Poekaymon

It belongs in the early 90s with hologram covers and trading card abominations. Agree?

I recently got a lot, which the person wouldn't break out, just to fill in a few difficult issues. So along with the ones I wanted, I got a bunch of others that even though they were in 9.8, I couldn't get much more than the price of the slab for them (I think I ended up doing $25 with free shipping on a bunch of them). I was thinking that he just sent in 25 to get prescreened as 9.8s and maybe got surprised by how many filler books actually ended up slabbed. The only choice then was to put it in a lot for some sucker like me.

I used to spend summers at my aunt and uncle's house. They lived right down the street from a comic and sports card shop and one day they took me to it. I never had much money, but once in a while got some. Always treated them like fine porcelain--read very gingerly then immediately bagged and boarded and put in a box. That was high quality, pre-internet content. And one of the highlights of summer. When I went back home I found the LCS and basically went there every day after school. Assembled 5-6 long boxes over quite a few years, and then lost them all, like you--though in a less dramatic fashion--I sold them all at a bargain rate and have spent the last 30 years regretting it. The really sad part is, I had a small box of my very favorite ones separated from several longboxes of runs and whatnot. I posted an ad in the newspaper and the guy who came to buy it only looked at the longboxes and agreed to the price I had posted without even going through all of them one by one. He started carting them out to his car and he hadn't even seen the small box of my favorites. I could have simply put it away and he wouldn't have known, but I gave it to him along with the rest. Not so much the value (though I did have some decent stuff in there like Wolv 1, Hulk 340, NM 98, etc.) but I can't remember what the other ones were that I really liked at that time, and will probably never be able to. (For example, I liked some strange stuff like Fish Police and Ambush Bug--but there were many others I can't remember now.) I'd pay money just for a list of what I had in that box.

People + message board = discussion

Not really. They should be identified so that you can tell the trolls apart. As you're describing it, maybe I'm one of these undercover moderators, sent here to investigate allegations of bully culture. (Woops, outed myself.)

I'm not sure at all--that's why I asked for a correction if I was wrong. What I am sure of is that no one in this thread is identified as a moderator or administrator or CGC employee. Whereas this forum does have people clearly identified as such, including, as one example, Architecht. But feel free to enlighten me.

I've come around to the silver. And I can display it without feeling too guilty about UV. The plat has to stay tucked away.

I do like the Chromium. Not a big fan of the Spidey 300 chromium, but the #1 is nice.

I actually hadn't noticed that before and now it's kind of bugging me. The platinum is better than the green in that regard, though I wish they had platinumized the "Torment" as well.

I'm still mystified by the whole UPC thing, why some have separate entries and some don't. Like as is discussed in another thread, there was just an SM 300 UPC sold for nearly double the price of a direct, but it doesn't seem to be a recognized variant like the Spidey Gold is. I'm sure there are others.

I generally go by how many 9.8s there are--247 gold upcs versus 172 plats. But that's because the plats were so hard to find in 9.8--top 9% of books as opposed to 38% for gold. Kind of makes a 9.8 copy a key in itself. But you're right that overall the gold upc is rarer.

I almost included this. Probably grab one one day.

It also seems as though you can be voted off the HoS as well. Alright, HoS it is.

Can't say I am a fan of a public lynching, speaking as someone who has recently been lynched, and if you were to post a similar poll about me right now, I'm not sure I'd survive. He is definitely suspect and his name needs to go somewhere. As you said I'm new, but I think you have a probation list as well. So if he admitted fault and refunded everyone, maybe you could put him on that and give him a chance to change.

You are aggregating a nice list of petty negotiation/haggling which should be kept to PM, as a lot of it is specific to a particular purchaser anyway, and it isn't going to double the price of a book. Sometimes you have to apply a little common sense, like a reasonable adult. If the board just has too many trolls, bitter boardies, and dishonest buyers who will use any excuse to ruin a thread, then, sure, any framework based upon reasonableness is a non-starter.

It must have been for $1246 plus an Ultimate Fallout 4 or something!

I'm sorry, but "righteously earned money" is hilarious.

Duly noted.

I use Gocollect. What's that $1246?

That UPC was up for like 30 minutes. I put an offer in on it, and then someone bought it at full price. Feels bad.

Trying this instead of general because I note that general often has some hostility with regard to books in the last 50 years. And I guess 1990 is still Copper, though it's probably cutting it close. (In fact, maybe this book itself can serve as the end of the Copper Age, as it seemed instrumental to me in setting up variants and X-Men #1 in 1991, but I guess Lee's X-Men is a better dividing line as it really went to the races. Gonna skip the UPC variants as I like the Spidey head. And this has nothing to do with value--pure aesthetics. I had a print of this on my wall for years, and now have a framed CGC graded one. Still one of my favorite covers of all time. 1) Green. Simple. Classic. Was stacked to the ceiling at the old LCS. 2) Gold. Young me liked this one best at the time. I think I bought like 5 of them with the expectation of striking it rich. In other words, the great marketing ploy worked on me. Today, gold is probably my least favorite. 3) Silver. I didn't think much of this as a kid, but in my old age silver is really growing on me. I actually bought a slabbed silver recently to put on the wall. The red and blue really pops off of the monochrome background. Probably my second favorite these days. 4) Platinum. I'm still going to have to go with old platinum. Took the excellent green cover and jazzed it up a little. I like the giant 1 instead of the price, and the extra art instead of an advertisement on the back puts it over the edge. I actually didn't know this existed at the time, and then heard rumors of it weeks later. I think my LCS sold their copy for around $300, which I seem to recall was at that time around the price of a high grade Hulk 181. So it was a bit mythical.

I mostly responded to people who quoted me and/or asked me direct questions (like you just did). I wasn't really looking at that as micromanaging--just being responsive. In my defense, whenever anyone posts in the thread I get a super loud gong notification. But yeah I did listen, and for the most part, a lot of it made sense, especially the people who just said that it wasn't possible due to trolling/animosity between board members. That does seem totally plausible to me now.

I agree. And I didn't mean that I was leaving. CGC is the best grading company, and this forum is great, and has a lot of knowledgeable, respectful people. But this thread has also shown me that it has several who are not, and at least a few who are outright trolls, and I have learned my lesson with regard to attempting to engage with them. So I may still start a topic on something that I find interesting, like this, but I'll be more selective in responses. Plus this was just too much work But, yes, you are right that it is because they are sellers. But just being a seller isn't the whole story, it's that some are very insecure sellers who have great difficulty discussing something rationally if it has the potential for any change. It's a bit of a shame because this is a message board, and not eBay or Craigslist, but c'est la vie. And correct me if I'm wrong, but no one in this thread is a CGC employee or even a moderator of this forum. If that's true, then regardless of when any of us joined, or whether we have 6 posts or 60,000, we're all collectors on a forum for a private company. So unless I'm missing something, this forum doesn't just exist for Bob to sell his books, and newbies are free to post topics, like this one, without breaking any rules.

That's one way to handle it. You could also just make it so no one can post unless they registered before 2010 or have 10,000+ posts. But if it makes you feel any better, I have certainly learned my lesson.

You're the future of the hobby. No pressure.