RockMyAmadeus

Hopefully, you won't be offended by what has been said here, but will learn from the collected wisdom of these boards, which is substantial. It would be like me talking about some aspect of a 1953 Corvette to a message board of Corvette collectors and dealers. I know *just enough* to know that I have no clue what I'm talking about, and I would look a little silly trying to insist something that wasn't even remotely the case. These are after market stickers. There were multiple distributors at the time they were distributed, and even if one of them did apply the stickers, it wouldn't matter...they aren't Marvel, so it's not official. An exception from the same era? This: So what's different between the two? Besides a giant sticker stuck to the front cover of the bottom copy? The second copy has no price in the price box. They were PRINTED, at Marvel's direction, at the PRINTER...World Color in Sparta, IL...on purpose. If the bottom copy was just a regular printing with the All sticker added to it, it would be worth very little. After all, anyone can just add a sticker to anything they want after the fact, regardless of why, regardless of how professionally that sticker was made. But because there's a PRINTING difference, all those copies are worth substantially more than the "regular copies." But ONLY because they have a PRINTED (not just stickered) difference. If your copies had a blank price in the price box....THEN we'd be talking, and you'd have found something incredibly interesting. Sadly, you have common copies of common books with a defacing sticker on them...worth maybe $1-$2 each. Sorry.

Making an offer is a GREAT way to have a seller check a price that he/she wouldn't normally have done. If the item is underpriced....buy it. Don't try and haggle..just buy it. I've had books that people tried to haggle, and I saw it was selling for quite a bit more than my ask...they get mad, and my response is "you should have bought it while you had the chance." And I've also sold books that had become underpriced, and the buyer wisely bought it outright, instead of trying for an even better deal. Oops.

I love that Egdar bought his copy of NYWF second-hand as one of the discounted 15c leftover copies. That's such a cool confluence of factors.

Again, depends on the rest of the book AND the "raggedness" or lack thereof of the tear. An otherwise 9.6-9.8 type copy with a 1" clean tear shouldn't grade lower than 7.0 or so. The lower you go in overall condition, the less the damage a specific defect does to the grade. For example..if the book is otherwise in the 8.5 to 9.0 range, a 1" tear will probably knock it to 6.5-ish. A 1" tear on an otherwise 4.0 book probably wouldn't affect it at all. Large flaws tend to amplify their effects the better the general condition, and lessen in the other direction.

I meant "Cuse and Lindelof." Damon and Lindelof is just one guy.

Good...I've been hearing good things about him. We need more of that.

No problem...just wanted to see if there was any way we could get a sense of where these came from, if they were scattered about the country, where they might exist. I know these are probably unanswerable questions...Spidey #1 Gold UPC has been known almost since it came out, and all anyone really knows is the guess that there were "10,000 made", and probably "made for Wal-Mart", but that's just educated guessing, with no confirmation from Marvel. It's possible nobody even remembers anymore with these other books. But, of course, any information can help. Thanks!

Further....the newsstand/Direct distinctions are important at the beginning...when Direct editions (starting in Feb 1977) were a tiny, tiny fraction of the print runs, until 1979....and then from about 1995 to 2011/2013 for Marvel, 2017 for DC, and whenever other publishers stopped publishing to the newsstand (I think Archie still does.) Distinctions for books from the 80s generally don't matter, regardless of what it is. But there is a VERY active niche of collectors who seek out 00s Marvel and DC newsstands, and as Kirk and Jerome Wenker and others can tell you....it is NOT EASY to do that. Dark Wolverine, the series that started in 2003 for example. Anyone have a complete newsstand run of that series, LET ALONE a 9.8 set? Doubtful. How about Amazing Spiderman from #500-up? Even the "Vol 2 #36 (9/11 issue)" carries a substantial premium for very high grade newsstands. Some of the ASM Spideys are so rare in newsstand format...like #694 for example...that people have been willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a 9.8 copy, and had a very difficult time in their search. And this, DESPITE the massive amounts of terrible misinformation about how many of these were made. No, Marvel DID NOT PRINT just 500 copies for newsstand distribution across North America. That's stupid, idiotic, and betrays a lack of understanding about the newsstand market in multiple ways, like here for example: https://www.comicsvalue.com/Amazing-SpiderMan-694-NEWSSTAND-VARIANT-EDITION-Marvel-COMICS-NM/122786683891.html Very little of the blurb at the bottom is accurate, from the "58,641 were made" (wrong), to the "Marvel/DC Newsstands after 2011 are approx 1:100" (totally wrong, with a number pulled out of thin air), to the "approx 585 copies originally made" (totally wrong, based on false numbers, one of which is pulled out of thin air, the other of which has nothing to do with how many were "made"), and thus will mislead whomever reads it and doesn't know any better. BUT...it IS true that the newsstand still operated like the newsstand, and the several thousand to several tens of thousand copies they DID print, would have been "returned and destroyed", just as they always had been...meaning, any newsstand copies surviving would be in the hands of individuals who purchased them, where they probably are to this day. So...yes, such distinctions ARE important, and DO matter, and ARE worth the time to properly catalog.

One of the more ridiculous things I ever heard someone in management claim at CBCS was that it was "too difficult" to make all these distinctions, which is why their newsstand designations end...for no rational reason anyone can think of...at the year "2000." Who made that decision? Why would they cut it off at 2000? Did they think there were no more newsstand copies published after 2000? It's like ending the listing for Amazing Spiderman in the OPG at issue #516....where are the rest? No, the real reason is "we're not getting paid enough to do this, and we don't really care." It's also why they have no census, and why it took them two years to get a message board up and running...and it's not 18 years ago, when message boards were new tech. It's not even remotely difficult. When you see a comic book from 2001-present with a UPC code, and it doesn't say "Direct" somewhere on there...it's a newsstand edition. If you don't have it in your database...you ADD IT as you're inputting the order. Not rocket surgery. "But it allows more room for error!!" So? Take pride in your work, and pay attention. Train people to know the difference. Doing the distinction AT ALL was a fantastic move, that was roundly applauded...until they announced that it was only up to the year 2000, which makes it functionally useless for well over half the books for which such a distinction is important in the first place. Nobody cares whether your Uncanny X-Men #215 is Direct or newsstand...in that it makes no difference monetarily. It's just about 50/50 split on books like that. But find an NYX #3 newsstand, which probably doesn't exist, but MIGHT? (Almost certainly doesn't, because it was mature readers, and those books weren't sold on the newsstand, but work with me.) That hypothetical copy in 9.8 would be worth TWICE or MORE a Direct 9.8...easily. ...except that it was published in 2003, so, sorry, too bad, you lose.

No politics allowed.

Absolutely agreed. Yeah, it's more work, but, as with all such distinctions, it will pay off in the future when you attract customers who are specifically looking for those, and stay because they're already there, might as well look around. That's 50% of marketing right there: getting people into your "space."

That's what I suspected. I imagine going forward, that might change, but these books are so niche and rare, it's hard to say. If CGC had taken a proactive stance with differentiating Directs from newsstands...regardless of the justification for it...20 years ago, this would have been addressed in the market long before now. We're still hearing stories of buyers saying "hey...this isn't the book you pictured!" and sellers getting pissy and saying "what do you care? What's the difference??" Thus far, we have four books that shouldn't, by all accounts, exist, in order of discovery: 1. Spiderman #1 2nd print newsstand (aka "gold upc") 2. Batman #457 2nd print news 3. Superman #50 2nd print news 4. Robin #1 2nd print news ....plus, the Superman #75 3rd and 4th print news (not counting the 2nd print, because it's just a Direct version with a UPC sticker as a "make-do.") So that's 6 altogether. I wonder if we'll find more?

Thanks for the confirmation. Since you know these three books definitely exist, and certainly have collectible value far in excess of the regular 2nd prints and/or regular newsstands, are you going to differentiate them going forward? And...is it possible to give out any generic information about where it came from, such as region and/or state and/or even city? And can it be assumed that neither the seller nor Lonestar knew it was anything special?

Sure. 1/4" tears...if they're actually 1/4", and not an underexaggerated 1"...are perfectly ok in 8.5, provided the book is otherwise in the 9.4+-9.8 range.

Oh, I'm definitely lost. And yet have not resorted to name calling. 1. Yes. 2. via Imgflip Meme Generator 3. RRUUUUNNNNNNN!!!!

RUNNNNNN!!!!

That IS a great question, though... Indeed, why bother putting a cover price for something that usually won't sell for cover price,

Very true, maybe we should introduce the concept of “classic back cover”. Could create a whole new driver to get people to pay exorbitant prices for books. Eventually, someone will invent a cube, wherein books can be paged through, front to back, while preserving the grade.... (Don't laugh, someone's probably already thinking about such a silly idea.)

The books aren't worth the prices you're asking. The stickers mean they're damaged. Marvel already had their own test price program in place, and stickers was not part of that. Even if the stickers are legitimate...even if they were printed by Marvel, which is almost certainly not the case...they don't add value to these REGULAR COPIES because they are stickers....added to the book after the fact, and damaging them. Are they "real"? Of course they are; they're right there. But are they Marvel products? No. of course not. Marvel had the resources of the largest magazine printer in the world...World Color in Sparta...why would they need to make stickers? As interesting as they are, the likeliest explanation is that they were back issues that some store had and wanted to sell for the then-current cover price a few months later.

 Quick, hide! It's the Pump & Dump King!! RUN!!!

That tracking is awesome. Too bad each stop can't get its own stamp.

Exactly. I get that this is the best forum for comics on the internet, but there IS a subtext to all of this, and openly hating CGC or one of its aspects is at odds with that.

Didja...didja see what I did there? Huh, huh, didja....?

Dude! Don't 'fingh' that meme. Remove the via imgflip link. Never!!

And, by the way...as groundbreaking as Sandman was, let's not be fooled for a minute into thinking that Gaiman wasn't doing heavy recycling of stories that were, in some cases, thousands of years old.