The Less Blob

It is not just about taxes. A lot of folks found their incomes lowered to the point of now being eligible for various entitlements. This could eliminate that eligibility. A friend who was canned and turned into a $1,000 a month "consultant" from a 6 figure job is now eligible for Medicaid for him and his family. He's 50 something, in poor health, and lives in a remote area where he had been allowed to work remotely. (He was actually fired two weeks after he left the hospital after a one week hospitalization where he worked 8 hours a day from his hospital bed and his company lauded him for the extra effort, and replaced with two 25 year olds). He has a very specialized skillset and is not likely to get a job unless he can have the same deal. McDonald's wouldn't hire him. If his family was supplementing and selling $1000 a month in on ebay and the government considers all of those sales income, he may no longer be eligible.

they say the actor has lost a bunch of weight to be more believable as a villian. i guess brain washing, mind control, whatever.

last issue of 80s books doesn't mean much though. 1st jack i get, but he's not who hobgoblin is going to be in the movie, according to my 15 year old, it will be ned? how sweet ned turns into a villian is beyond me.

batman and superman on cover. 1st fat thor. 1st skinny hulk. 1st fat sue storm. if i owned 50 copies I would be pushing this as the critical key of the early 80s that thor 339 obviously really is

she was already in the show last season though. it was pretty obvious she would be big in the coming season 3.

Here's a newsie (a little rough) for $3.49 plus shipping: https://www.ebay.com/itm/The-Incredible-Hulk-419-VF-Marvel-Comics-1994/154323887110?hash=item23ee6ba406:g:Gk8AAOSw-SVgIXeH it is the first on the cover, but you know how this market is with second appearances. i wish it were different, i have sooooo many second appearances of big characters. seriously, in a comic market that is experiencing madness, you can still find an affordable copy of this book?: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=amazing+spiderman+135&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1

"The situation reminds me of what happened to the Golden Age comics: huge print runs and poor treatment. Obviously the number of extant copies of copper/moderns far outnumber the Golden Age books, but they were so common it didn't matter...then no one cared...and when they did again, the stuff that was great before had yellowed or gotten water-damaged or was purchased by people that essentially remove the books from the population. They are still not rare, but we have seen several books now that have lots of copies and are able to maintain a demand that keeps the prices up. Surely there must be (newer) people buying multiples and multiples?" really nothing at all like GA books. GA books got rare because they were tossed (or got pulped during WW II). kids grew up, moved out and folks didn't keep them. by the time folks started really collecting in the 70s/late 60s so much was gone. virtually nobody in the 40s and 50s viewed these as being worth anything. the same was true of a lot of things. the disney stuff was kept more, for sure, and that's why your generic duck book from the 50s can often be had for $3-4. but nobody threw out their x-men 4. it was bagged and boarded most likely. i have a bunch of copies, they are all nice. i have sold a bunch over the years too. i never went hog wild selling it because the $12-15 it went for seemed like it could be more when the timing was better. Are 45 year old guys who have been collecting all along really going back and buying this for $50? maybe cgc 9.8s get bought at FMV. totally unrelated story about how people just don't understand the value of stuff. a work colleague's uncle owned a very famous restaurant here in new york. it was a place a lot of famous people went, authors, etc. back when authors were celebrities. he was an avid reader and book collector. over the decades he amassed a big collection of signed first editions from the 40s - 60s from restaurant guests. he died in the 70s and his wife cleaning things out did not think these dusty books could be worth anything literally threw them all out. in the trash. we're talking about books signed by hemingway, et al. my friend who was in his late teens was looking at the books that were getting thrown out, being an avid reader and intellectual and such, and was going to grab a few to take home. his mother screamed at him to get moving and not look at stuff in the garbage. given the provenance of these books we might be talking about a million dollars in the trash, definitely in the six figures. and the madness is that they were actually worth a decent chunk even then. but folks are ignorant. and these were wealthy people. but seriously, who throws away hardcover books anyway??

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers 1 from 1994 is picking up a bit: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=mighty+morphin+1+comic&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1&_pgn=2

While I am sure they exist, I have not read a good review or even comment about Justice League. I'm not sure who on rotten tomatoes is saying they liked it, but I doubt the methodology because 64% liked Dark Phoenix and that is impossible!!!! Wandavision had a huge group of hardcore viewers excitedly splicing and dicing and discussing every detail of the show every week. Final episodes of any fine show rarely make everyone happy. Should we throw GOT out because the last couple of episodes left us empty? Wandavision wasn't even close to that. Honestly, it's pretty close to where most folks thought it was going. We thought there might be another big baddie, and possibly a hero or someone helping Wanda, but the end result would have been the same, the big baddie wouldn't have won, they would have been sent back to their dimension or whatever.

Books like these popping to this extent really make me wonder if, perhaps, more people are collecting comics than we on the boards have assumed. Posts here seemed to assume far fewer collectors than in 1993, let's say, because print runs are way down and there are far fewer shops and generations of kids since 1993 have been less interested in the medium. But when I see something like this at $50 or whatever, X-Men 1, even Spawn 1s at $25+++, I really have to wonder if this assumption is true. (I think I sold a nice #4 here in December for $24, which probably meant I thought the ebay FMV was around $30?). Because folks who have been collecting since the 90s are unlikely to be paying this sort of $ for books as we already have them. So this is newer blood paying the big money for books that had nearly (or more than) 7 digit print runs. So yeah, all the new $ in the hobby has prevented me from buying some books I want, it has also allowed me a budget to buy period, which I'm pretty happy with. If we were stuck with 2005 levels of $10 and better books I would not be having nearly as much fun!

As much as I enjoyed the 9 weeks of anticipation and such, I think I'm with AOD in one sense, given that we're not going to see a season 2, or if we do it will be in so long we'll have forgotten all of this, I'm actually ready to move on and stop caring. Kind of like i stopped paying attention to GOT a week or two after the finale. If Dr, Strange 2 gives us any more clarification that will be great. We're not going to see it in any of the other Marvel TV shows this year and Marvel just moves too darn slow to fill a demand quickly, like banging out a six episode Agatha series or a "rise of SWORD" show .... clearly we can pretty much ignore the last 4 seasons of SHIELD as having no connection to the MCU, including Ghost RIder hiding the Darkhold anywhere. Heck, even a "tales of the blip" might be interesting because it isn't like everything stopped happening for 5 years. Maybe Charlie Cox's Daredevil can represent Wanda when she gets sued for mind trapping all those people?

Now you made me do a google search and I understand why I knew nothing about the FF movie. It is wild that a 90 minute movie can get made and never released, not even on TV.

This is something from a Washington Post article: But the publishing company produced comics through a strange process now known as “the Marvel Method,” whereby, typically, Lee would have a conversation of some kind with his writer/artist to discuss a few ideas. The writer/artist would take that prompt and write the story in visual form by drawing the pages and placing clarifications and dialogue suggestions in the margins. After that, Lee would add the dialogue and narration. He virtually never wrote actual scripts. And tossing around concepts with a writer/artist is the task of an editor, not a writer. Given that the writer/artists — most notably Kirby and Ditko, but also such titans as John Romita, John Buscema, Wally Wood and Don Heck — actually constructed the story, they should be considered the true, primary writers, with Lee doing embellishment (however crucial such embellishment may have been to the work’s success). I don't understand what the article is getting at. It is trying to take credit away from Lee for story ideas and the actual writing of the comics, but it seems that he was pretty important for that stuff, even if the artists were too. What made Marvels of that era enjoyable vs. DCs were the stories and dialogue and narrator boxes and all that and the art too, sure, though I can't say the art at Marvel was always better. By the late 60s DC had made a lot of progress, but, of course, by then Stan Lee had really stopped writing. Let's be serious, was Lee all out writing with no assistance 20+ titles a month? Probably not.

I am happy I did not get around to listing the copies of 316 I had intended to. I am not sure I can make similar claims as to condition on any of them, but still

that is wild. and the bidders are numerous and seem legit in terms of not being linked to the seller. that is roughly FMV for a 9.6 slab. these folks are betting that this is a 9.8. if it is a 9.6 they are losing $50.

technically, in NY, if you sell back issues for under cover price you're not supposed to collect sales tax. I found this in a tax bulletin. i tried to explain this to a shop charging sales tax on their dollar box moderns, but they would have none of it. and, of course, ebay charges sales tax on those books too.

He started in comics around 1953 and wound up at Atlas/Marvel by 1955 after a brief stop at Charlton, so yeah, he was not stuck at Charlton all that long. I'll be honest, I never cared much for him when I was younger, for all the same reasons his work dried up/slowed down in comics, but came to appreciate it a lot more as an adult. What's interesting about him is that his interiors were often a lot better than the covers.

you still need to collect the pertinent information for your accountant

no, it was only required for $20K+ before, but the new proposal lowers the limit. it is a pain because i suspect it will also include all your shipping charges.

Romita Sr. was a pure delight when I met him at a show in like 1995. He signed a few books for me, chatted about this and that. Some guy had just finished asking him to sign like 50 books and he was nice about it. There was no line. Romita Jr. had a line 100 people long. That made no sense to me! Makes me regret not taking advantage of these opportunities back in the day when autographs were not a profit center. People knock Chris Claremont, but I also found him to be pretty pleasant. This was back when they didn't charge for sigs...

His net worth was around $50 million when he died, so he didn't fall too hard, unlike some of the talent who died unable to pay medical bills, etc. It's not like he ever owned Marvel, if he did we could speculate on how rich he could have been had they not sold off properties, etc. ron perelman messed all that up. had he not mortgaged marvel he could have solid it for the many billions disney has spent buying marvel and getting properties back from fox and what spiderman would be worth right now. of course, all of that assumes a lot of things. maybe a good episode of "What If?"

that's pretty bad

80-90% of the listings I see don't result in any record of a sale (they never say "sold"), usually because the prices are just stoopid.

yes, for 90% of the listings it is even worse than your typical "I am not a professional grader, look at the pics" ebay listings, because it is usually group shots of 9-12 books, only the front, you can't see anything but huge defects, and the grade is usually "great shape" or some other nonsense. but do you know what anyone paid? did someone actually buy it in the thread?

The point is you are in the minority. Possibly a pretty small minority. But your posts seem to try to imply that you aren't and that there is some consensus that the show was bad, like Justice League or Dark Phoenix was bad, when no such consensus exists at all. That's my point. And there's nothing wrong with having a minority view. Lots of us have minority views on far more important topics than a silly TV show. I'm not trying to tell you your opinion is wrong.