RockMyAmadeus

So, since the books that aren't "DCU" versions, but ARE part of the same program, like Zero Hour #0-4...where are those going?

Back in the oldest of days, you used to be able to click on any listing, ended or not, and it would take you right to the listing page. About 10 years ago, they added the intermediary page, which is functionally just an ad page for other listings. But this "new feature"...the "the listing you're looking for is no longer available. Try this one!", which I DO NOT want to "try", means that you have to click THREE DIFFERENT PAGES to get to ended listings now. I suspect it's a concerted effort by eBay to stop people from looking at completed listings. I suspect that completed listings are going the way of the dodo, and will no longer be accessible at some point in the future.

What?? No green ink?? HULK MAD!!!

The CGC witness program, when everyone is playing above board, is the best program that exists of its kind. When a book is in a yellow label CGC slab, you are 99.9924% guaranteed that someone watched that creator sign that copy, and that there is an unbroken chain of custody from that event to the slab. CBCS, on the other hand,instead of vigorously protecting and defending the integrity of their "yellow label" program, instead offers strangers the opportunity to submit books that were not witnessed, merely because the submitter happens to be associated with someone the employee knows. When he should be the gatekeeper, he is instead opening the door wide open to potential fraud and abuse. Nothing is foolproof...but CGC's program is far superior to anything else out there.

A) is a built-in, ready-made conflict of interest, and B) the precise wording is "permanently dispose of the overage", which DOES NOT mean they will be destroyed. It merely IMPLIES it. And, they have a built-in excuse for why you may see other copies in public in the future: "It is industry standard practice for publishers to award complimentary copies of books to the writers/artists etc involved in each project at their discretion. These copies are outside the scope of this offering, and COULD make their way into the marketplace." There's nothing preventing anyone from "permanently disposing" of the overage into a longbox in their house for a year or two. CBCS is absolutely foolish to be getting into this sort of situation, but, then, there's no one responsible in charge there. This is Franklin Mint/QVC type behavior, here. It's very, very unfortunate that we have once again reached this phase in the comic book industry, instead of relying on creative people telling stories in which buyers are interested.

Living in SoCal, I couldn't be much further from Canada. Dang it. No shot at newsies or Whitmans.

Robin #1 newsstand 2nd listing up to $200, which is currently the high bid for both high bidders. Looks like it's a duel between those two. Aren't you the top bidder, Carl? Still a day+ left.

Better. I wonder why they took it off.

Interesting, the final cover doesn’t have Bats saying “R-Robin?!”. Such a great cover.

Just saw this today. GREAT movie, and an OUTSTANDING performance by Millicent Simmonds. Just outstanding. The opening scenes...wow. Excellent, excellent film, fantastic cinematography, pacing was absolutely perfect, and Krasinski has a fantastic eye for detail. There were a lot of really excellent filmmaking touches throughout that had me very impressed. Everybody was great in it. Outstanding film. No wonder it grossed 300 bazillion dollars.

I live 20 miles away from LAX, so I wouldn't be staying overnight.

Again: "I know you are, but what am I?" is not a valid counterargument. Are we going to continue this until the thread gets locked...? I'd prefer not.

I respond fairly timely to your posts. I've made other posts in other threads during that time. I think you've missed the point again. Like I said, when you're willing to engage in good faith discussions with others, there are a lot of people here who would be happy to do so with you, including me.

"I did stop...until I had more to say. But then I stopped! Really!" I don't think anyone's buying that, based on the last several posts. Good try, though.

You initiated this current discussion by accusing me of having dishonest motives for discussing these books, namely to "pump and dump." Just on a purely equitable standpoint, the person who initiates it should be different from the person who finishes it, wouldn't you say? You can't start a discussion and then complain that people respond, after all. Logical fallacy, and below the belt shot. Your opinion of why I have had "timeouts"...itself a matter of legitimate dispute...does not therefore negate the fact that you've engaged multiple conversations over the past several years in bad faith, as you have done here. It doesn't absolve you of your own bad behavior. "I know you are, but what am I?" is not a legitimate counterargument. It wouldn't matter if 10 billion people agreed with you. That's the logical fallacy of "appeal to popularity." Agreement does not equal evidence. The only thing that matters is the evidence, and you don't have any. This is wholly inaccurate. First, it cannot be considered "shill bidding", because that's not what shill bidding is. If you did your research responsibly, you'd see that I was actually the high bidder at several points during the first listing. Let me be perfectly clear, here: every single bidder has the right to bid any amount they can, at any time they'd like, for any reason they'd like, so long as they pay for the item if they're the high bidder at the end. That's the key: actually going through with the purchase if they end up being the winner. After all...who are you to judge someone else's motives for bidding, IF they're playing by the rules? If I win, and I pay, regardless of why I won, then that price is not an artificial price...it is a REAL price, even if it's a price I would have preferred not to pay. Are you offended that there are people who LEGITIMATELY drive up bids out there? Too bad. That's reality, and it's both perfectly allowed and perfectly ethical. It's only "shill bidding" if the person placing the bids has no intention of paying if they win the item. That's it. If they win and pay....there is no shill bidding, by virtue of the fact that they have "driven up the price" on themselves, and have established a legitimate price for that item, regardless of what you imagine to be their motives for doing so. The price is only artificial if an actual transaction did not take place, because the bidder never had any intention of actually buying the item. All of which, by the way, was rendered moot by the two highest bidders, who blew my high bid out of the water. As far as "Auction 2" goes, when I posted that I "threw my bid into the ring", I was...again...the high bidder, and perfectly prepared to pay if I won at my high bid. Therefore...by DEFINITION...there's no shill bidding. And, if there's no shill bidding...which there wasn't...then there's no claim of "pump and dump" because of "shill bidding." After all...it's kinda hard to "pump and dump" if you're doing the OPPOSITE of "dumping"...that is, BUYING. Now, wouldn't it have been a LOT nicer if you didn't come out of the gate swinging, but tried to have a good faith dialogue about this...? I think so. Here's your error, as I explained before: that's not "pumping and dumping." Carrying the book "to my last days", and having my heirs dispose of it IS NOT even remotely "pumping and dumping." I think it's fairly clear that if I sell the book in, say, 2037, what I said about it in 2018 no longer has much bearing on the value of the item, wouldn't you say...? Aside from that, you make the fallacious assumption that I will only dispose of the item by selling it, of having my heirs sell it. There are more ways to dispose of something than selling it. And, on top of all of that, you've changed the parameters of your statement. Here's your INITIAL comment: (emphasis added) In other words, your original claim was that my "vested interest" was in THE LIVE AUCTION (which I have disputed, and continue to dispute.) NOW you say my "vested interest" is "in this book" (which I obviously do not dispute, depending on what you mean SPECIFICALLY as it relates to this book and "vested interest." If you mean a FINANCIAL interest, then, again, I dispute that.) So which is it...? You have operated in bad faith, and continue to do so. I...and, I'm sure, many other people...would love to interact with you in good faith. If you can't do that, how about just letting it go, and not accusing people of having dishonest motives...?

It depends on the type of comic being graded. Here's a price list: "Max Value" is the "fair market value" of the book. That's just for the restoration check, grading, and encapsulation. Shipping is between $14 and $70 for one book, again, depending on value. For example...getting a copy of Rom #37 graded would cost $20 for the service, and $14 to $40 for return shipping. A 9.8 copy of Hulk #181 would cost around $450 plus around $100 for return shipping.

For SM 50, it is easy.... it has the "Historic Engagement Issue" banner and bar code on front cover. (all other 2nd prints have Superman shield in the UPC box) For Robin, it is also easy... it has "The Adventure Begins" banner on top right hand side of cover and bar code on front cover. Yes...if you see the "Free Poster Inside!", it's a regular first printing.

Ick. Another fascinating part of this is that it answers the question "what would happen if people treated comic books in the 1990s the way they treated them in the 1930s and 40s." Since all the collectors were focused entirely on the first printings, Direct OR newsstand, and deliberately ignored these reprints, the reprints show up, several decades later, in tiny number, saved pretty much by accident, in varying degrees of condition, but mostly "worn." That's precisely what happened to comics from the earlier era. Nobody "collected" them; if they were saved at all, they were saved by people who simply didn't want to throw them out, or had the means, like Church, to save a single example of everything being published. And he certainly didn't put a lot of effort into keeping them perfect. He just stacked them in the closets. If you had told Edgar, in 1941, that in a couple of decades, his comics would be worth thousands and tens of thousands of times what he paid, I'm sure he would have looked at you as if you had two antenna growing out of your head It wasn't until people like Bill Gaines, starting in 1950, that people started to purposely save multiple copies for posterity, and do so in a deliberate manner to preserve their condition. It's a very interesting mirror, these books, a time warp into "What If...?" Er, that's Marvel, I mean "Elseworlds"...

I promise I won't flip out... ...this time.

Yes, one wonders that on a regular basis.

It seems to me that Robin #1, for whatever reason, is the most common of the three being discussed at the moment (Bats #457, Supes #50.) I do not know why this is...these are flukes that shouldn't exist. There simply was no mechanism in place for newsstands to order second printings, and the Spiderman #1 Gold was, from all accounts, a special request from Wal-Mart. I think I mentioned this before, but perhaps these were made the same way, for the same reason. To date, the other implied possibilities....Superman #53, Action #662, and a couple of others....haven't been made public if they exist. As far as speculating...as I mentioned earlier, these are so niche as items, it's doubtful more than 20-30 people in the hobby would ever want one badly enough to pay any real kind of money for them. But...they are the most interesting because, not only shouldn't they exist, but as a result of a confluence of factors (the sum of which was unique to these books, and that has guaranteed that they had very high attrition rates completely naturally, as opposed to the "manufactured rarity" of so many books right from the start) they occupy a very strange place in comics history up to that point. Those factors are as follows: 1. Despite initial demand, which is what prompted the newsstands reprints in the first place, all three of these books quickly fell in popularity. 2. In 1990, "reprints" such as these were considered the worst of the worst, with absolutely zero collectability. Nobody wanted them, and as a result, any people who bought them would have bought them to read, and likely thrown them out...if they were purchased at all. They were certainly not purchased knowingly by collectors, and the majority of copies obtained would have been treated well only by accident. 3. They are newsstand copies. That means they were fully returnable if they didn't sell, and they almost certainly were returned in large numbers. By the time whoever had them had to claim credit for them, the original books would have been 3-4 months old...long enough for all of them to have cooled substantially. 4. The last time any demand-based reprints had been issued was for Star Wars in 1977, and the Direct market was in its infancy. In the intervening 13 years, immediate demand for further copies would have been satisfied by reprinting the Direct market version, which, in fact, happened on several occasions (Dark Knight, Transformers, Ghost Rider #1, Ghost Rider #5, etc.) 5. If people really needed a copy, there were plenty of Direct market second printings of all three books available at local comic stores...which were ubiquitous in 1990...to find one. They didn't need to haunt a newsstand to hope more would show up, and, in fact, conventional practice guaranteed that once the initial copies sold out, there weren't going to be any more to be had. If you wanted one, the only shot you had was the comic store. 6. And, finally, nobody knows how many they printed in the first place, and, unlike Spiderman #1, which was followed by thousands and thousands of people, and as a result, became known very shortly after they made their appearance, these books quietly slipped under the radar, and vanished into the pages of history, unknown and unappreciated for at least a couple of decades, by which time it was far too late to launch any sort of mass acquisition campaign. I suspect not even DC still has records of these books being produced. It's been nearly 30 years, after all. Any one of these factors is enough to make the books hard to find, but all of them combined, and you have the scenario in which we find ourselves today: mainstream DC comics that have distinct versions that are prohibitively rare, and, despite a concerted effort to locate at least Batman #457 going back several years, has only succeeded in finding a mere handful...15-25 copies known, despite literally hundreds of thousands of still extant copies of the "regular version." That's pretty amazing, all things considered. We'll see how many more copies surface, but at these price points, if they're out there, they will be found.

Perhaps if you took a nicer approach, people wouldn't react to you the way they do. Perhaps, instead of accusing people of dishonest motives who 1. have no history of "pumping and dumping", and 2. have a long, well established history of scholarly interest in these areas, you might consider a more measured approach. It's certainly not an issue of form, as you imply here. Substance is miles more important than form. After all...the current discussion was initiated by you, and was accusatory from the start. What was preventing you from taking a nice approach to start with?

Hidden in an eBay listing.