RockMyAmadeus

Look at that sexy Zeck cover! Seriously, Mantlo and the rest did wonders with a toy...a TOY.... "Hey, here's a toy, can you make a comic book about it?" That's ALL THEY GOT. Mantlo's series, while a little stilted and hokey at times, nevertheless was quite groundbreaking and totally different from everything else Marvel was doing at the time. And from #47 to #66, it was about as intense and wild as comics can get. The opening scenes to ROM #47... Think about it: what other "secret alien invasion" stories had been serialized like this, over 7 years? Yes, it's all the rage NOW...and on TV and whatnot...but it hadn't been done in Marvel comics (and I don't recall anything like it from other publishers as well.) And sure, "secret alien invasion" had been done on TV and film, but not to this extent, and certainly not in a serialized, ongoing format. Skrulls, ok, but they were never the central part of any story, and it would take Bendis in the 2000s to really flesh out the idea to its fullest potential. But ROM...? 30 years before Secret Invasion...? 15 years before the X-Files...? There was ROM. It is wildly, wildly underappreciated.

This is what I think of as a proto-event. It happened just before these sorts of things got branded and hyped as big events. If it had happened two years later, it would have gotten a "WRAITH WAR!" logo on the top of each issue and it would be a lot better known now than it is. There were multi-part crossovers into both Avengers and X-Men as part of this event, and the effect of X-Men was much more long term and dramatic. The first appearances of Forge were split between X-Men and Rom, and the gun Forge used to strip Storm's powers was based on Rom's Neutralizer. So all the stuff that followed - Life Death, the romance with Forge, the years of powerless Storm - flowed from the Rom crossover. ROM appeared all over the place. Hulk #296, Avengers #244-245, FF #277, X-Men #185-188, Power Man & Iron Fist #73, Marvel Two-in-One #99...great stuff!

you weren't the only one. He really looked liked a polished turd... I suspect, if you ever produced a turd that looked like ROM, you'd be in a world of hurt.

I love X-Men #256-258. Classic, classic Jim Lee X-Men, wildly undervalued.

$75 each....? Good gravy, WHERE?

This move was unnecessary.

idk, I seem to remember a 1 page preview in the back of comics that had a 'meteor' flashing across the sky, impact, and Rom stepping from the crater in the last panel surely we can collectively agree on the first issue that had this preview

And...no silly arguments about where he first appeared in comics!

Decades and decades of ROM gathering, justified.

Can you imagine a ROM movie...?

The scant sales being a result of the book's scant numbers, but I have not seen raw copies go for this kind of money. Until this 9.2 sold I was sure that the dollars raw copies were realizing were rivaling what a slabbed copy would go for. If this 9.2 sale is legit it would suggest a commensurate increase in slabbed prices as well, hence my posit that the book is "hot". @Cujobyte: I have a working theory that the sandman 8b will eventually be the copper age equivalent of the star wars 1 price variant. -J. So....there's an "obvious uptick in heat and price"....but, scant sales to demonstrate that...? How does that work...? "If" is a big word. We shall see. Four raws and two slabs in six months or so is "a lot" by this book's standard. And with strong prices for each and every one of those raw copies and a 9.2 now evidently selling for what a 9.8 sold for six months ago, I do not believe the word "hot" is an overstatement. -J. You would have to demonstrate the sales history of this book to show an "uptick." A 9.0 sold for $250 less than three years ago, and a 9.4 sold for $300 in 2009. There have been 17 sales of this book slabbed, going back to 2002, averaging about 1.2 a year. The prices, while "up", don't definitively prove that this is due to the book ITSELF, or the overall exuberance on the market in general. This 9.2 is a quintessential "outlier", if it's even legitimate. For record keeping purposes, you argued THE EXACT OPPOSITE POSITION when discussing Cerebus #1 last year. Hardly. Context is everything my friend. -J. No, that's pretty much the exact opposite of what you argued, right on the nail. "You can't accurately gauge the market based on a handful of sales!" was the very gist of your argument. Context. Context. No need to derail the thread any further, if you need any additional clarifications, feel free to shoot me a PM. (thumbs u -J. No need for additional clarifications; it's already all there. It's the same argument, in reverse. As far as derailing the thread, this *is* the Sandman #1 and #8 appreciation thread, right...? And we ARE discussing aspects of Sandman #8, are we not...?

Probably a little from column A, a little from column B...

Ooo...I hope Jaguar heats up soon!

MOOOAAAARRRRR...

He handled the X-men and Rom taking on Galactus was 1 of my childhood highlights. The series is what it is but at that time, it was my top of the stack read over the Defenders, Avengers, and the X-men. Long live the the childhood memory of Rom. Gods of Galador, what were they thinking when they ended the series ? Man, ROM was good. So, so, so good. I really hope Disney can pry the rights to ROM from Parker Brothers. They certainly aren't doing anything with the character.

That wasn't a very good press.

Liefeld was the next McFarlane (!!!!) It was hard not to get caught up in all the excitement, even for those of us who weren't kids when it came out (and thus, aren't blinded, at least partly, by childhood nostalgia.) But there's nothing wrong with honest critique, and some folks go completely off the rails...I mean bate insane...when you dare criticize their childhood memories...which is completely silly (see: Liefeld discussions in OA.) "Time Bandits" makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, is a terrible, terrible movie...and I love it to pieces, because it came out when I was 9 years old. "ROM" is not high art...but #47 is the sole and only issue I remember from my childhood, and thus is the greatest comic book ever published.* * Potentially exaggerated due to nostalgic myopia. I understand nostalgia...it's valuable...but part of growing up is learning how to put those things in perspective, and not clinging to them for dear life, recognizing them for the value they had to you at the time, but not letting yourself get sucked into a rose-tinted glasses view of your past.

The scant sales being a result of the book's scant numbers, but I have not seen raw copies go for this kind of money. Until this 9.2 sold I was sure that the dollars raw copies were realizing were rivaling what a slabbed copy would go for. If this 9.2 sale is legit it would suggest a commensurate increase in slabbed prices as well, hence my posit that the book is "hot". @Cujobyte: I have a working theory that the sandman 8b will eventually be the copper age equivalent of the star wars 1 price variant. -J. So....there's an "obvious uptick in heat and price"....but, scant sales to demonstrate that...? How does that work...? "If" is a big word. We shall see. Four raws and two slabs in six months or so is "a lot" by this book's standard. And with strong prices for each and every one of those raw copies and a 9.2 now evidently selling for what a 9.8 sold for six months ago, I do not believe the word "hot" is an overstatement. -J. You would have to demonstrate the sales history of this book to show an "uptick." A 9.0 sold for $250 less than three years ago, and a 9.4 sold for $300 in 2009. There have been 17 sales of this book slabbed, going back to 2002, averaging about 1.2 a year. The prices, while "up", don't definitively prove that this is due to the book ITSELF, or the overall exuberance on the market in general. This 9.2 is a quintessential "outlier", if it's even legitimate. For record keeping purposes, you argued THE EXACT OPPOSITE POSITION when discussing Cerebus #1 last year. Hardly. Context is everything my friend. -J. No, that's pretty much the exact opposite of what you argued, right on the nail. "You can't accurately gauge the market based on a handful of sales!" was the very gist of your argument.

We shall see. If the book shows up again for sale shortly, the odds are good it wasn't.

Label chasers look at more than the numerical grade now. Which is very unfortunate, because the label notes are subject to so much change. At some point, if it gets too silly, CGC may stop doing label notes altogether.

Frankly, the most disturbing part of this whole conversation is this obsession with what the label notes say on slabs...

That's like the 18th copy known!

This was the first X-Men Annual I ever bought. But it needs to be signed....

The 9.4 is $291, so it's doubtful it was a BIN.