Gonzimodo

I also passed on all those, but I did later pick up an NYX 3 at Half-Price Books for $1. I immediately turned around and sold it for like $60 and thought I was a genius.

I've passed on many books over the years that had no appeal to me and are now "keys," but the one that always comes to mind is Walking Dead #1. The day it came out, I picked it up, looked through it, didn't like the art, and put it back on the shelf. Luckily, I got a mulligan on that, because the book started getting some buzz, so I bought issue 7 at my LCS and then issues 1-6 as a lot on eBay. I thought I may have overpaid at the time, but that $50 turned out to be a steal.

It's like taking "Brand new, still in the bag" and cranking it up to 11!

"Already in glass case"

Please let this become a regular feature!

You just hit the nail on the head. Checking random samples is reasonable and sufficient quality control for mass produced manufactured products, as the products coming off the line are essentially identical. You just need to check one every now and then to be sure the equipment/process is functioning properly so you can correct any problems immediately. With CGC, each graded comic is unique, with its own distinct label identifying it, so random sampling really isn't sufficient. CGC apparently agrees: "A Quality Control specialist inspects the collectible, CGC label and CGC holder. All of the certification details are reviewed for accuracy and the holder is checked for any defects or contaminants." CGC clearly is not providing the service it claims it is for what you are paying them.

My LCS recently started doing "special events" about once a month where they'll open up a back room full of stuff they've recently bought from collections or pulled out of storage. Comics are $2 each and are mostly from the 90s and 00s, but there is a fair amount of 70s and 80s sprinkled in there, too. I spent a couple hours digging and came out with a short box full of random run fillers and things that caught my eye. I didn't find any real gems, but it was nice to take some stuff off my want list without paying through the nose for it. It was a fun little throwback to the good old days for me, but it also confirmed that it's not something I have the time or patience to do on a regular basis anymore.

I always carried my folded-up list in my wallet so I'd have it everywhere I go. Now I just keep a copy on my phone. The convenience of that is nice. The downside is that I usually forget to bring my old man reading glasses when I leave the house, and I probably look like one of those dooshy flippers who live and die by the Key Collector app when I'm squinting at my phone. Yes, I do want that SUPER-HOT-BLAZING-LIKE-THE-SURFACE-OF-THE-SUN 14th appearance of SuperTerrificGuy's archvillain's second cousin's neighbor's cat THAT YOU MUST BUY NOW DUE TO TV AND MOVIE RUMORS OR YOU WILL MISS OUT ON MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND LIVE OUT THE REST OF YOUR LIFE IN POVERTY AND DISGRACE, but only because it fills a hole in my run. Hmm, I've got the lingo down. Maybe I should start a YouTube channel...

I've come to appreciate the ones I have as souvenirs of my time in the Army, but I have no desire to seek out and collect any more of them. Some people are just wired to collect things like that. I'm not. In modern parlance, I'm generally a "Cover A" kind of guy.

This is probably why I seem to place more personal value on the comics from my earlier days of collecting, before I had easy access to comic shops and the internet. I had to scour every spinner rack in my small town to find what I wanted, and trips to actual comic shops or cons in nearby cities were truly special events. When I was stationed overseas, I had no car and was lucky if I could tag along with someone to the nearest base with a newsstand even once a month. Now that I live in a big city, my local comic shop is less than ten minutes away from my house, and the internet is always there. There are a few other really good comic shops in town, too, but I've gotten so lazy and complacent that I rarely muster up the motivation to drive even twenty minutes to visit them. (Wow, I feel like a jerk typing that out, because there are so many collectors out there who don't have even one store within 100 miles of them.) The convenience is great, but it's taken away the thrill of the hunt and, sadly, a lot of the fun and passion for collecting that goes with it.

For the most part, I really do not care where I actually get most comics, with a few exceptions. I value my Mark Jewelers books because they specifically tie back to my time in the military, and I would never actually seek out other MJ books beyond what I have. They're just a quirk to my overall collection that I think is kind of neat. I also personally value a lot of comics I bought off the stands in my earliest days of collecting more than gap-fillers from the same period that I bought later, but that's just nostalgia kicking in.

When I was younger and had more energy and free time, you couldn't keep me from digging through any long box I could find. Now that I'm older and lazier, I mostly fill gaps in my collection online. It just seems harder and harder to find those rare, underpriced gems anymore without putting in more time and effort than I'm willing to.

I was initially annoyed by them when I was in the military and buying them. "What are these stupid inserts? Are these reprints or something?" Now I think they're really cool, because those specific comics are essentially souvenirs of that time of my life. The idea that they now may have more market value than their "civilian" counterparts is just the icing on the cake. I just wish I hadn't sold my Uncanny X-Men 266 Mark Jeweler variant years ago because it had a small corner bump and I wanted to upgrade. It didn't even cross my mind at the time that MJ variants were special in any way, so hopefully the buyer realized what it is and was happily surprised when he received it.

Finally suffered through the video. My initial impression:

It was very eye-opening to me when my grandmother died and my family went out to a storage unit to go through her stuff. She had been in a nursing home for a couple years and put almost everything she owned into this unit. I ended up taking her old folding card table, a small glass vase, and a funny coffee mug. I don't remember if my siblings took anything at all, and I believe most of her stuff eventually went into the trash. It was sad to see, because I know those things probably meant a lot to her at some point, and I felt like a vulture going through it, then discarding most of it. I just don't want my stuff to be a burden to my family when I'm gone. Assuming I'm still around, I'll be spending my retirement years converting as much as I can into cold, hard cash.

Yeah, in the comic I showed above, I'm guessing there must have been something internally that I missed. As I said, I had almost nothing invested in the book, though, so it really wasn't a big deal. I don't consign with MCS as often as I should (due to sheer laziness), but every time I have, it's been an excellent experience.

I consigned this back in 2019, and they graded it a VG/FN (5.0). I'm still not sure why, but I must have missed something pretty obvious. I admittedly am pretty lazy when it comes to grading, but my other books all came in about where I expected them to be. I bought it for only $1 and sold it for $30, though, so I'm not really complaining. I think most people these days know how tight their grading is and factor that in when buying from them. I've always had pretty good success selling with them. I love those guys.

I'm pretty driven by nostalgia in my buying and collecting, but I also have a wife, kids, friends, job, and church to keep me busy and not wallowing in the past too much. I definitely buy way more new stuff than I should, though. However, I'm getting to the point where I think I need to start selling off a lot of it. It's kind of morbid, but I really don't want my wife and kids to have to deal with all this stuff when I'm gone. I used to have grand designs of being a big hero and passing off an amazing collection of comics and toys to my appreciative kids when I go, but they don't seem to have any interest in any of it.

Nice.

Did you see today's Hasbro Pulse release?

I hate stores like that. The hope of finding underpriced gems is one of the main appeals of actually taking the time to search through back issue bins. If I want to pay FMV for something, I can go to any of a dozen different places online and order it. It's the store owner's job to find those books and price them accordingly, not the buyer's to do all the work and then pay above the marked price.

I'm still dragging my feet on this, but I think I've talked myself into getting one. I've only seen a couple episodes of Rebels, so I don't really have any real attachment to the Ghost, but this toy looks amazing! I know I'll regret it later if I don't buy one...

Actual published numbers for each are apparently not available. It being 1984, you can guess that more newsstand copies were actually printed, but I really have no idea, personally. As I understand it, comic shops (direct market) apparently did not order enough copies to meet demand, so they supplemented their orders by buying up newsstand copies once they hit the stands. Individual collectors who missed out at the comic shop also sought out newsstand copies, as did the speculators and flippers at the time. (Two other comics usually mentioned for which this happened are Thor 337 and ASM 361.) If you assume that newsstand copies generally have a lower "survivability rate" than direct market copies due to being out in the wild, getting thumbed through by snot-nosed kids, bent up, being bought by random non-collectors, etc., and then being returned and destroyed if unsold, then it follows that a higher percentage of newsstand copies of ASM 252 have survived in better condition than any other typical issue has. That's because a lot more were treated essentially the same as direct edition copies, which were probably more likely to be handled properly, bought by collectors who care about condition, and bagged and boarded. (Not everyone assumes this, of course, but I'm just trying to explain the logic.) So if we assume that more newsstand editions of ASM 252 were published than direct market editions (Again, I really don't know.) and they had a much higher "survivability rate" than usual, it's definitely possible that there are more surviving newsstand editions than direct market editions out there. Without knowing the actual print runs and newsstand return numbers, though, it's really just a guess. We can state with some certainty that ASM 252 newsstand copies "survived" at a higher percentage than almost all other newsstand editions of comics of the time, and so the ratio of newsstand editions to direct market editions is higher, but that's about it. Now I sit back and wait for people with a lot more knowledge to come in and tear this post apart...

Hopefully there is some human verification process after that, though, because pictures online can be mislabeled, regular editions can be confused with facsimile editions, and all manner of things can get cross-referenced and confused. It could explain a few of the glaring QC issues we've seen. (I'm obviously just speculating.)

Right, and I totally agree with that, but in the video, there isn't any overall discussion about what percentages of published or surviving copies of XYZ #54 (or comics in general) are newsstand vs. direct market. Rather, it seems more like a general information and identification guide for newsstand vs. direct. The ratio of surviving newsstand copies to surviving direct market copies isn't really discussed, except briefly in the case of those immediately popular books. That's probably why it feels out of place to me.