Turnando

Yes. Look at the threads for estate sales where people announce the smoking hot deal they got and brag flipping a book they bought that day from a dead guy's collection. Anyone with an expensive collection should consider that. Most heirs probably don't have the expertise to get a fair price. If I died and someone bought my stuff on the cheap and then bragged about it online I'd have to come back and haunt them. I hate those estate sale threads.

@revat awesome

You said you are a hustler and will sell to a sucker. Neither of those will work for long. Maybe you were joking but collectors don't like those kinds of jokes. Investing in collectibles is about as high risk as it gets. If were easy to make money from it more people would do it. The vast majority of old comics are not worth the time and space they have occupied during their lifetime. The same can be said of most collectibles. Watch 'The Antique Road Show'... Old and rare does not always mean valuable.

imo, the problem is with giving free stuff (effort, data) to a for-profit company. They can fold if they can't pay people to produce their product, it's a sad but natural evolution.

I say collect them. I like to collect accessories. They are so compact! I was pretty heavily into vintage SW action figure collecting and when I started running out of space I started collecting accessories. I now have a very large collection of vintage SW accessories. I have most variants of the accessories for all the figures plus things like the accessory packs. Accessory collecting is fun!

This looks like clay shapes that I saw a guy make on a TV program about how brains work. The guy was able to see numbers as shapes like this. He had been diagnosed with autism and his brain did things with math and numbers to make numbers appear as shapes to him. When given a number like 10,435 he would shape a ball of clay into a shape that looked like the image he saw in his mind. They tested him by giving him different numbers at different times, separated by long periods, and compared the shapes made, say a year apart, for a bunch of numbers and the shapes matched.

It was not a $5 book it was a $40 book. When you buy something remotely the TOTAL price is what matters, not the item price. Everyone who looked at that listing calculated the shipping as part of the deal... Except you. By backing out of the deal after the fact you are breaking the calculation that everyone else used, including the seller. By asking for a discount after the deal you are breaking the deal. Anything the seller agreed to for a discount after the fact was to make you go away and not waste $35 worth of their time. I agree with others that sellers who gouge on shipping are bad people but it's right there on the price tag, bro. Don't buy something without looking at the price tag. Now you are the bad guy if you don't pay $40. This is why I don't sell my stuff. One incident like this is like an hour lost and my hours are worth a lot more than 5 or 10 or 40 bucks to me.

Oh, ha! You said it, it's Dark Carnage. I should read some super hero comics... Awesome rendering.

Very cool. Is that your character? That would be a good character in The Manhattan Projects https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/the-manhattan-projects

I think collecting is an impulse. I have collected one thing or another my whole life. My mom does too. Not sure if my collecting is learned behavior. I'm guessing it is a hereditary brain structure. Like diarrhea: it runs in your genes.

I bought two of your books. I brought "Now and Then" with me on vacation, I love staring at it.

Saliva

Cool. Good to see a comic vendor who understands technology.

That guy sounds like most of the failed hires that I worked with at a construction job I had last year. Very familiar behavior. They are the guys who can't even work a shovel and say they need to be inside with the carpenters because they have mad skills. Losers, every one of them. They just can't do as they are told to do and it pains them that they have failed at everything they have done in life... and it is never their fault. Imbeciles. And that guy was definitely going to steal from you.

I used to collect vintage action figures pretty seriously so I know variants are super important in that hobby. I'm not as experienced with comic collecting, I'm a reader and comic history buff, but it seems to me that comic collectors don't get very excited by variants.

If you have a job and that job isn't selling comics, if comics are your hobby, then I don't think it makes any sense to report the comics. You have a real job and that income dwarfs your ebay account, you are doing your part by paying income taxes on your job. Your comic habit is not a profit center if you are most people. You sell a few you buy a few more.

I'd encourage you to stick with your LCS unless they are doing something you really don't like. I think having a decent LCS is worth the extra few dollars, especially if it's a shop you like. Choosing a book off of the shelf and buying it from someone you know is a genuine experience. After you have it for a while you can decide of you want to slab it. Wait for a comic-con where you can drop it off in person. Pre-ordering a collection online isn't fun to me. Instant gratification fades quickly. I've bought plenty online but a new book that I can easily buy from my LCS...never.

Looks like foxing to me. Humidity encourages it. If you search for foxing and old paper you'll find some resources. It looks like some of the spots on the bags are on parts that don't touch the paper so those might not be from the paper. Looks like mold is growing. Do you live in a humid climate?

Cool. I just came within 1 click of buying one. I like Silver Surfer. I wonder if Kirby saw this.

I don't expect dollar bins to be sorted. In my store I'd put the rejects in the dollar bin, bagged or unbagged, depending on what they were when they reached dollar bin status. I go through the dollar bins to relax and look for a cool cover or some decent art or writing and nothing more. That's how I'd treat them in my store: as a fun diversion that completes the store and draws in real comic lovers who will buy something besides a dollar book. The only thing I don't like in a dollar bin is flipping through junk that has been in the same bin for 2 years. I know it because I flipped through it last year and the year before and I wondered why it was taking up space then. An easy way to rotate the junk out would be to always stock the box on the left... and shuffle the books roughly from left to right. Roughly... I wouldn't spend more than 2 minutes doing it. When you add a dozen books on the left then shuffle to the right and take a dozen out of the far right box, verify they are junk, and get rid of them.

I wonder what the average level of damage is for sending a book back and forth. It's not zero. I'm with the guy who says he doesn't care that much about holder imperfections. If the book is safe and the crappy holder isn't too crappy I'd let it be. Every round trip that book makes is like running a gauntlet. The book WILL eventually get killed in the back of a big rig truck piloted by a meth addict.

Normally I'd say don't touch it, you haven't had any time for it to soak in that you finally reached an ultimate collecting goal of yours. After you have spent some time with your treasure you will realize you don't want to let it out of your sight. But... In this case I'm going to say it isn't really a grail. An ultimate, almost unattainable item in your collection. You said a reason to try to change the grade is to make it worth 4 figures instead of the couple hundred you spent on it. A grail is not for sale so who cares what it is worth? Think about it, is that book really your grail? Not really, so go ahead and yank it, crank it, smack it on a bing bong, and sell it for a profit.

You have put so much work into looking at every book that I don't think selling it all at once is your best move. Knowing exactly what you have probably won't get you much more money than if you had spent a week or so digging for keys to figure out approximately what you have... not if you are going to sell it as one lot. I'm going to guess that you like to focus on details or you wouldn't have catalogued it like you did. It would probably be just as fun to take on the job of selling them in small lots: here, there, everywhere. It's the same kind of meticulous detail work that you already did to catalogue it. You'd make a lot more money if that's any incentive.

Flip through them, read the cool ones. Then bag and board them and enjoy them for a while. Keep the ones you end up really liking, sell the others for a big profit. You have an instant collection of really cool comics.