shadroch

Not a clue, but it sounds interesting. Hope someone can help you out.

I'm at my shop and a guy knocks on my door. We aren't open for business and have a sign in the window stating that but people still keep knocking. Guy asks if I buy comics and I tell him i'm not currently buying anything except 25 cent covers or older. We talk a bit and he says he is moving and doesn't want to take the books with him. He brings in a short box and it's all Marvel/DC from about ten years ago. He says he has six boxes and wants $20 a box. It's all bagged and boarded and in order, so I'm a little tempted but I must have 50 boxes of similar stuff so I pass. He goes down to $15 and I pass. He says $50 in store credit, but I tell him I won't be open anytime soon. He looks around and asks me if I'll trade them for a recycled metal cowboy sculpture that's about a foot tall and made from horseshoes. It had a $39.99 price tag on it, but I won three of them at auction for $8, so I agreed. He couldn't decide which one he wanted so I told him I'd trade him all three for $20 and the books. He must have thought he was Peter Minuit buying Manhattan for some beads because he couldn't pull the $20 out of his wallet fast enough. I told him I needed to take a photo of his drivers license in case the books are stolen, and he had no issue. My next yard sale is in two weeks so I'll do a quick keycomics.com search on them and blow the rest out, with any luck.

When my friend Jim Silver was briefly running Wizard, I asked him if it would be possible to have a grading seminar at some of the shows. He said he'd look into it. A week or so later I was told no, it wasn't going to happen.

That is mold.

The auction still has a few days left.

I was the top bidder on an item, but the reserve wasn't met. Then my $17.76 bid was topped, with the new bid being $18.26, still reserve not met. I raise my bid to $23.00 when suddenly the high bid jumps to $100.00. As the person had made that top bid days ago and was the leader at $18.26, shouldn't the new top bid been $1 more than mine?

No. Do the math. If you sell a book for $30 on ebay, between your time and fees, it will cost you more than 7.00. Unless, of course, your time is worthless.

You send them your books, they list them o their site, as well as ebay. They grade, store, and advertise your book. Then ship it for you when it sells. It's pretty close to drop shipping, and they charge 10 per cent, although there is a $7 minimum charge per sale so it doesn't make sense to send them $10 books. You can also bundle books and sell them at auction, although they take 25% for that. I've had very good results selling through them.

Not being sarcastic but I'd look for someone to go with you that knows what he is looking at.

I'd say the book is legit. The proper question would be is the seller?

Would you mind sharing the reserve? I'm interested but not if it has a sky high reserve.

Yes, that is he. He was initially charged with defrauding people over not paying them after he sold their books but during the investigation it was shown he'd take a book, restore it it, sell it and then return a lesser copy he'd done some work to. In one example, he took a FF 1 , restored the cover but then attached it to a greatly inferior interior while attaching the nicer interior to a spare cover he had laying around. That's not as weird as it sounds as in the late 1980s, hundreds of SA Marvel covers surfaced in the NY area and many dealers married them to coverless books, or even replaced the original covers. Several dealers passed on my restored Flash 105 because they thought it had a married cover but CGC gave it a Blue 6.0. To make things stranger, when he first looked at my book, he said he would add Japan paper to the cover, which should have garnered a Purple label so I think he ended up giving me someone else's cover or maybe even the whole book. I had given it to him around Thanksgiving and usually waited three months or so to get books back, but this one was done before Christmas. He said I'd told him I wanted it for a Christmas present., when what I'd said was my Mother was paying to restore the book as a Christmas present for me. It was one of those cases where little things here and there didn't add up but only in retrospect do you start to get the whole picture. He ended up surrendering his business license as part of his deal. Rich was a nice guy. I'm not sure he intentionally set out to cheat anyone, he just pushed the envelope on what was acceptable and was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. He was one of the most passionate collectors I knew, and had an amazing collection of Good Girl original art.

I suck as an artist but I'm working on creating 3-D comic cover shadow boxes. I take a comic to the print shop and make five color copies, usually around 11x14. I mount one copy onto thin cardboard and use an exacto knife to cut out the main figures and the logo. I mount another copy on slightly thicker cardboard and mount some of the secondary features on it. When I get better, I will switch from cardboard to foamboard. Eventually, both sheets are glued to another copy of the original cover and the effect is pretty cool. You can buy similar items on line but they run close to $100. My way, all in you are talking about $10-$15 for a finished framed work, and you can do any book you want.

I dealt with a gentleman who restored comics starting around 1986. I'd bring him a batch of books and he would look through them and tell me what he could do and what it would cost. Most books cost more to fix than they were worth. He restored an Avengers 1 but it wasn't cost effective to restore the Avengers 3 and 4. He also did a JLA 1 and Flash 105. While he offered clean and press, he never mentioned just pressing books. That's not to say he didn't press his own books but we were fairly friendly and he never mentioned it. It was really cool stopping by his studio. Once I was there and he had an Action 1 disassembled, with pages all under glass. The thing I found strange was his studio was over a pizza place. I'd have thought you would want to be as far from a potential fire as possible. He told me he was pretty much self-taught but had spent a week with Susan C. to fine tune his work. A few years later, he was arrested and charged with switching out books on clients. He plead guilty to some reduced charges and agreed with the Nassau Consumer Protection agency or whatever its proper name was to not restore books for profit. There is a NY Times article on him from 1996, but you need an account to access it. I'd guess that widescale pressing didn't take off until about 2005. Metropolis had a comic press but Stephen came on these boards and promised they would no longer press sometime around 2004/2005. It turned out CGC had secretly been offering pressing to a select group of clients for years before they went public with it..

I didn't know him except for a few interactions but my condolences to his family. RIP.

Recently stumbled across this book and had to re-read the story. It's still the best single story I've read in nearly fifty years of collecting.

I'm still waiting for someone to identify stores that keep their dollar bins in alpha numeric order. I've spoken to at least twenty store owners who don't, and I'd love to speak to some who do if someone would simply give me the stores names.

What shops do you frequent that have their dollar bins organized in a alpha-numeric system?

I'm having a yard sale/flea market this weekend. I have seven boxes of bagged and boarded books, almost all from 1995 to present, and five boxes of mostly raw, with some bagged but not boarded. These range from BA to about the mid 90s. I know it's not a real test, but lets see what happens. It was a last minute decision to do this at all. I wouldn't have set up only someone offered to run everything for a percentage of sales and some comics. Comics are only a very small part of the offerings and I'm hoping to do close to a thousand dollars overall.

I remember buying a case of 24 or 36 of the Battlestar Galactica sets off the dealer who was set up next to me. I was convinced I'd hit a home run. I carefully secured them alongside the box of Elvis cards I bought a week or two earlier.

If you are new to the hobby, there is a very good chance that your taste will be very different in a year or two. There is also a very good chance these books will be worth less than they are today, so my advice is to wait. My first week on ebay, I spent $2,000 buying stuff I was sure I would never get another shot at, and I overpaid for much of it.

In the latest MCS newsletter, Buddy discusses how the first real comic shop in the Dallas area was called Tanners. Then he casually mentions how future DC Executive Bob Wayne opened a store directly across the street and the two had a fierce rivalry until both stores closed. There has to be a great story behind this. Why would Mr. Wayne choose to locate across the street from the only other shop in many many miles. I met Bob a few times when I was a retailer and he once went out of his way to help me out of a semi-sticky situation. There must be a back story worth reading about.

Thanks.

The term File Copy is greatly over-used and abused in our hobby.

If you are going to list a few dozen ebay BINs, why not ship them to MCS and let them do the heavy lifting. You save the paypal fee and the hassle of packing and shipping the books?