The Less Blob

I have all those things being a positive for me. I am an upper middle class earner. (OK, at the bottom end of upper middle class.) I am no doubt saving money during the pandemic. hundreds of dollars each month. it doesn't cause me to drop $2500 on a book that was $800 not long ago. It has totally made me think about buying $15-25-50-$150 books I might not have thought about before. Absolutely. Is it really some well off folks taking ALL of their $5,000 or whatever covid savings and plowing them into a couple of books? How many of these people are there?

I still don't understand where all this four digit spending is coming from. I understand $5 books becoming $20-50 books because of extra money.

well, we are a few more years closer to a decent gambit movie/show then .... frankly, gambit is a guy who might be more interesting in an 8-10 episode series, particularly after a less forgettable introduction in movies than he has gotten. clearly dismey believes its disney+ shows are worthy of a movie budget

that is awesome. are the stories original to this?

yeah, you're smart though, i suspect you don't want 5 long boxes of my worst books. i brag about the winners here, there are still boxes of losers. but with winners multiplying by lemmings a $300 dollar box book pays for a lot of mistakes.

let us know. i always figure dealers in response to ebay wackiness are going to jack everything up... those $2 books are now going to be $5 and aslo the keys will have facebook, not ebay prices.. but then i see people posting $1-2 a pop hauls here, like there are still a lot of mistakes sitting in those boxes

I don't think it matters for them, i doubt goon was over 25,000 and fear agent was probably lower, but someone here can correct me, i'm just pulling numbers from my ..... those kinds of numbers are plenty low enough if general demand spikes

I don't see any reason to sell dollar box books for a dollar, except for space limitations. but if i could get $2 a pop for 5 long boxes of moderns and coppers i would, just because my comic cave is getting crowded.

you're not impressing us. where are the newsies??

yes, but outside of "1st ultimate" this and that, the way the market is set up, i don't know if anyone will ever care about run filler. believe me, i wish they would. i can think of two titles, walking dead and deadpool (1st regular series), where even the run filler was selling great, both were aided by relatively low print runs compares to the marvel ultimate books though. hoping invincible can get there, although i don't have that much, unfortunately. do any other titles come to mind where that happened? i guess harley's first series did to a certain extent as well as gotham sirens. if chew or fear agent get good shows that might happen. the goon has a small enough group of books it could happen, but i feel like powell just doesn't have it in him to ever get the movie or show off the ground and if he hands it over completely to someone else it will be a mess. i don't think it even happened for Black panther's (late 90s? early 2000s?) series, and that had a good combination of relatively low print runs and a discrete # of issues that could have made it possible, but appearing in a zillion different places before then did not help.

But why are these Jim Lee books bouncing back? They have nice covers, but I don't think the stories in 248 or 268 are big impact stories. maybe 268 if hydra becomes relevant again. there are a couple of very minor flashback 1st apps in it. does the new blood spending all this money recognize them as iconic covers?

I miss scavenging. Right know my knee is a wreck, so i can't dig through boxes anyway, but I miss the hunt. I blew over $150 on dollar books at some place a few months ago just because i missed it so much. frankly, not a bunch of winners in the group though, but maybe with a bit more aging. I bought a bunch of pristine batman titles from the period right before and after detective 1000 and some superman titles from around then, and a bunch of late 90s /early 2000s x-men related books and odds and ends. i am hoping something relevant happened in those batman issues around then. and some batwing issues, but not the right one(s). i always feel like batman books have a good chance of going somewhere if you buy a big stack.

x-men 268 seems to have bounced back nicely. that was once a wall book and i know i have snagged it in cheap-o boxes (I am excited when i do though). i remember that one being down as well and now i see some heathy sales.

i don't feel like 244 ever really made it en masse into the cheap-o boxes (because i think i only own one). somehow I have found my fair share of 221 in them though, probably because sinister isn't on the cover and people forget. not that lee is on that cover either, but maybe folks see "M Squad" and figure it is worth something. Nobody seems to care about artists anymore except for variants or killer covers. And it is his 1st on X-Men, not pro or marvel work, so less of a big deal. The book used to be a big deal, but i have found it often in $1-2 boxes. I'd buy it cheap all day though. everything comes back eventually it seems and it is going to be worth at least what you paid.

cap was kind if a second tier title and those books are 5-7 years earlier. those books may very well have gotten beaten up. and the # of copies in the direct market was not huge ... the print runs might have been big (not that big), but if 30% are newsstand returns that get destroyed (these were after mile high ii, there may have been less shenanigans) there's definitely room for perceived scarcity. also, boards were kind of a luxury item in the mid 80s, reserved for the "good" stuff, not your generic recent stuff. by the 90s they weren't. also, i don't remember anyone caring about u.s. agent, even when he had his own series. maybe for a hot minute. i'll be honest, i don't think i have them. unless they were nice shape and 50 cents, i probably wouldn't have bought them. the covers are lame. i have 324, which has an interesting cover. i may have avoided the u.s. agent books because he looked lame, kind of like hulk 271. so, basically, it is really hard to compare some mid run B list title from 1984 or whenever to some super hyped book from 1991-93. Really difference universes in terms of quantity and condition. And even if half the copies of Spawn 1 and X-Men 4 got ice cream on them, there are still plenty left. I think it is a market perceiving the value at $25+, folks willing to pay that because they regularly do for books with more scarcity, and this keeps the market going.

see, you got me bidding on a slabbed USM 1 last night ... looking for a book that it is down... thought I could get a voldy 9.8 for $125...still got bid up over $200

it probably should, why not? she was a pretty popular character. not sure how popular she is right now. they never knew what to do with her in the movies, but she was big in the cartoons. I feel like Marvel will know how to use her right.

perhaps it is the lack of keys relevant to current stories or MCU outside of miles morales, 1st sam jackson nick fury, USM #1 and a few others? for the most part "1st ultimate ___" doesn't mean anything. simply reintroducing "ultimate" versions of characters doesn't seem that exciting. but yeah, i bought a lot of these after the fact. they seemed attractive and shiney and liked them at $ 1 a pop.

It is nice to see nice sharp copies of these books.

I am not sure what some of the best offers were. Whatever key combination I used to do to find the actual sales price doesn't work anymore. I guess signed by Morrow carries a premium too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/MIGHTY-MORPHIN-POWER-RANGERS-1-SABANS-HAMILTON-COMICS-1994-GRAY-MORROW-SIGNED/324470144223?hash=item4b8bed7cdf:g:toEAAOSw3hlgFfwe https://www.ebay.com/itm/MIGHTY-MORPHIN-POWER-RANGERS-1-HAMILTON-1994-SIGNED-BY-GRAY-MORROW/254794315515?hash=item3b52ecb6fb:g:q3UAAOSwsI1fxRv7

Makes me think of Amazing Spider-Man 583 Obama variant. Many purchasers were not "comic people" and so those copies are not likely to stay in the same shape as those owned by boardies. I'm not saying by any means this is the SAME as Golden Age, and there are clearly many more copies of these 90's books out there, but they're no longer the drek they were and a lot of wells have run dry. --------- My local shop sold them bagged and boarded because he jacked up the price a little on them pretty quickly and had ordered extras for sale later. It is quite possible a lot of people bought it like that as a keepsake and never actually took the book out. I really think betting on the notion that big print run moderns are rare in high grade due to assumptions about poor handling isn't reality based, particularly as we are talking about sales of raw books. Again, I am not commenting on whether anything should be hard or not in cgc 9.8, so many things impact that like cover stock, color, etc. Spawn 1 sells for $25 because it is popular even though there are zillions.

What would you list a bulk lot of 20 9.4-9.8 spawn 1s for on ebay? $500? $750 just for sh***ts and giggles?

These enormously printed 90s comics were saved in nice condition in vast numbers. And books like Spawn 1 were bagged and boarded early because folks thought they'd be worth something. Did some people get ice cream on them? Of course. Do I have over 20 minty copies of Spawn 1 somewhere? Yup. They were $2 each in bulk on ebay in the early/mid 2000s. I bought 20 of them around the same time I made the genius move of buying 50 copies of Superman 204 at 75 cents each. Are they all 9.8s? I doubt it. I'm not saying 9.8s are "easy," but we're talking about raw "high grade" books. Honestly, I don't know what is going on. It may be more a function of the hoards simply not getting out to market. I have 20+ copies. I'm not sure I have ever listed one. I think i did here once. I have sold about 5 x-men 4s here and on ebay. I think I have 5 more. Spawn 1 and X-Men 4 were never actually garbage books that would have been abused en masse, even if you could get them in $1-2 boxes (and high grade Spawn 1s were rarely in those).

who wrote the punchy dialogue and all that?

I don't know if there could be an issue with a january 1099 making it look like you are no longer eligible, losing coverage, only to be corrected months later with your taxes showing the $10K was only $1K in profit. I don't know how frequently they test income eligibility for this stuff.