CycleGirl

I was looking at the upper mid-range sales over the last couple of months. For comparison, I'm also showing what the GPA price was moving up from just a few months ago. May-9 6.0 $46,000 (Mar $25,000) Jun-27 6.5 $56,999 (Jun $34,000) Jun-18 7.0 $49,200 (Dec 2019 $23,600 last sale) May-22 7.5 $75,000 (Feb $29,500) Jun-25 8.5 $114,000 (Apr $78,000) These are pretty strong jumps in the 6.0 - 8.5 range. I think that between April and June that there was a bit of a "traffic jam." The 4.0/5.0 books were up against higher graded books that were still in the 20 - 30k range on GPA. They needed these higher graded books to take the next step before they come start moving up to the next level. I'm definitely NOT selling.

You never know what you're going to see on these boards! That ASM is a beautiful book, Roy! GLWTS!

Congrats to buyer and seller! Very nice book!

I'm a believer!

My copy came at last!

This is a big upgrade from the raw copy I've had for years. The hammer price was a bit high at Heritage, but it was too pretty to let go. One of my favorite covers and characters of all time!!!

Two copies? Which one is higher grade?

Oh right, like who would ever pay $10k for a Silver Age comic book...

Well... below is the 7.0 from the Heritage Auction that sold for $12,900 and it does have chipping on the right edge.

Wow! I'm pretty sure I would spit out my wine if an uncle of mine showed me that book.

It really is! Very nice looking book for that grade.

Steranko

It looks like a few of the March 2019 sales were lower than what we saw in January. I'm looking at the 6.5 and 7.0 grades. Probably somebody just got a screaming deal on that 7.0 at the Heritage auction for $12,600 when nobody was looking! It's probably not enough to be significant, but enough to keep an eye on. At that price, I wish that I had nabbed it!!

I don't think that the Avengers facsimile would pass as a counterfeit to anyone looking closely at the printing. Full disclosure, I worked in ink jet printing for a number of years. Even though imagining wasn't my area, I did pick up some things. Anyway, the text really gives it away. One thing that printing presses really do well is text. Diagonal lines are PERFECTLY smooth with a printing press. When you scan and then print with a digital process this is always approximated by pixels. Digital can make a vertical line without any artifacts, but with a diagonal line there will always be some jaggedness however small. It's pretty well hidden with high dpi (dots per inch). It happens in both the scanning and printing. I would look at the back inside cover, the W's near the bottom in the words "Waves" and "Wacs". The edges don't look smooth as they would be when printed from a printing press. If you compare this printing with a silver age book from your collection, you will see what I mean. Black text is always beautiful in the real thing. Unfortunately, the photo is not that high of resolution, so I'm not sure how it would look under magnification. Anyway, that would be one thing that would be easy to look for. The color printing on the image panels would also be different but I'm not exactly sure in what way. Printing press people do all sorts of things to get pantone colors to look how they want on the page. Digital printing has a completely different way of doing things. Under magnification I expect this would be apparent. Oh, did anyone notice how in picture #5, you can see how ragged the cut is of the front cover? It looks like it was done with a dull paper cutter. I suspect that the process used to make this was something like scanning the comic with a regular scanner. Printing with a color laserjet or maybe an inkjet, cutting with paper cutter, and then stapling. I expect that a lot of us on this board would see it as counterfeit if it were in hand. It just wouldn't look or even feel right. You know, I don't want to give those people any money, but I would love to get some of these books in hand to get some high-res scans. I think that it would be good to disseminate to people what to look for. The people really at risk are the more casual or beginning collectors I think. I ran into a collector who thought they found an X-men #1 with this book. The technology is definitely out there to fool a lot of "casual" collectors.

I'm pretty sure there are ways to determine whether a document is old or not. Whether or not CGC has any in-house forensics, who knows? I would think that with high-end books, that they would be looking for signs of forgeries. I understand that in the art world, forgeries are rampant and there are all sorts of techniques to identify actual works from forgeries. I expect that our hobby will one day need to employ those sorts of experts. If CGC stays ahead of the curve, it will greatly increase the value of their service. Who would buy a 5 or 6 figure unslabbed book once it becomes known that counterfeits are out there?

My biggest concern about CBCS has been the value of graded books. A while back, I saw an X-men #1 in a CBCS 9.0 sit on C'Link for a time. I believe that it was listed for about $40k which would have been a pretty good price for a CGC 9.0 . Whatever it was, I gave serious consideration to buying it, cracking it and sending it to CGC. However, there was certainly no guarantee that it would get a 9.0 or higher from CGC. So, in my mind, I had to discount it half a grade plus the rather substantial cost of grading (including insurance, etc.). Looking at it that way, I discounted the book about $8 - $10k so that a $50k book became a $40k book. It really made me wonder why someone would send a book of that value to CBCS. How much did the person save on the cost of grading? Let's face it, for better or worse, most investors want their books graded by CGC ESPECIALLY for the books worth 5 and 6 figures. CGC charges 3% to grade a high value book. CBCS charges 2.6%. Does the market value CBCS graded books within 0.4% of the value of CGC graded books? I'm thinking that the difference could be as much as 20 to 25% based on the risk that the book might lose a half point on the grade. For a minor book or a modern, I probably wouldn't mind buying a book in a CBCS slab, but when it gets into serious money, I don't think so.

Namisgr WOW! FF51 This Man this Monster is one of the best covers and best stories of all time! And the Pacific Coast copy to boot! Just amazing.

That's a very presentable copy! Good PQ as well.

Congrats then!

Very nice copy! I'm usually pretty hesitant to purchase a big time key in raw form. I'm afraid it will grade much lower than I hope for.

IH181 is a huge key for certain. However, there are a LOT of them out there. Almost 10k have been graded by CGC and about half of the graded books are 7.0 and higher. It stands to reason that there are tens of thousands of raw copies out there below 8.0 . The bottom line is that value is based on demand and scarcity. IH181 certainly has demand but it is not particularly scarce. On the other hand, I've heard GA collectors say that AF 15 is not scarce, so there you go, it's all relative isn't it?

Okay, I just have to say it... It makes me happy to see girls dressed as heroes instead of as princesses waiting for a hero to save them. Go save the day, girls!

It's almost embarrassing, I just walked down to the box and found another delivery from the postman that came in this weekend! I seem to collect in streaks. This was purchased from AlphaOmega here on the boards! Kudos!

I remember my first exposure to collecting when I tagged along with my big brother and his friends visiting the comic shop in the Pike Place Market in Seattle. Back in those days we would get on a city bus and go downtown for no reason then to look at the curio shop, magic shop and of course, the comic shop. I had read a gazillion comic books by then. Pretty much any comic book we found, I would read. Richie Rich, Archies, DC, Marvel, it really didn't matter. The Goodwill and Salvation Army were great because they were cheap there. At the comic shop I first saw comics in a glass case worth tens and even hundreds of dollars. It was pretty astounding to me. I remember that there was an X-men #1 in the display case. I don't remember what it cost except that it was way beyond my meager means. Still, I wondered what it would be like to own rare and important books like that. Even then, I understood that all cultural phenomena had a beginning. Archie, Super-man, Spider-man, etc. all of them had a day when they first appeared on the spinner rack and that was a big deal. Really, I think that was my best day of collecting. I didn't bring home any books that day, but I went home with an aspiration - a dream of owning rare and special comic books someday.