kustomizer

That comic just tends to get a bad wrap. Do egregious printing/production errors like that affect the grade much?

Even if he marked the books as replicas, they're not his intellectual property to be profiting from. There's also a Brazilian seller doing the same thing, and at least one or two others in on the game. Even the guys just selling the replica covers have no legal right to be doing so. Ultimately it's dealers and collectors who stand to be scammed by these counterfeits. I certainly do think the market exists for Marvel and DC to print their own legit replicas of key books on the original paper type, and clearly marked at the bottom of each page. Maybe they will, seeing as how the unauthorised versions are selling for a $100 per copy.

I hadn't actually considered that!

You're right about the novice, but it would be quite the minefield entering the hobby just now. There seems to be very low awareness that these counterfeits are currently entering the market even amongst seasoned collectors. I think the likely scenario with counterfeits would be crooks selling them off "cheaply" to newbies who think they're getting a bargain on key books. "Wanna buy Hulk #1 for $1000? It might be worth a bit more but I really need the cash for my wife's dentist bill so it's your lucky day."

I picked up the massive Steranko is... Revolutionary! last week. Pretty much the best thing ever. Here's some dude touting it:

Do they float?

That'll just make the surviving collections even MORE rare! An upside to everything. The next global flood's gonna be bad news for collectors of just about anything.

I like stamps. They have nice pictures.

Even with Action Comics #1, you had to wait a good 40 years before it was serious money. Not many of us are thinking about that long of an ROI. I sold an old torn-up cereal box for $540 a few years ago. Admittedly it was an Aussie 1966 Batman theme, but still. Nobody deliberately kept stuff like that other than garbage hoarders. I see '60s candy bar wrappers routinely go for over $100 apiece. A few boxes of household paper garbage from the '60s would make for a decent retirement fund now. Throw in a few toys, garage-band records and comics from the time and that's a lot of bingo money.

And as Disney now owns Marvel, I'd think they'd be very protective of that major property too.

That's true, even just one copy would have done the trick ... only a 10 cent investment for $3 million today! Oh well, who knew?

Well, now it all makes sense. Thanks. I was born around the time AF#15 came out, I'll always regret that my parents didn't buy a caseload of them for my eventual retirement.

Unless it's suddenly 1962 again, how does some kid get 2 copies of AF#15?

Or blowing in the wind.

I'd grab pretty much any Marvel from the 70s + early '80s at those prices.

Well, it would have been at least heavily plotted by Don Heck, as that was the Marvel method.

Sure. And I sometimes wonder what the FF would have been like if drawn all along by Don Heck and Spidey by Bob Powell.

Thanks. I'm way down in Australia, otherwise I'd drive over there myself!

Stan Lee, 1967: "Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean, I’ll just say to Jack, ‘Let’s let the next villain be Dr. Doom’... or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He’s so good at plots, I’m sure he’s a thousand times better than I. He just about makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing... I may tell him that he’s gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I’ll give him a plot, but we’re practically both the writers on the things.”

A couple of the things Stan said in that interview were generally correct, but much of it doesn't ring true.

I'd imagine the '70s stuff would have gone quickly, and much of the '80s. But there'd be a massive slow-down at the '90s mark. Wish I could have been there for that sale. Any chance you could take a photo or two of the stuff that's still sitting there?

Stan Lee, from a 1974 interview with Jae Maeder. Lee is referring to how he conceived the FF and Spidey: 'So I figured okay, I’ll do it as I’ve always done it, I will do as he says and give him a superhero team. Only this time I’m going to make it totally different from anything before. As different as I could make it. I figured, I’m sick of stories where the hero always wins and he’s always one hundred percent good and the villain is one hundred percent bad and all that sort of thing. So I figured, this time I’m going to get a team of characters who don’t hew to the mold. Fighting amongst themselves...the Torch wants to quit because he’s not making enough money. The Thing wants to get out because he’s not getting enough glory and he thinks Reed Richards is hogging all the headlines. Occasionally a crook gets away or beats them up. They’re evicted from their skyscraper because they can’t pay the rent because Reed Richards invests all their reward money in stocks and the market takes a nosedive...I tried to do everything I could to take these super-powered characters and in some way to make them realistic and human. To have them react the way normal men might react if those normal men happened to have super-hero powers. And then I carried it forth with Spider-Man. So he’s got the proportionate power of a spider, or whatever. Isn’t it still conceivable that he might have halitosis or fallen arches or dandruff or acne? Mightn’t he have problems with money? Does it follow that just because he’s Spider-Man all the girls are gonna love him? I tried to figure how many fallible features I could give Spider-Man.' Notice the amount of errors in the above descriptions of the FF and Spidey? It's almost as if he didn't really know the characters or their sub-plots.

No, of course not. How would that be any kind of theory? I'm thinking it was his wife, Joanie.

I just got the massive Steranko is ... Revolutionary! book, at last ... this could take a while.

Well, more like an alternate view.