COI

That's all fine, except that I'm not sure why profitability alone doesn't make the book worth slabbing. You said any book that is "meaningless" - which you define as having no value below the 9.8 threshold - isn't worth slabbing, and my response was that it's still worth slabbing if it's a 9.8 because it's profitable to do so. There are people who are trying to collect 9.8 runs of titles, and to them the books aren't "meaningless" because they're a part of the run. Otherwise, I agree with your argument, except I don't see why you're using the terms meaningful/meaningless instead of low/high demand, because that's all it is - a function of demand.

Unless it's a 9.8, then it's worth slabbing. The point really is, if a book isn't worth the slabbing fees, it shouldn't be slabbed. Isn't this why the 9.8 prescreen exists? Big-brained insight for big brains. You're all welcome.

I don't think it's as simple as "some people cleave towards reality and some don't"; I think some people are just better at discerning what is real. Most people think that they are being "real" in their interpretation of reality, and accuse people who don't agree with them of being delusional or dishonest. You'd have to be able to reliably discern what is real and what is fake before you could value it accordingly, and in order to do that you'd have to have the humility to recognize that your interpretation of the world might not be as "real" as you think it is. A nice start would be if more people took an interest in learning HOW to think, before they dug their heels in on WHAT to think. Reasoning from first principles, formal logic, epistemology - actually understanding the difference between subjectivity and objectivity, what constitutes evidence, etc - these are tools we can use to evaluate our own perceptions of reality. As opposed to what we do now, which is tribalism, political and religious ideology, declaring expertise after 40 minutes google searching, extracting data from headlines, cult of personality, bad faith arguments, intellectual dishonesty, outrage farming, etc.

Only a bot could amass 100K+ posts on a comic book message board.

You can observe the spread between 9.6 and 9.8 frequently hit those multiples, but that doesn't mean every 9.8 hits it. Far from it. My point was that it happens frequently enough that it shouldn't be surprising.

You can take out DD 131 as a variable and replace it with many other keys or even non-keys, and you'll find the same spread between 9.6s and 9.8s. Sometimes it's $100 for a 9.6 and $600 in a 9.8 for run fillers, and sometimes it's $100K vs $20K for something like Hulk 181. So as egregious as sales like this might seem, they're consistent insofar as some portion of the market go HAM for 9.8s. In this hobby, 9.8 has become symbolic of "the best", even when it's not the best. And there's some number of people who value that symbolic representation enough to regularly pursue it to the tune of 3x-10x the 9.6 price, and for those people the 9.6 isn't even an option. I think it's easier and more useful to apply this sort of generalization to sales like this, than it is to try to understand it book by book, sale by sale.

Can't say I disagree with that. We want certainty and we want to be right, but as individuals we just can't know enough to justify that certainty. So we tend make sweeping generalizations and we oversimplify based on what little we do understand.

We're in agreement. What I said would be more directed to instances where people extrapolate from the top 5% to paint a picture of the market in its totality, which you clearly aren't doing.

I'll say the same thing I've said every two dozen pages or so in this thread: 1) the comic market is so vast and varied that you can find data points to support any hypothesis you want about the status of the market or where it is headed. 2) Everyone here is hyper focused on the top 5-10% of books (slabs, high grade) and ignoring the rest, so not only are these just anecdotes, they're anecdotes selected from a very small pool of sales. 3) There is no data for most sales. 4) In general, collectors tend to fixate either on the books they lose at auction, or the books they take a bath on as sellers/consignors, and those limited market interactions create biases. These conversations are interesting enough, but we're all mostly in the dark about most things that don't fall into our individual areas of focus. We can play point-counterpoint all day and we can make an infinite number of plausible arguments based on hand-selected data, but ultimately most of us are just guessing.

This is like the third or fourth time I've seen a thread started because of a video this guy made. I hope our decedents will be adapted enough to the internet to not play into this game over and over again. Until then, every moaron trading in clickbait and manufactured drama will keep getting their signals boosted, and we'll all be dumber for it.

That's a nice set of books, and the quest is a cool idea. 20 years ago, at the age of 20, I started a high grade ASM run. I bought a couple of the bigger books first, ASM 14 in 9.4 probably being the biggest, but I focused a lot of my attention and money on the mid-run stuff. The reason was simply that I only had so much cash, and buying one or two books a year just wasn't as fun as buying a few books a month. You can probably see where this is going. ASMs are common and the only barrier to entry is money. I have more money now than I did 20 years ago, but my view of money and my desire for NM ASMs has not kept pace with the prices of those major keys in the run. It's simply too hard for me to stomach paying $10K for a book today that I was passing on at $1200 20 years ago. You can take all of that with a grain of salt because maybe you and I are totally different and I have no idea what your situation is, but had I focused on the big boys first, I might've actually finished the run by now. Good luck.

For sure. If you stumbled on someone's 50 year accumulation of books, the first thing you would do is pull out the keys. If there are a lot of keys, that's where your resources are going, and by resources, those are the books you're going to purchase, sort, press, submit, whatever. Even if you are a sophisticated enough dealer/collector to recognize that there are some early '70s Daredevils that are 9.8 candidates, and that those issues are almost non-existent on the census, those will be way lower on the priority list to be processed. And that's if you already have a 50 year accumulation in front of you, ready for processing, which doesn't happen to 99% of people who are out there buying and selling books. So even with knowledge and access, it's an uphill battle for those early bronze DDs to end up in 9.8 holders. For someone like you who's waiting for them to show up so that you can buy them, that's why you can expect to have to pay a premium that, in some cases, might seem completely out of touch with reality. As a corollary to this with regards to the census, books that are extremely popular also get cracked and resubmitted so often that the census becomes unreliable and we get a distorted sense of how common they actually are. The census for something like Hulk 181 only tells you that lots of people submit Hulk 181s; it tells you almost nothing about how many Hulk 181s exist in a certain grade, nor does it tell you how many are available for purchase at any given time, because it doesn't account for the "ghosts", nor does it account for how many people are holding or even hoarding long term. This is why I don't pay all that much attention to the census on books like Hulk 181 or ASM 300; people get so fixated on how big the numbers are, when they mean almost nothing and when they can't be properly compared to low census GA or obscure and/or low demand SA/BA in any coherent way.

I tend to think that the availability of Hulk 181s or GSX 1s as well as the even more common NM 98s and ASM 300s are good for the hobby overall, because they give beginner and intermediate collectors something that's worth owning and reasonably attainable. They're an entry point for people who want to get into major keys who can save up the money to buy whatever grade they want. Getting the cash in hand is the only obstacle. There's a sort of diminishing returns when it comes to scarcity, where the right amount of scarcity can fuel demand, but too much scarcity can work against it. I believe this is one of the reasons ASM has always been one of the most collected titles; they're always available. Of all the people who would love to own a run of Planet Comics, how many people will be dedicated enough to hunt those down, even if they have funds? Not all collectors want to spend most of their free time scouring listings on a daily basis, terrified that they may miss a once-every-5-year shot at a book they need. I know this because I'm one of those myself who gets bored too easily to keep up with that kind of quest. So not only do you have to have the funds and have your finger on the pulse, you also have that peculiar temperament. So many more barriers to entry instead of just needing the cash. I remind myself all the time that if Hulk 181 were as scarce as something like CL 25, it would be a million dollar book. The supply is accounted for in the price, which is why a 9.0 is $9K and not $5 million.

This is a good point and one that is often ignored in these discussions. In the same way that discussions of market trends tend to revolve around the top end books, even when those sales constitute a tiny percentage of the market, discussions around investment tend to revolve around high grade books based on the fallacy that buying the highest grade you can afford on any particular book is always the way to go. The term "investment grade" has always bothered me because it doesn't make much sense. Buying mid-grade Hulk 181s 20 years ago has proven to be a great investment, just as high grade copies have proven to be a great investment, and the same thing applies to VF ASM 300s and many other ultra common books. There are a lot of books out there and there's enough data available to support almost any kind of argument you want to make about how collectors should spend their money.

I don't think this thread went off the tracks at all. The question posed in the original post was about balance. The problem with this is that eating a good burger or getting laid CAN be negative if burgers and sex become a crutch you rely on to get through the day. That's imbalance. This will be a problem for some people and not for others. Nostalgia is not all positive; it is bitter-sweet by definition, and for some it's more bitter than sweet.

I had a rough childhood, so that helps keeps things in perspective for me. I miss certain things about the past, particularly the pre-internet past, and I have fond memories, but I also remember all the things that weren't so perfect and are far better for me now. As a culture, I think we've become a little too nostalgia obsessed. It's a trick our minds play on us. Things were not necessarily better, we were just in a state of mind where our day to day life was filled with novelty, and we were therefore more amenable to being seduced or enchanted by relatively simple and mundane things. As we get older, the patterns repeat and novelty becomes harder and harder to come by. I think it's some form of arrested development that keeps certain people stuck in a loop of trying to recapture that novelty and sense of wonder from the same source material that generated it when they were kids, not realizing that it wasn't the material itself but more the plasticity of their mind that allowed them to absorb that material in a specific way. No amount of money spent on newsprint and plastic will help chase down that dragon. If you find yourself lamenting that comics, movies, music, video games, or whatever, aren't as good today as they were back in 'your day', consider that it's your mindset biasing you and remember that you're probably not the target audience for whatever it is that you're claiming sucks nowadays. Because 30 years from now, the next generation will be lamenting the exact same thing using the same flawed reasoning. I'm not a psychologist and can't prove any of what I just said, so maybe I'm overstating things, but that's my intuition. That's not to say there isn't a healthy way to engage in nostalgia based hobbies, but doing it as a way to escape the present - and in doing so missing opportunities to have a good time now and make memories for the future - probably isn't the best thing. So to answer your question about balance, reminding myself of all of these things keeps me in check.

Restoration in all of its forms was stigmatized in the past for good reason - in 99% of cases, it was done to deceive buyers. Logically, you would think that the existence of grading companies would reduce this stigma by putting the restoration on the label, which informs potential buyers and solves the deception problem. Instead, the stigma remained, which is reflected in the market prices of purple label books. The stigma around deception became a stigma around the purple label. I don't know this guy, but the reason he's even taking this chance is because the market incentivizes it. You know, the same market that greatly rewards the clean and press game, a practice that also used to be stigmatized until it became highly profitable to look the other way. So while I don't like what he's doing, it's his property, and mid-grade AF 15s, while valuable, are not one of a kind artifacts that transcend notions of basic property rights. So to single him out as everything that is "wrong with the hobby" - when he's just operating in a space where profit or at least the preservation of value is the main game - is kind of silly.

I'm not upset about anything. I was just giving my perspective as to why I don't see the value in paying multiples for 9.8s over 9.6s. It's a combination of CPR making 9.8s more common than they otherwise would be combined with CGC not being consistent enough to justify the price difference for me. I don't think it's particularly good OR particularly bad for the hobby because it's a small subset of the collectors. To your point, I'm happy to take the deep discount on 9.6s.

Interesting.

No one was happy that day. Disappointment, rejection and a little bit of fear on my end.

Myself and another boardie who I will not name got flashed in a PM by a female boardie who I will also not name. Does that count? This was probably in 2003-ish and both the flasher and my fellow "flashee" are no longer around.

For me, it applies anywhere you see these massive spreads between 9.6/9.8. My stance on the CPR game has been consistent for the last 15+ years, so my bias is that pressing has undermined the pursuit of very high grade books by making them more common than they otherwise would've been, and this would apply to all eras. And I emphasize very high grade books because that's where the price spreads are the largest. In addition, the difference between 9.6s and 9.8s is so small that the difference in price between 9.6s and 9.8s suggest either that 1) people have supreme confidence in CGC's ability to discern the two consistently, or 2) buyers of 9.8s are primarily concerned with the label, which is why they'll take 1 copy labelled a 9.8 over 5 copies labeled a 9.6 for the same price, when it's plausible and maybe even likely that at least one of those 9.6s could have scored a 9.8 on another day. I think most people who have seen and/or submitted enough books at this level would scoff at #1, which means it's likely that the market for 9.8s mostly hinges on #2. In CGC's defense, I don't think any group of people could be consistent enough, given the number of graders and volume of books, to warrant those spreads. And to be fair to 9.8 sellers and buyers, the value we assign to every book in this hobby is based on some conceptual framework that has nothing to do with any intrinsic property of the books themselves. And clearly, the market for 9.8s has spoken, so it really doesn't matter what I think. But we all have to draw the line when it comes to our own perception of value, and I tend to tap out at around 9.6.

9.8s are just another version of manufactured scarcity. I could relate more to the 9.8 chase if the CPR game wasn't a thing. The subjective and sometimes arbitrary nature of distinguishing a 9.6 from a 9.8 is reason enough to go for the 9.6 at a deep discount, but what really makes it baffling is that the 9.8 you're thinking of buying at 5x the 9.6 price might've been a 9.0 in a previous life that was dunked into the Lazarus pit. But hey, if that's your thing, go nuts.

Schadenfreude is a hell of a drug.