BLBcomics-migration

A Buster Brown comic book from 1909

THE KATZENJAMMER KIDS 1902 and 1903 comic books

HAPPY HOOLIGAN by Fred Opper 1903 - 2nd Hooligan comic book

MAUD by Fred Opper 1906

The Three Fun Makers 1908 - first time multiple newspaper comic strips appear in a comic book together

I cut out and saved many of his columns...jb L Watt-Eavns also did the initial surveys in CBG of how many comic books had had restoration stuff done - and his numbers were huge, i thought, even by standards of almost 25 years ago now About 5 years ago,some one mailed me a near complete run of CBG from the first issue up thru 1985 or so - it was in looking thru the first couple boxes i rediscovered i began advetising in there with large ads with #3, then #4, then #7 and down the road when year long contracts became available to garner ad discounts, i signed up. Watt-Evans census surveys were as far as i remember the first attempts to figure this stuff out bob beerbohm

Bob, I think most people would consider 280 out of a few thousand to be a decent statistical sampling, at least enough to draw some general conclusions. Surely you're not implying that he needed to see each and every one of those thousands of collections for his conclusions to be valid? I also feel that Tim has a very valid point here. After all, aren't the Neilsen TV ratings based on a sample size of only 900 or some small figure like that and it's supposed to represent the viewing habits for over 200 million Americans. Of course, the sample has to be structured and set up properly to be a representative sample of the entire population. No doubt Bob's sample size of 280 (either complete or partial) would not be totally representative, but I think it's probably still good enough to provide the hobby with some relative idea of scarcity between books. Took a look at the SI 4 rating and it actually covers a range of between 1,000 to 2,000 copies in existence. So Ernie definitely got the SI numbers wrong on the ASM #1. Never bother to pick up the Marvel editions, but I don't believe he has the SI ratings in there or does he? When I was deciding between GA books to buy, I would always refer to the SI rating since I felt that it was just another piece of information to factor into my purchasing decision. Although the ratings are probably not completely accurate from an absolute point of view, I always felt that they had some validity from a relative point of view. Not sure about Ernie planning to produce an update every few years. I do know, however, that he was planning to produce quarterly updates for his RVI pricing index. I found this convoluted pricing index to be totally useless whereas his SI scarcity index did have some value for me, especially with respect to the earlier and rarer GA or pre-GA books. Overall, I would fully agree with both Jon and Bob here on the importance of the first two volumes of his photojournal guide, since I also feel that it represents the most significant one-time comic publication to date and possibly ever, from a pure collector's point of view. Once upon a time when i first began discovering EC comics, oh, this must have been around 1967, i did a series of trades and ended up thru 3 separate deals with 3 copies of vault of Horror #12 - now, at this time i had less than 20 EC comics, Mad #1 and Weird Science 18 19 being the first 3 i ever got my hands on during the summer of 1967. Three of them were Vault 12 for a very long time, in my mind, Vault 12 must have been an easy issue to score, hence, i had no qualms about trading them off for other stuff i thought must be scarcer. It was 17 years before i scored my 4th copy of Vault 12 Perception becomes reailty in the hobby of collecting comic book magazines. I, too, wanted to believe the SRI ratings Ernie gave each comic book in there. But then i always came back to the two Tom Reilly paragraphs following the very long Edgar Church write up in his Photo Journal Guide. How utterly wrong that supposedly "authroitative" data was on the collection i was so intimately involved with and knew very well each of the players who got in on the first third of the collection which came out of the Berkeleycon 1973 i co-hosted on the UC-Berkeley campus. For some reason which eludes me to this day Ernie never talked with any of the players who were in on the initial scoring of one of the absolute finest high grade batch of comic books to ever come down the pike. He never talked with Bud Plant, John Barrett, Jon Campbell, Scott Maple, David Belmont, Nick Marcus, Mike Manyak, and the final player i remember to be Bob Selvig, though on that final note, i might be misremembering. David Belmont (then of New York state) might remember as there was another player involved in the initial first batch. I keeping meaning to ask David, Scott Maple thinks Ernie might have talked with C&C employee Tom Walton, then the publicist of Comics & Comix, when i was no longer a part of C&C, but running my own multiple store operation and building my secondary wholesale market via a comics warehouse with a million books in it. Walton knew nothing and threw out good sounding sound bytes almost always false in fact - which Ernie then must have merely transcribed a conversation as the write ups on the Reilly and Cosmic Airt Plane seemed to me almost like after-thoughts following his huge Edgar Church look-see. Plus, Ernie erroneously stipulated that Tom Reilly copies were not as nice as any given Edgar Church counterpart. That they were not supple like a Mile High et al That concept, too, is erroneous in my humble opine. Taking the above concepts into consideration, over the years as i talked with old time collector friends in those pre-auction house eBay days about Ernie's Scarcity Ratio Indexes, there was book after book which we would chew the fat about being no where near as scarce as Ernie made them out to be - because we could rattle off collectors we knew to have copies plus ones we had ourselves. There are something like 22,000 covers in Ernie's first two volumes plus all kinds of stuff listed & priced which did not get covers posted - a phenomenal under-taking by any standards No one had ever seen anything like it before in comics fandom I consider the photo spreads to be essential tools of the trade, but consider much of the text data suspect. This conclusion on my part comes after almost 20 years now of looking at the tools of our trade. I also do not agree with many prices on books in Overstreet, there is stuff i consider way overpriced and many books underpriced. much less Wizard and the Krause Standard Guide is a pricing joke, if you ask me. So, Ernie's SRI concept was a noble cause on which he never followed thru on to correct many many errors, due to forces in play which took Ernie's attention elsewhere. eBay has proved, if nothing else has, just how not scarce many of the SRI high numbers are. Likewise, eBay has proved that many Platinum Era comic books are not as scarce as once thought, which i track closely for corrections to the Victorian and Plat sections i compile for the Overstreet PG for a decade now. I have raised certain prices reflecting the marketplace and have had no qualms about lowering prices on stuf fwhich has prived out to be way more common than originally thought to be. And Ernie's SRI of 4 on AmSpi #1 being 1000 to 2000 just furthers that one issue number being out of whack. One could prove many other SRI claims to be out of whack as well. I think that certain SRI claims Ernie made constituted a form of self-fulfilling prophecy inthat the collectors who believed gobbled those books up, inducing a false sense of scarcity, made them harder to acquire than reality might otherwise dictate. I am also not claiming that ALL of Ernie's SRI claims are wrong or false - but many many of them are as time has proved out. Robert Beerbohm http://www.BLBComics.com

yer welcome tth2 Thanks, this old dog knows a lot about the inside contents, the history behind the history, most of the old war stories of the comics business, but evidently, i still have a few things to learn about grading old comic books in the higher grades - so, i am going to be posting cover scans this week end to Buddy Can You Spare A Grade as i am going be going back to grading school for a while in an honest effort to come up to speed on the concept of standards tightening in the hobby once again. That, and a pair of cheaters i bought at Walmart as my long time 20/20 vision is not as strong at 53 as it was decades past. I guess my major concern has been content over form in the hobby. But not the only. But old dogs can learn new tricks - and all i have ever done for over 35 years now is buy & sell old comic books - and i plan on doing same till the daisies be coming up over my grave - best robert beerbohm http://www.BLBComics.com

Bob, I think most people would consider 280 out of a few thousand to be a decent statistical sampling, at least enough to draw some general conclusions. Surely you're not implying that he needed to see each and every one of those thousands of collections for his conclusions to be valid? Of course not, but over the years I have gone over various books with various collector friends of the higher number supposed very scarce to rare categories - and we would speel off those collectors we knew had a copy and invariabley come out with more copies supposedly known to exist. but i honestly do not think 280 is high enough of a ratio sampling considering back in the 80s there were more collectors of old comics than there now At the time i was buying 10,000 of each Xmen, and new comics sold in vast more numbers than they do now - by sheer process of osmosis, there were more collectors of older stuff as well General conclusions are one thing, but to sit and assign SRI numbers to all the books in his Photo Journal Guide as an add-on bonus and people going biz-zonkers trying to collect the "blank" covers as well as the 9 and 10 SRI issues, well, just by following Ernie on Spiderman #1 being a 4 according to him, the rest of it unravels as well at least it does to me, and a lot of other collectors. doesn't mean i am 100% correct either bob beerbohm

Ernie came to my house twice mainly because of my many Centaurs and odd ball GA i had....His books are the greatest gift to fandom....allowing people to "Journal shop" for books they never would have pursued.....A remarkable achievement. jon Hi Jon I fully agree, and i prefaced my commentary in my entry into this thread on Ernie's Photo Journal Guide with saying it still stands, and probably will forever, due to the sheer hard work he put into it and the scope of the project, as the greatest comics fan project ever done. A true gift to fandom and we all should say a prayer for Ernie tonight. I know from personal knowledge that for some bizarre reason his two paragraphs on the Tom Reilly collection is 100% wrong, other than getting the name correct. He surely never asked the players involved, as i asked each of them, people i all know/knew personallt for many years. That got me going into digging into his SRI research concepts. What i have been examing for many years now is the concept of his Scarcity Ratio Index and find the data which he used to come to his conclusions to be lacking. On another note: Can i get a shot of the back cover of that Standard Oil Comics you won from Stew? I am coming to grips with the next Overstreet history essays and surely want the data to be correct. I have picked up half a dozen B series, so i am correcting the listing as well as the historical importance of this little known series predating Funnies on Parade as well as Gulf (Comic) Funny Weekly. And many thanks for supplying the WOW #1 cover in OPG #35 - only issue i have never read yet. Robert Beerbohm http://www.blbcomics.com

hello, might i inquire as to what your name is? With you saying that Ernie never examined your collection, then that further strengthens my position that the SRI concepts in his book, which he was using to set himself off from Overstreet, as Ernie had visions of reprinting these two volumes every couple years with new upgraded data btw, at least in the early days when he was flush with excitement over it being printed finally. To answer another query in this thread, i believe, not having my Gerber's handy right now either, that a SRI 4 is 2500 copies. I wrote a piece abotu 10 years ago in CBM that i venture to opine that there are probably 2000 copies floating around the LA area alone - that i personally bought and sold around 1000 copies of Amazing Spiderman #1 over the course of having placed my first ad of comics for sale in RBCC 47 back in Oct 1966 . Granted, most of that action occurred in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, when Am Spider 1 was a lot cheaper - it was about $20 circa 1973 or so, for example, but still, the concept that only 2500 copies of Spiderman 1 were still "alive" 20 years ago was humorous then to me, as it still is. After thinking about this, and never asking him directly, i have come to conclusion that maybe Ernie was trying to present "demand" as well as "supply" into his equation. what do others think of that thought? Robert Beerbohm

Back in the day, when the Direct Market was younger in energy as well as in size, Ernie came down from Nevada about once a month to score new comics stuff as well as look thru the Bay Area comic book store offerings. His Mylar business was in its infancy as well. he was a consumate comic book fan for a long time, and something comic book fans like to do, generally, is scroll thru comic book boxes looking at stuff they have never seen before, or examining any given collector's copy of any given book to ascertain its condition. One thing i did notice Ernie was doing was if some one had a better copy of any given issue, he would supplant the better condition image into his master file of film negatives. So, Ernie's project was also a photo journal of the best conditons he could find at the time. He was enamoured with the Mile High collection, but i still hold forth that many many of the Tom Reilly copies are nicer, or in the least as nice, as its Edgar Church counter-part. I imagine he looked thru much/most/all of each listed person's collections, though i could not vouch that concept in its entirety, as i can only go by the concept that he spent hours upon hours in my stores, looking at comics, making copy camera photos, etc. And i do know he "upgraded" his photos - that is personal knowledge from Ernie to me. Some enterprising soul could contact all the living persons listed in that weighted list on Photo Journal #2 and ask em - Robert Beerbohm

Not having the time to go thru all the posts on this thread, my feelings about Ernie's project still remain it to be the greatest fan project ever attempted. However, the data in it is almost all skewed in that he lists his sources in #2 - that list is weighted against how many covers he shot and used in his book. My name appears an inch or two down from the first column. Ernie began his project in the early 1980s and he would come down from the Reno Nevada area where he lived before he went back east to take care of his ailing father into my Telegraph Ave Berkeley comic shop HQ to photograph 100s of covers at a time. Said he was working on a book of comic book covers, and it kept growing in scope as time went by. Took him years. Eugene Henderson (San Diego Comicon Board of Directors, the last of the true "old timers" on it, and as a side bar, the one who sold his childhood copy of Action #1 to Bruce Hamilton for a grand who then brought it to the Berkeleycon 1973 show i co-hosted which Theo Holstein tried buying there for $1500, which brought on some newspaper publicity which got Bruce a 2nd copy which became the basis for the Action #1 selling for $1801.26 which blew the lid off comic book prices all back in the months April thru June 1973) also tooks 1000s of photo covers of my stuff each San Diego Comicon, setting up a copy camera contraption at the show. That Berekelycon 73 was also where the Tom Reilly books first surfaced. Getting back to Gerber's project, this was back when i had approximately 75-80% of all comic books published since 1933 on hand - prior to the ware house my comics company Best of Two Worlds owned with a million comic books in it and a Federal Disaster Area brought on by water floods. There are about 280 collectors listed there - out of thousands then active - from which he compiled his project of the first two volumes. Think about that for a sec. His Scarcity Ratio Index was ultimately based off examining these 280 collection based all over the country. And there were THOUSANDS of collections - still are, which he never examined. I started exmaining his skewed SRI data results when i first read his interpretation of the Tom Reilly/Arnheim collection which is so falsely labled "San Francisco" copies in today's marketplace. EVERYTHING in those two paragraphs is wrong, except the name of the original owner, data which i have put out onto these boards earlier this year as well as some CBM thoughts Gary Carter printed back in the 1990s. The most humorous SRI Ernie published was calling a Siderman #1 a "4" Robert Beerbohm http://www.blbcomics.com