Stefan_W

My first CGC shipment in a few months arrived at CGC today and I am encouraged by people saying in this thread that TaTs are really good right now. It is a group of moderns regular track. Fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly and quickly

There will probably be improvement at Comic Link because Feb is one of their featured auctions. Outside of CL I would not be surprised to see things nose up slightly leading into spring, but I doubt there will be big changes overall since the economic conditions are not really pointing in the direction of extra disposable cash for people.

I get that glare on some comics but not others. My assumption is that the light in my basement comes in at such an angle that there is some glare with certain colors on the cover. I dont personally care enough about it to go through too much trouble, but I was thinking of standing up something on that end of the scanner to block out that light.

Things moved quickly this week and it is done and set to ship out today.

I'm in!

I think a lot of businesses do. I hired a contractor to put interlock in the back yard. They messed up and water pooled when it rained, but the contractor continued doing more new jobs and did not come again to fix the issue until their busy season was over. It is what it is.

My ME book that I sent in back in Oct is still SFG.

Mike is the best, Happy New Year!

Not a comic book per se, but I upped my comic game by picking up an HP 8300 for scanning my slabs.

Nevermind, I followed the link from HP to an external site and it worked. Here is my first attempt scanning with it. I like this software so I will pay for it, which means the watermarks will be gone for future scans.

I bought an 8300, got it home, connected it to my Windows 10 computer, and it is not picking it up. Any suggestions on how to get it working?

I buy the brow label books once in a while. Some people say they grading was tighter back then, which is not correct. Most people submitting in that period did not press out their comics first, so it is easy to get a grade bump (unless of course it graded out as a 9.8 to begin with). I avoid the next gen thin blue cases like the plague. The grading absolutely loosened in that period and it is common to see a drop in grade with a crack press and resub.

Thank you for doing this once again! The UF 4 that went for 2k and the Usagi were mine. I was pretty happy with with both even though the prices dropped significantly over the past year. It is what it is. The bad part of this auction was I missed the FF 5 CGC 3.5 by less than 50 bucks, which sucked since that was my target books for this auction. But I did land Marvel Mystery Comics 82 and the Stan Lee signed Iron Man 1, so all good in the end. As a general impression, I found it really tough to get any sort of deal on any of the books I was bidding on. It was either pay full price or bust, which is kind of how the featured auctions go.

GPA is the go-to, although people who don't want to pay for that service will sing the praises of Go Collect.

I have dealt with who I assume to be the target audience for this article and I think it is a worthwhile read for them. I have people contacting me all the time to sell their collections, and there are a portion of those who figure their books are a goldmine and price the collection as such. A common approach I see is people going onto sites like MCS (which is great, by the way), seeing their books are listed there at $3 each, and figuring the set of 2000 such comics is worth $6 k. If they are nice they say they are willing to give me a great deal at $5k for the group. In reality, books that that go directly into my dollar bins and the 8-ish long boxes of comics are worth about 10% of what the owner thinks they are worth. The downside to the article as people pointed out is that it does not get into key issues that are more valuable. So if that group of 2000 has a nice run of Spidey comics that includes ASM 300, and other books like it, the value of the collection goes up quite a bit. I do like that the article mentions they should be sold as a group. I have run into more than a few cases where the person allowed a "really nice private collector" to rummage through and pick out all of the key books, leaving all of the worthless stuff behind. The really screws the seller royally since they are unlikely to ever be able to unload thousands of comics that have been picked over in that way.

I dunno. I found the toughest market for selling comics was when it was at its peak and the prices were sky high. People can only afford to go to a certain point, so unless you were ok with sending them to an auction house there were crickets chirping when trying to move most books. The start of the downswing was even worse because people were just looking for steals and were ok with waiting for the desperation to set in on the part of sellers. The best market for selling has reasonably priced key books that people can afford, and features a gradual increase in overall values over time so people can feel secure in their investments.

The reason listers put up wishful prices is because CL does not allow bids that are under 1/2 of the list price. So basically, the lowballers are weeded out if you put up a list price that is high enough. Of course doing that also weeds out some of the serious buyers who look at a ridiculous list price and are instantly turned off. I have had weak results on their exchange as both a buyer and a seller. I managed to sell one books out of a couple of dozen listings that I posted, and I bought a handful that was maybe 10% of the offers I made. The biggest turnoff about their system is they set the time for the seller to respond to offers way too high (something like five days), which means that the amount of the offer is essentially tied up unless you want to risk a seller saying yes at the last moment after you gave up and already sent the money elsewhere. At the end of the day most of the buyers are content to wait around for the books to roll into auctions and gamble that they can get the books cheaper that way. I dont have hard stats to back this but I would guess they are right about this more than 90% of the time since it is much harder to get a deal making an offer than it is to scoop a below-value book in an auction format.

I agree with that when focusing on Hulk 180 and 181, and the mini-series is an absolute must-have for any collector, but my dollar bins are filled with other Wolverine titles. People loved to buy up the 1988 series and later series and a very low percentage of those books are worth much more than the cover price now. Conversely, there are scores of Spider-Man books that are worth a lot of money. Granted the Spidey character has been around a lot longer, but I dont see many Wolverine comics competing with the long list of Spidey keys.

Only the last 4 or 5 months?

Huh. Heritage allowed me to hold books until I had enough to ship. I did this by contacting customer support and they put a note in my account saying not to ship until I said I was ready. This worked well until shipping times increased and books were not going out until a month or more after I asked to ship. Plus the ugly fact that they were horribly overgrading their raws and people bid like complete insufficiently_thoughtful_persons on them, but that is a separate issue.

I totally agree with everything you are saying. Scarcity is really important in how the market plays out. Books with 4k+ 9.8 copies in the census and with daily sales are going to hit the peaks and valleys of the larger comic market trends. However, less common books where there may be a sale every few years are not going to respond to market blips in the same way. I track the total value of my PC at the end of every month and the books that are bouncing are the ones that have new sales. The most secure books I have are the ones where I dont change the value from month to month because there is nothing new to go on.

This is exactly what silver age collectors were telling me just before the values on their books started to tank as well. Just because things happen in a certain order does not mean they wont happen.

It has been so-so for me as a seller so far and I haven't been able to find any decent deals as a buyer. My X-Men 12 CGC 8.5 final sale value was ok but a few hundred below what I was hoping for, especially since the 9.0 copy next to it went for a full $1k more. My UF4 went for a good price. I still have a WoSM 1 and a Usagi left to end with the former looking like a decent sale value and the latter still sitting very low compared to what my other 9.8 copies went for. Bottom line for me is that I did ok in this auction but not enough to make up for the bloodbath I took the books I had in the auction before. I was hoping to roll them into big keys but I kept just missing out. I ended up buying up smaller books at full price while getting half or less of FMV on a lot of what I sent in, so hard to call it a win right now but the big picture and longer term trends may make my rollover in books look better than it does right now.

Yup. My bid was $42 under the winning bid. I am still kicking myself over that one, had a bid that would have won lined up and then I changed it.

I've been pretty frustrated the last couple of CL auction with being edged out on books I really wanted. Last time around I missed an ASM 1 by about 30 bucks, and last night I missed an FF 5 by less than 50. It finally worked out with this beauty though so all good.