular store had registers on both sides of the store. It gave him and his employee a better view of shoplifters that way.)

maybe. i need to get away from my wife. i'm only an hour drive, although probably more with weekend traffic.

just saying that was cheap, although maybe things had dropped fast between 2007 and 2008. I don't remember my keys suddenly feeling worth a lot less. like i said, i sold a raw FF 5 in lower grade for more and if 2.5 timely Subby 2s were available on ebay at $250 I would have grabbed them. maybe I am remembering it all wrong, but I was very active in bidding in that market from 2000-2004 or so (low grade slabbed GA) and then selling them off in 2006-7 at 50-100% more than I paid, but maybe 2008 was a mess? I snagged plenty of pricing mistakes ... even for stuff like ASM 129 and IM 55 ... at my shop, but not CGC books

sounds like you're rich! I hope the package doesn't get lost in the mail!

Basquait only produced about 600 paintings that we know about. That still doesn't make the prices make any sense, but it feeds into it.

those prices sound very low, was this recession 2008? I sold a raw FF 5 in 4.0-4.5 shape for $750 in 2006. The submariner 2 in 2.5 for $250 sounds CRAZY cheap for then as I paid $500 for a much later issue in cgc 7.0 in 2001 or so. if I had seen early timelys that cheap in 2008, despite being broke, I would have bought them. I can't speculate on the other prices.

what do tables cost (for future shows)?

when does it open? does the 75 include dealers and staff?

Agree on both grades. But I do see the value in letting someone know what it would be without this specific thing going on. But why is a popped staple treated differently than a crease? I'm having trouble figuring out why they think something is Green or not.

the kiddie oriented TV show from a while back was lame. too much of the Hercules vibe going on. They totally missed the whole point of conan. they messed up the movie with momoa. it wasn't the worst thing I had ever seen, but it wasn't conan either, it was pretty boy sword and sorcery. understanding it wasn't how the comics developed him, but how they showed conan turn into conan in the movie with arnold made so much sense. they've seen this can work... see the witcher ... they have so much source material to work with, like 700+ issues of conan between marvel and darkhorse, the original books, etc.. yes, they need to have overarching themes that work along side "monster of the week" plots. there is a lot of good sword/fantasy/sorcery stuff on TV now, they can make this work.

CGC gives 2.5s and 3.0s to comics with big chunks out of the cover, so a missing MVS with a 2.0 kind of makes sense.

very simple. if you are looking for a beautiful copy in a slab and don't mind an ad page missing, the green is great for you. It's interesting though. early, rare, GA, folks are more accepting of this sort of thing, heck, even not so rare, not so early, GA. I used to sell ugly 40s Fawcetts and DCs missing wraps for full guide "Fair", sometimes better, fully disclosed. admittedly, "fair" OPG was a pretty reasonable number for these books (often $10-20), but if I paid $1-2, I was happy.

Red sojna s firsts are cheap outside of high grade slabs. This is an iconic character and you could get a decent first for $50

I just don't know how it will impact the run filler and all those lovely savage swords.