Happy_Thorsday

Barely less than the Ditko Spidey (Parker) page. Might be good day for some SA Marvel shopping for once

Last 2 pickups for this year. Next up will be an early Avengers/Thor page I hope!

My favorite pickup so far this year.

Just got into OA collecting and thanks to some very informative posts on the boards here was able to get my first piece of art from Mr. Moy earlier this year. Thanks for sharing your years of OA collecting knowledge everybody!

If I picked 3 books. Green Lantern #3 (1942), almost any All Winners book and Comic Cavalcade #6. I have a few books out that have WW2 covers or they depict a tie in to a real event and people notice those. Older books with tie ins to historic events are fun

This "when will they ease up" mentality has been the most boring and frustrating time for me as a collector. I always took the advice from various collecting hobbies to heart. "buy the rookies first" "buy what you love" etc.. I am glad I did but now I can't really justify the entry point of starting another run of books. The prices "easing up" are mainly books that had a high velocity of sales, so the books easing up had huge volumes IE moderns, Bronze keys, warehouse books (FF48) and post 70's Spidey books. I never really chased the high volume keys because they were never much of a chase, you could hit a couple shops and find them. ( I am sure some GA collectors find it amusing I am talking about SA books like they are hard to find) I even got bored and bought out a chunk of low grade early FF books while telling myself FF 1 and 5 will come down a bit and I can put it together but then BOOM FF4 to the moon. It's things like seeing FF4 jump up that have kept me from buying, if the rapid increase of value is from investing it seems irrational and almost every thread where I have seen someone posts a copy of FF4 starts some type of speculative discussion. I bought books because I believe I wanted them and will always want them, so if someone is buying them because they believe they will go up I feel like I am lumping myself into a demand group that cannot sustain. The more everyone talks about price, speculation and volatility the more it seems to becomes that, irrational, and now I'm talking about it! I did love picking up that chunk of early FF books and flipping through them though so maybe I need to disregard some previously adhered to advice

Out of those TTA's the one that would be hardest for me to let go of for me would be the 44. Can you let go of some of the TTA's? I was going to sell X-men 2 through 12 a few years ago and I sold a GA cap instead of the 4 and 12. Even before the prices went up on 4 I was really glad I kept 2 books for characters I liked. The Jim is a no brainer but if you have attachment to any of those TTA's look around and see if you can only sell 4/5 of them and throw something else out to sell. Don't worry about a book "blowing up", that says enough that you don't love the books and the best advice is always buy what you love and you did with the JIM 83!

For the last couple months I have seen a lot of people complaining of damaged books, grading issues in the 9.4-9.8 range and slow turnaround time. If this board is a good place to look for customer feedback then these price increases make sense. There is even another thread joking about a new executive hire at CGC and the timing being comical, to me it seems expected that they would bring someone in to aid with the paradigm shift occurring in the hobby.. This just seemed like CGC listening to everyone in that we care a lot about our collections and when we entrust them to a 3rd party for judgment we want them to take care. If the hobby is growing they definitely need to grow with it. More graders, more oversight and better training <<<Hopefully that all comes with the price increases.

I started getting back into collecting around 2011/2012 and I was going to pick up books I had always wanted from Marvel AND DC. At first I picked up a few DC books I always wanted, which was primarily DC Villains and DC GA Heroes. What waned my interest was reading the DC New 52 stuff and trying to push through it. Compared to the Marvel stuff that was being put out it felt like a chore. I did not have a desire to keep up with the DC content or see it executed in a different medium, it just was not fun, the characters were familiar but that was about it . The Marvel stuff on the other hand kept me invested and made me want to see the stories and characters continue . I have a good number of friends that are DC guys and have been for decades but they almost never speak positively about recent runs and their affinity for that content seems to have dropped over time. The more I talk to people about the DC content they love it's really not about DC it's just about Batman because he does kind of have his own easy to understand universe compared to most other DC characters. Just my 2 cents with some anecdotes.

I have bought hundreds of raw silver age books from the vendors I saw recommended over and over on the boards here. Maybe I am lucky but I have had all the books come back in the grade range the vendors posted or higher. A few times I even doubted how high the vendors listed certain grades only to have them back in the posted grade . The only time I have gotten burned was purchasing from a vendor at a show with a few books coming back CT, or course afterwards I looked up "CGC forum _VendorsName_" on google and sure enough the vendor had known issues. If you want to buy raw books I would suggest looking off of Ebay, even graded books I have bought there have shown up with broken slabs

I read most of mine that are in slabs albeit it might have been years. As prices have gone up I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people who have read their slabbed books is higher than it used to be! I have about 30 books I feel I need to get slabbed now just because of their value. I may also want to sell to upgrade other books and it seems slabs grab a larger premium than they used to. That will soon equal 30 more books that are slabbed that I have read before. Another caveat you may want to add is "Does the collector of slabs read comics as well?" Some people will say they have not read the comics in their slabs but they may also not read comics

I chased Jim 83 and lost it repeatedly on Ebay and other auctions sites between 2014 and 2018. It is one of those crazy cool books with such an iconic cover that every time one comes up there is so much competition to grab it. I finally picked up a copy a little more than 2 years ago and it is my favorite book in my collection, I genuinely enjoy owning it. I would rather own the low grade 83 you suggested over the books you listed for trade hands down. TTA 27, 35 and 44 are all awesome books (44 is one of my favorite covers) and parting with things you actually enjoy is not fun. TTA 27 and 35 are also so tough because it is almost like the character is split between those 2 books. Thor has that Kirby excellence going for it for older fans (and me), The Simonson run in the 80's is off the charts and in the last ten years they have made some of the best storylines as well. This makes it likely that there is more to build on in the future, comics and otherwise. Ant Man and the Wasp are awesome characters and played a key role in the early years of Marvel but his best storylines both silver and modern have typically needed Ultron and or The Avengers. Best of luck in your decision-making process!

Keep in mind at auction you are competing on an item that is being marketed professionally and with a sense of urgency. Heritage, comiclink, comicconnect etc are the best in the business as drawing top dollar for a book, keep in mind that top dollar is what you are paying. Remember there are thousands of collectors with books you might want, all in different situations. As collectors we might all be great but as business/dealers everyone is not in the same league. When I go after keys I want I will find 5 or 6 copies and make low (but respectable) offers I am comfortable with. Maybe that person wants cash quick to pick up another book or wants the cash for another personal reason. Often none of my offers take but every now and then I can get a book I have been chasing for a long time at a price that does not make me question my purchase. I have paid lowest gpa on some great books in recent years doing this, I have also paid on the top end when I have gotten caught in auctions for a book I really want. Everyone is happy with their purchases in recent years because prices are up across the board. The more you get used to interacting with individuals’ collectors the better you get at interacting with individual collectors. I have gotten some amazing advice here and other places. You are off to a great start in that regard on this thread. Keep going!

That is an awesome book to cap off an awesome collection. Thanks for sharing! I was curious, do you think knowing that you were keeping the TOS 39 ungraded pushed you towards keeping the run raw rather than moving towards slabs?

I had to pull GPA to double check. 3 consecutive months where the average price of a 6.0 was $225+ and the 5.5's were around $150 during that time. In hindsight I should not have lumped the two grades together because those are very big price breaks for such similar grades. Also on the topic of the thread, origin issues from this era are also pretty reasonably priced AV 58 has that pretty cool avengers assemble cover (que repeat of first app white vision joke) and has the origin of both Vision and Ultron.

I don't think it would be a price factor for most people as way more knowledgeable folks than me have alluded to in this thread. The funny thing is what finally made me pull the trigger on a Stan Lee signed book was that it was the last Ditko issue (#38). I doubt I would felt the "demand' for that book if I had not read a lot about the backstory at Marvel during that era from the boards here. If comics appreciate will ASM 1-38? With near certainty but not primarily because they are Steve Ditko art. To your Malekith point in your later post I don't think they could have messed up a villain more than they messed up Malekith. We did not even get the land of Faerie or David Bowie labyrinth vibes! He was zero fun in that movie

For some people it might be preferable to the home. If knowledge of the valuables in a storage unit would make the unit a target for theft, then the same could go for a home (nowadays with social media I could see this being even more of an issue). I would rather have some bonehead break into a business rather than a family home. I don't like keeping valuables in my home, but a lot do for the enjoyment factor. So to each their own.

Luckily I bought the keys for the runs I really wanted before this spike upwards. My plan is to fill in my early Dr Strange run through 183 (1969) and then I still get to pursue about half of the books in the first defenders run. The only thing this has changed for me is X-Men and ASM, I don't want to start something I might have to stretch myself for later and with this shift that would be a real concern and possibly not as enjoyable. On the plus side I had picked up low grade copies of ASM 4,6,9,13,15,20,31 and 42 before all of this craziness so now I might get to move them to grab a really nice copy of Strange 169. Positives and negatives with all of this

Great Topic. With all of the focus on high grade stuff lately I am interested to see peoples opinions on properly centered books (9.6-9.8 with a giant white stripe!?). Thanks for the poll!

I hear you with the middle school years, back then I was looking for X-men cheap and I could only find Avengers and Defenders :P. It's from Avengers 57! They had this amazing 4 book block. in 55 Red Cowl is revealed as Ultron, in 56 they time travel with Cap to see if Bucky really died and then by 57 they introduce vision who leads them to and helps them beat Ultron in 58. If you want to check out a recently comically relevant cover, look up 58 (first app of White Vision! *jokes*). Edit* all of this talk made me skim and they did not beat Ultron in 58. That was the origin issue for Vision and Ultron were it was found that Pym Created them.

Yeah at a 6.5 it was down to around 3 and I had been shopping for a copy around the time the movie came out and was happy to pick one up when the hype died down a bit. The copies I had been trying to get around the time of the movie kept going up into the 4,000's! One of the few times that waiting paid off in the last while.

Thanks and awesome Hulk book btw! Those first few are such an interesting parlay from marvel monster books into hero books. The Monsters turn Heroes! I dug this out. I had forgot about that ending until you referenced it so thanks for that!

Bc is spot on with Avengers 55. I got back into collecting a bit before Age of Ultron dropped and a mid grade 5.5-6.0 AV 55 was around $200-250. I waited a few years and it went down to a quarter or a third of that. You can still get a 5.5-6.0 for under $100. Which if you like some of the Ultron storylines and future potential use of AI in comics or the MCU it's definitely cold considering.

Picked this one up a few years ago from MCS