shadroch

I was thinking it would top out at 1.8 with the damage. Sending it to MCS, but I don't think it will get slabbed. I paid $700 for it at a show after watching the dealer pay $350 for it. I offered him double what he had just paid and he accepted. Believe it or not, but I didn't notice the water damage until the next day when my pretty good deal turned sour. That was about four years ago, and it appears this should sell for about a grand.

5.0

I'm happy now. Will selling my building make me happier? Maybe. What will I do next? I've not a clue. My thoughts are to get a 40 foot shipping container, load my stuff into it , get my vaccine and hit the road. Never been to Yellowstone, or the remote parts of the Grand Canyon, or Monument Valley, or Deadwood. Take some time off and then go back to sellin stuff on the internet. I still believe my business plan will prove successful, although it needs some fine tuning.

As you can see, the structure is good but it has heavy water damage. It reads well, has no sticky pages and has the MVS.

I will have gotten ten years of use out of them. If I'm alive in ten years, I'll still be 72 and unable to enjoy life like I can now.

Today is my birthday and I get a call from my sister who wishes me a HBD and tells me she dreamed something special will happen today. I get to my building today and there is someone waiting for me. As I've gotten to know the local building inspectors far too well, I know he is not was one of them. He introduces himself and asks me if I'd be open to selling. He pulls out a paper that has an offer for the building, with 25% down, 36 payments and then a balloon payment at the end. Says he wants to make it a residential three unit, with a professional office in the back. He says he makes his best offer first and it will never be higher. He will use a third party title insurance company as the " trustee", but i'm not sure that's the right term. I like the idea but have to run it past a local RE attorney.

Eight days for a priority package from SE Arizona to Arlington TX last week. Sent a 44 pound package Fed EX Ground that the chart said would arrive Thursday. It got there today.

Comics didn't go well from 1939 to the 1990s. They imploded in the mid 1950s after only being around for a little over a dozen years. Few artists and writers could make a living off comics, and even fewer companies stayed afloat. Fast forward to the mid-1970s when a rag paper shortage and inflation nearly doomed the industry. If it wasn't for comics reinventing the way they were distributed, they most likely would have failed as an industry. The 80s Indy movement brought some great comics, but just about every publisher failed. Pacific, Eclipse, First, Eagle, I could go on, but they all failed. Heck, DC was in talks to license a few heroes to Marvel but that fell apart.

As a shop owner, I supplied two or three places with comics. One was a 7-11, another was a coffee shop in the Mineola train plaza, and one was a youth boutique. It worked great for me as I only gave them books that were a few weeks old. I'm sure many comic shops had their own network of newsstand outlets to sell their surplus stock. It's possible thats how direct books ended up in non-direct locations.

Don't get hung up on the documentation. Individuals are held to lower standards than companies with access to accountants.

Let's suppose you have bought ten books a week off your local comic shop. Thats roughly $30 a week for the past two years or 100 weeks x $30, or $3,000. Sold in bulk, you may get $500 for them. You now have $2500 in losses to use against your other sales. Or you can donate them , and have $3,000 in tax deductions against your sales. If you bought SA books ten years ago but don't have a paper trail, you can use a ten year old Overstreet to estimate what the books were selling for at the time. Tax agencies aren't trying to get blood from a stone. They expect you to make good faith efforts and as long as you are on the up and up and don't try to screw them entirely, they are usually pretty reasonable. Tax codes can be very user friendly, if you learn how to play the game. For the last ten years or so, I write the price I paid, and the source I got it from on the backing board of every comic. Takes a few minutes but hopefully will be worth it down the road. It lets me know exactly what I need to sell the book at to break even, and how much room I have to negotiate.

Found this today. A year ago, this would have got me all warm and fuzzy.

This auction ends on Thursday at 11:59 PM East Coast time.

Auction ends Thursday ay Midnight East Coast time. Usual rules, PP preferred, returns if warranted. One of the hottest books on the planet due to some internet nonsense about Ditko creating Venom. Flippers delight. BIN is $100 and includes free shipping. All others pay $5 Domestic, exact cost international. The book looked perfect in the bag, but a closeup shows a couple small non color breakin creases in bottom corner. Opening bid is only $10 and please keep the bids in $1 minimum bids.

In the last week, I have ,in essence, traded a few books that cost me under $1,000 for a new patio set, an 8x8 shed, a 10X10 shed, sixty feet of sail shades and a Ninja Foodie. Next up is a roman bath tub, and the fire sprinklers needed to convert part of my storage area into a living space. Honestly, that excites me more than having another half box of slabs. I think selling 10 % of my "vault" books, 1/3 of my GA, SA and BA books plus whatever I can sell from the copper to today will net at least another $50,000 while still leaving the majority of my books untouched. Books are selling at pretty high prices- I sold a weak VG Conan 1 for $200.That's easily a third more than I expected.

I somehow got the idea you were more interested in reading them, not looking for HG copies to grade. Buying them sight unseen would be foolish. Having to pay to ship an unseen collection would be folly

3.0-3.5. I don't know signatures well enough to opine on them.

I've got a bunch of them. They turn up at estate sales and auctions pretty often, but most are missing a thing or two. Lots of kool stuff in them. Fairly cheap on ebay, and well worth the price.

After buying dozens if not hundreds of collections, your typical 1980s book that was read once and put away in proper storage will grade out in the vicinity of VF. If they had a board, I'd venture 8.5 or better. Now ,if they were stored in an attic or a damp basement, the paper quality may drag down the grade but if they were stored properly thats not an issue. About ten years ago, I bought 200 X-Men 151s that were bagged ,stored in a comic box in a kids closet. I'd say about a dozen were 8.5 or less. Pulled many potential 9.6/9.8s out of them. The couple on the end suffered a bit of curving but the middle 200 or so were great.

Neither. I'm not poor, don't really drink and certainly aren't looking for sympathy. I need to get some work done on my building and reluctantly decided to sell a few books to finance it. While deciding what books to sell, I realized I no longer cared about almost all of them. When I was a kid, my grandmother used to have a big old trunk she called her "Hope Chest". That's how I've looked at my comics. My plan all along was to sell a few a month to supplement my income, but now I think I'll sell them more rapidly. i'm still opening my shop. It just will have more South West pottery and jewelry than I originally intended. Comics will be represented by a few hundred TPBs and a couple boxes of dollar books. I'm pretty sure I will make more consigning them to MCS than I would with them hanging on the wall of my shop. Getting good money for them with zero shrinkage and little work sounds appealing to me.

I consigned 25 books to MCS that went up for sale on the 24th. fourteen of them sold by yesterday. I lost money on one of them- a TOS 50, but thats because I bought it at its height and meant to flip it but missed the bubble. Otherwise, I made well over 200% return on every book. Have another sixty ready to send, and a few hundred I'd like to sell here if I can ever find the time.Just purging my doubles and multiple copies will take me a few months. With the renewed interest in foreign editions, I'm confident my copies will find new homes rather quickly.

As a wiseman said: If not now, then when?

There is nothing to feel bad about. Simply time to turn the page and start a new chapter.

I've told this story before, but I think it's worth sharing. At one point I was trying to assemble a collection of every Marvel comic from the 12 cent era. I forget now, but I think it was around 700 books. I was well over 90% done, and most of what I was missing was obscure titles and things like Millie the Model. Went down to Philly for a show and found a dealer who had lots of low-midgrade Marvel SA. I think I needed 56 books and this guy had almost twenty of them. As he was adding them up,, I had a sudden epiphany. I was about to drop a couple hundred bucks on books I didn't collect, that no one really collected and was doing so just so I could say I had completed a collecting goal no one but me cared about. I apologized, put the books back and bought a couple of iconic covers instead. From that point on, I identified 100 key books from that era and pretty much stuck to buying them. I'd much rather have eight copies of Avengers 9( my first grail) than a complete run of Millie the Model. To illustrate how the hobby has changed, I first encountered Wonder Man reading a Marvel Triple Action where he appeared in a short flashback in an issue featuring Power Man. I think it was MTA #15. This was in the summer. With no comic shops, I had to wait until Thanksgiving to attend a convention where two dealers had copies. One had a copy that looked brand new but he was asking a small fortune for it. The other had a pretty beat up copy that was cheap so I bought it. It took me months to read more about the mysterious Wonder Man. At this convention, I also first saw copies of what became the Comic Buyers Guide. I soon subscribed and every two weeks I had a convention show up in my mail box. I also found out that Phil was now running monthly shows. I didn't go to them too often because my budget didn't allow it. A year or so goes by, and I read an MTA featuring the Red Guardian. Grabbing the latest CBG I find numerous copies of the original and a week or two later, it comes in the mail. A couple comic shops pop up, but none very close to me, but within a year there are two within a bike rides distance.