comiconxion

Also, at least if they were going to counterfeit the book, they had the gumption to number it #1 - why not try and get top dollar if you're already breaking the law?!

Yes, I remember the book was cut skinnier. Also, the blue seems a teensy bit "brighter" on the cover to the 2nd printing, but that's hard to tell in a scan.

Having been the one to have first "discovered" the Gobbledygook counterfeits back in the 90's, I can tell you for sure that the two books discussed (the $23k 9.8 book and restored 9.0 on eBay) are definitively not 1st printings from the scans that have been provided. I'd be willing bet a real first printing. They are one of the following: 1) Misidentified 3rd printings 2) Doctored 3rd printings (with the printing infomation erased) 3) Counterfeits with new a new cover that was shot off a 3rd printing 4) Cracked open cases - Someone cracked open the case for a 1st printing and replaced it with a 3rd printing The only way may be to open one of the books in question to find out what it is. But, I can tell you I've known about the extra blood spot in the logo for years and it is an easy way to spot a 3rd printing at a distance. The interiors of #1's are also slightly different. A lesser known fact is that each if the first three printings is a slightly different size (as are the 1st and 2nd printings of #2). I believe the 3rd printing is actually more narrow than a 1st printing. And, the interior grey tones on the 3rd printing are more washed out than the 1st and 2nd printings. These are some additional things to look for if you were to authenticate a 1st printing and didn't want to rely only on the cover. I think that owners of these books should work with CGC to help solve this mystery. We're all speculating until someone can examine them in more detail. If someone has tampered with one of the CGC cases, CGC should be able to inspect it first hand and confirm this. If the owners crack open the cases themselves, we may never get to the bottom of things. But, I think it's important that the results be shared publicly so that people can be assured that they have a first printing inside books that are certified.

The ones that we've seen are dated 1984. The 3rd printings came out in 1985 and typically they are denoted with the Month and Date of publication. 2nd printings are also typically denoted with the revised Month. So, I doubt these would show up as 3rd printings even if that info. was inadvertantly left off.

Yes, the Gobbledygook ad is the definitive way to tell the first printing from the other two. The studio address in the indicia also changed from Dover, NH to Sharon, CT between the printings. The denotation of the printing wasn't in the indicia, it was further up on the inside front cover located next to drawing of the Turtle with the dedication. The first printing didn't say first printing, but the 2nd and 3rd printing denoted the printing with the date.

Wow - That's definitely a 3rd printing or modfied one!

It'd be interesting to crack one of them open and see what was on the back cover and inside front cover. The first printing has the Gobbledygook ad on the inside back cover which is a more unique identifier of a 1st printing. I remember reading a CBG article back in the day that mentioned reports of someone removing the "3rd Printing" delineation from the inside front cover of the Turtles #1's and selling them as 1st printings. It's possible CGC could have been fooled by that. It's also possible that they just overlooked the printing information. I've also seen reprints of Albedo #0 and Albedo #1 being identified by CGC as 1st printings. So, mistakes do happen, but if you pay for the service of properly identfying books and mistakes are made... what is the buyer's recourse? A restored 3rd printing of Turtles #1 probably isn't worth what the original owner paid to have it graded. And yes, "liable" was probably the correct word to use. I'm no lawyer.

So, in this case would CGC be libel for the mistake since the dealer who currently is offering the book appears to have purchased the book from someone else on eBay who listed it as a first printing based on CGC's label? http://www.ebay.com/itm/Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-Issue-1-First-Print-CGC-9-0-/140662122849?pt=US_Comic_Books&hash=item20c01da961

I'm not sure CGC is even 100% accurate when identifying TMNT 1st prints. Take a look at this one... it's clearly a 3rd printing from the colors on the front cover. http://www.ebay.com/itm/1984-TMNT-Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-1-1st-Print-CGC-9-0-VF-NM-White-Pages-/360437669303?pt=US_Comic_Books&hash=item53ebc25db7 OMG I would be on a plane kicking their door open!

You're forgrtting that there were two stories in G.I. Joe #1 and two sets of artists! Now you need to get Don Perlin to add his John Hancock! Unfortunately no way to get Jack Abel's signature. And as a bonus, you could add Al Milgrom who inked the pinups over Trimpe... And here it is - triple signed by the writter and both artists!

Guess I was right that the books could get higher prices that the art because the Turtles completists don't necessarily collect the art. Odd that the cover to #1 went for half the price of a copy of the book! Congrats to the winner of that masterpiece. Just hope the ink doesn't continue to fade over time! The person who won it may want to send it to a conservationist.

As of today, about $9k for the set actually... Surprised, yes, but since it's the first legit set to be auctioned to the public by one of the major auction houses, it's possible they could go for a lot more. Becuase there are a lot of book completists out there, the appeal of the books may actually outpace that of the art. We will see!

I don't think Hama wrote each and every issue. I believe I remember some fill ins in the early days by people like Steven Grant?

As the person who had the first set authenticated by Kevin years ago, my two cents is that they look legit. The right hand borders of the front cover have similar shading variations as is seen on a few other of the legit copies that have appeared. The fact that Kevin and Peter recently signed them also lends some legitmacy to them.

This is wrong - the bagged 2nd print of #3 had a "clear" Spidey with the webbing on it not a black Spidey. It's the same as the #4 & 5 in the bag. I don't even think Black Spidey was introduced by the time G.I. Joe #11 came out.

Yes, that is the Marvel Masterpieces I card art of Cyclops - one of my favorites from the set!

Yes, the upcoming auction will be a good barometer. Almost all the past sales were privately arranged and the ones that were public, weren't very well advertised. Many interested buyers could have missed them. A VF or better set should go for $3-6k. But, in the case of the Gobbledygook books, provenance is just as or more important than condition. I'd much rather have a Fine set with letters from Kevin and other original owner explaining their origin than a NM set without any provenance. Because of the provenance of this set, I expect this set to go towards the higher end of the range, but we will see!

In looking through the Scoop archives, I found this article on the "extra" #1 copy that was sold by Steve Lavigne back in 2007. http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/public/default.asp?t=1&m=1&c=34&s=262&ai=55021&ssd=1%2F17%2F2007&sp=gobbledygook&sd=1/12/07&arch=y

I believe there are a few more sets out there. Here are the ones I remember: 1) The original set which I purchased in 1996 and was the first set authenticated by Kevin. This was the set that the Overstreet Price Guide first showed pictures of a few years back. The letters that accompanied that set exposed the fact that the yellow counterfeits existed and the fact that there were only 50 copies of Gobbledygook printed. I believe Motor City Comics now owns that set and is selling them. See the following Scoop article for more information and pictures of those copies: http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/public/default.asp?t=1&m=1&c=34&s=262&ai=55658&ssd=3/31/2007&arch=y 2) The set that Steve Lavigne sold on eBay a few years ago. This set was the second authentic set to appear in public in recent years. I'm not sure if the collector who owns those is on the boards here, but I got to look through that set soon after he purchased them. If my memory is correct, Lavigne also had an extra copy of #1 that he sold so that should be out there as well. 3) After I traded my original set and missed out on the Lavigne set, I was lucky to "discover" another authentic set which I purchased from a high school friend of Kevin's. Kevin sent the set along with some other rare Turtles items that are rarely seen (a original page from issue #3, an unused iron on, a prototype greeting card, a Mirage Studios business card, a set of the first Dark Horse figures, and some photocopies of ads/art (some previously unpublished). I had Kevin and the original owner both write letters to document the provenance of these copies and the condition of these were actually nicer than my original set. 4) The "PGX Authenticated" set. This set is the most controversial of all the sets that have appeared. They were stapled differently from the rest of the copies that have surfaced. Speculation is that this could have been the set that was used to create the yellow counterfeits. After the counterfeiters had shot them, they could have re-stapled the books, but without seeing them, it's hard to tell. Anyway,CGC refused to certify these books so the owner had PGX do it. Not sure they were authenticated by Kevin or Peter as part of this process or what copies they used to authenticate them, but I'd love to see this set surface again so they can be compared against the other known sets. 5) As someone else mentioned, there was a set at the VA Comicon last month. Bechara Malouf (an original art dealer) owns that set. For those that are interested, he was asking $6k for that set at the show. I thought this was an "extra" set came that one of the board members, but I could be wrong. Regardless, they only recently surfaced. Unfortunately, I don't have scans of all these copies to share, but figured it was important to note their existence.

I'm not sure what the print run was on either, but if my memory serves me correct, the one with the larger 75 Cent price was the initial print run that was brokered by American Comics and Sunrise Comics. Again, if my memory serves me right, there was such outrage that Marvel had reprinted that book that they reprinted it again to meet the demand of the other retailers. So, the smaller priced version may actually be a 3rd printing? Those books represent an interesting snapshot in time in the mid-80's when certain books were being priced up immediately after coming out. I am not a speculator. I dont care about commonality of the three pack, or their worth. It was just something I noticed while putting them away. My comment was specifically directed at the different font on the 75 cent price. So in the longboxes of this three pack that you have seen, did they have one font or the other, or was there an even combination of the two?

Listed a few 30 cent variants that were either the highest or 2nd highest census... http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/comiconxion

You are correct... Mike Zeck isn't the fastest artist and he does his best work without the deadlines of a monthly comic. He's very much a perfectionist when he has the freedom to be that way. For instance, sometimes he spent up to a week doing some of the cover recreations he did over the last few years. That's becuase he wanted to redo them to be better than what he did on the originals. If you see one in person, you'll see the incredible amount of detail he put into them. Some of Mike's best work was done for pieces that went unpublished. For instance, he did a fantastic set of four Captain America portfolio plates circa 1982. One of them (the Cap & Red Skull) finally saw print when it appeared on the first page of the Mike Zeck sketchbook, published a couple years back. In my opinion, that piece topped almost all the Cap covers he drew. And Mike did some fantastic Cap covers! And there are three other plates that people haven't seen... one of Cap and the Avengers, one of Cap and Falcon, and one of Cap in a fighting stance. Ah, maybe one day they'll get published! In addition to the the set of six Punisher portfolio plates that were shared on this site, there was an additional set of six that was done for a second French portfolio. The Zeck sketchbook also features some great pieces including an unpublished portfolio plate, an unused wraparound cover that pre-dates the Punisher mini-series (allegedly done for a Baxter reprint book that was never published), the B&W version of the Big Nothing cover, and the B&W ad art for the Limited Series. The Sketchbook a must have for Punisher/Mike Zeck collectors. For those that want one, it can still be ordered off his website.

Hello to all the variant collectors out there that I've run across in years past. I gave up collecting variants a few years ago after having been one of the first variant collectors. It was fun in the early days discovering what might be out there. Anyway, I decided to sell off the last of my variant collection and listed 30 of them on eBay last week. I held some of the nicest ones back to possibly get graded. For anyone who's interested, I've listed the remaining books in the Marketplace... Send me a PM if you'd like to purchase any of them.

Wow- It's hard to believe that providing those articles impacted people so much... As far as the early listings of the IF #15 and X-Men #106... I don't think I had anything to do with that directly. If memory serves me correctly, I saw the X-Men #106 in the late 80's (somewhere between '87 and '89) and I found the IF #15 a year or two later. I think the IF #15 reference in the price guide was published slightly before I found my copy - so someone else out there must have found one as well. I had told people in the local area about the X-Men #106, but I didn't know anyone who worked for the Price Guide that I could have told to include information about its existence. It was a strange coincidence however when it appeared. It proved to people that I wasn't crazy. In 1993, Overstreet listed the existence of the Iron Fist #14. That was one I searched for, but never found (until many years later). Many people thought it might have been a typo as no one else had heard of one. There still is a variant that I would like to get listed in the Price Guide (Tom Gordon - if you're listenting, please write this one down). Back in the 90's, I "discovered" the existence of the very first price variant - a copy of New Book of Comics #1 (1937) with a 10 cent price on the cover. Every other copy that had surfaced did not have a price on the cover. The copy I had seen was owned by Dave Anderson (Oklahoma Dave, not the one in VA). For one of the CBM articles, Jon McClure published a copy of the cover. The copy that Dave owned copy was restored and I'm not sure how much more valuable that copy would have been because of the Price Variant, but it probably should be noted in case there is another copy out there. As far as helping fill people's 30 cent variant holes... I still do have a small box full of 30 cent variants lying around. I don't have any of the super rare ones anymore, but if there are particular issues you are looking for, I can see if I have them. Also, if anyone is interested in buying all of them from me, I'd be open to offers. Just drop me a private message.

I think I'm the other "DC area collector" that Paul was talking about... I had helped Jon McClure write some of those now infamous CBM articles on the variants and may be considered the "grandfather of variant collecting." Growing up, the 30 cent vairants seemed pretty common place to me. People didn't make a big stink about them becuase at every DC area comic show you'd find them (with Baltimore being one of the test markets). My quest for 35 centers started with a cross-country trip during the 80's on which I passed through a comic shop in Ohio. When I was looking through a stack of X-Men, I thought it was strange that a copy of X-Men #106 had a 35 cent cover price. It got me thinking that Star Wars #1 may not be the only book with a 35 cent variant. I then ran across an Iron Fist #15 at a local show and later an X-Men #105. That's when my theory started that there was one for each book published around that time. It was fun in the early days because no one else was looking for them. When others started looking for them at the shows and people started asking crazy money for them - that's where it ended for me. At this point, I've sold off most of my collection (to the benefit of other collectors out there). I still look for them at shows when I get a chance, but it isn't an obsession anymore. Glad I got it out of my system when I did. Good luck to those out there trying to put together runs. The good thing about collecting variants is that you know it will take you many years to put together the run. Sometimes the quest is more than half the fun! -Chuck Costas