Qalyar

Is there one, specifically? I know that the community has assembled a list of DCU variants, price variants of various types, CDN/UK/AUS printings, and so forth. In particular, I'm curious about any physically distinguishable ... printings/editions/variants/what-have-you. Even if the distinguishing characteristic is pretty small. Actual cover changes. Price variants. Indicia text changes. Hell, different barcode numbers are fair game.

I think I'd go 8.0 here. There's a couple of spine ticks near the top staple that are big enough they may have graduated to "creases", plus that impact divot under the D in Dracula. It may just be the image and my brain working, but feel like the top right corner has a bit of a non-color-breaking wide bend also. Also, a little softness to the corners, especially at bottom, and that bad ding on the back cover spine near the bottom. My big question is about that half-circle of non-red in the Topps logo. Is that a printing defect (which won't count against grade here) or a surface scuff that removed ink (which very much would)?

I'm going to say 1.8U here, with a label notation regarding the staple. Let's run with that for argument's sake. A 1.8 slab of the Star Wars #4 35 cent variant (which this does appear to be, rather than a reprint or other shenanigans) would be the new bottom-of-census copy, so it's tough to make definitive claims about market value. However, based on the value drop-off from higher grades, GoCollect guestimates a 1.8 would be worth about $160. That's probably enough money to make slab-and-flip marginally worthwhile anyway, but I suspect this will outperform the estimate. The 35 centers don't come up all that often, and recent sales have been, um, pretty good. So far this year, there has been a 5.0 go for $650 and a 7.5 for $1500. Both of those sales were above the computed FMV and the 7.5 was especially above even long-term trends. I wouldn't be extremely surprised if this book could squeeze out a $200 offer against a $225 or 250 advertised BIN. The math is a little tighter if this only comes back 1.5, but I'd probably still take the gamble here.

This is First Edition #86, as the indicia says. First Edition was the preview and advertising publication of First Publishing. This one came out in October 1989, previewing their December releases. As for value, maybe a couple bucks? First Edition isn't real common on the market, and trying to assemble a complete run would require the gods' own patience, but there's approximately nil interest in any of them. The fact that First Publishing printed very, very little with current market interest at all pretty much dooms their house organ to further obscurity. Despite the title of the advertised poster, this has absolutely no relationship to the ultra-rare Vootie APA fanzine. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It's an interesting piece of industry history, regardless.

Heck, I'm a couple years into searching for certain books that ARE moderns!

I can't wait to see what label shenanigans my German reprints of Black Hole (the Charles Burns indie, not the Disney film adaptation) get. The 12-issue US run was reprinted as 6 double sized issues in German by Reprodukt. My submission that includes 1-4 just moved to SFG (5 and 6 will be months later, as they required pressing to attempt correction of a defect caused by poor original distributor shipping). Obviously, label info is likely to change once they're actually graded. But right now, in SFG, the status for them lists: "Black Hole 1 3/95 Kitchen Sink Press". NOPE! That would be the correct label for the original US #1. "Black Hole 2 5/80 Whitman". HAHA NOPE! That's the series based on the Disney film. "Germany Black Hole 3 2000 Randlecourt Printers". We were doing so well, until the printer. Randlecourt was a mid-60s British reprint publisher, probably associated with Thorpe & Porter, best known for their two issues of Batman Album with a gloriously mis-colored Batman costume (bright red with a yellow cowl). "Germany Black Hole 4 2002 Reese Publishing Co.". Sigh. Also correct until the publisher. Reese was primarily a 60s-70s men's magazine publisher, best known for Man's Book and Real Combat Stories. Four books. Four different wrong ways to list them during SFG. I'll revisit this once we see what the grading lottery does with them...

Can confirm. I'm very much not in New York, and just had a Registered Mail delivery this week with no signature confirmation.

It's certainly a consideration for flip books, but for PC comics that I want slabbed? It's not like they're going to get any more slabbed sitting in a box in my house than they are sitting in CGC's receiving department.

For the record, it's unfortunately impossible to get a GSX1 signed by the entire writing team. Although Claremont, Thomas, and Fite are still alive and active to varying degrees (I don't believe Linda Fite has done convention appearances since circa 2001), Arnold Drake passed in 2007.

This list is not comprehensive. I am not responsible for errors, although I hope I haven't made any. A few of these credits aren't the obvious ones; the big example there is that he has a writer credit for Giant-Size X-Men #1. Obviously, he's not Chris Claremont! However, he was the writer for the 5-page Cyclops that followed the main one (and before the Iceman story by Arnold Drake, and the Jean Grey story by Linda Fite). Dark Horse: Kings of the Night #2 DC All-Star Squadron #1-3, 6-8, 40, 54-56 Arak Son of Thunder #1-3, 6-7, 47 Atari Force #1-4 Batman #336-338, 340 Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! #5 DC Comics Presents #31-34, 41, 48; Annual 3 Infinity, Inc. #1-23, 31, 46-53; Annual 1 Justice League of America #207-209 Legion of Super-Heroes #279 Secret Origins #9, 20 Shazam: The New Beginning #2, 4 World's Finest Comics #271 Dynamite The Adventures of Red Sonja #1-3 First Elric: Sailor on the Seas of Fate #2, 4, 7 Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf #1-5 Marvel Amazing Spider-Man #101-104 Avengers #35-104, 132, 350; Annual 1, 2, 19-20, 22-23 Avengers West Coast #73, 80-82, 87-88, 101 Captain America #168, 215-217 Captain Marvel #17-21 The Cat #1 Chamber of Darkness #2-7 Conan Saga #1, 4, 29, 42, 47, 50 Conan the Barbarian #1-26, 32, 49, 58-59, 64, 70-71, 94-95, 97-99, 101-104, 106, 111, 114, 240-262 Daredevil #51-69, 71 Doc Savage #1 Doctor Strange #169-178, 180-183 Dracula Lives #1-3 Fantastic Four #119, 126-133, 136-137, 156-179, 181, 303 Ghost Rider #1 [the 1967 character on a horse, not the guy on the motorcycle with his head on fire...] Giant-Size Avengers #1, 3, 5 Giant-Size Captain Marvel #1 Giant-Size X-Men #1-3 Haunt of Horror #1 The Incredible Hulk #105-106, 120-147, 153, 158, 173-178 The Invaders #1-23, 25-28,32-36, 38-40; Annual 1 Iron Man #44, 47 Kid Colt Outlaw #127, 136 Kull and the Barbarians #1-3 Kull, the Conqueror #2-3, 8 Kull, the Destroyer #11 Marvel Two-in-One #11 Modeling with Millie #44 Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #4, 6 Not Brand Echh #1-3 Patsy and Hedy #104-105 The Rawhide Kid #67, 91 Red Sonja #1-15 The Savage Sword of Conan #1-60, 83, 102, 219-220; Special 1 Savage Tales #1-5 Sgt. Fury #29-41, 44 Star Wars #1-10 Strange Tales #143-144, 150, 153-154, 158-159 Sub-Mariner #1-39 Tales of Suspense #73, 87 Tales to Astonish #82, 93-98 Thor #273-275, 277-278, 280, 283-289, 291-294, 299, 472,-473, 476, 480-482, 484, 486, 488 Two-Gun Kid #88, 113 Warlock #2, 6 The X-Men #20-44, 55-64, 66, 71-92

It might be due to the weirdness of these books, which are assembled from remaindered copies of other books?

Zero consistency. In principle, there are four 32-page remaindered comics rebound into each [Title] Double Double Comics, with no shortage of title options: Action, Adventure, Batman, Detective, Jimmy Olsen, Justice League of America, Lois Lane, Strange Adventures, Superboy, Superman, and World's Finest. If someone eventually turns up something not on that list, I wouldn't exactly be surprised. They probably did start out using remaindered comics that matched the collection title (that is, putting Batman issues in Batman Double Double Comics). But if they ran out, or had too many of something else, or were lazy and grabbed whatever was on top of the stack, something different would go in. Basically, for any given title, there's not only no guarantee of what issues are inside, but there's no guarantee of titles either. In fact, I know there are at least a couple of known Double Doubles where a stripped Marvel comic got mixed into the DC stack and bound in. The internet also says that at least one has been discovered that only had three comics, instead of four; I guess the stack ran short! There might be some configurations that are more common and represent what these were "supposed" to contain. Maybe. But trying to figure that out is a job only for poets and madmen. Assume it's essentially random. EDIT: 1967 to 1969/1970 is the general time period on these.

I've bought quite a few books on ebay for the purpose of slabbing. Results have been mixed. I curate pretty hard before buying and then again before submitting for grading. So I've had a pretty good net win rate of 9.8s (and nearly everything else that's gone from ebay to me to CGC has been 9.6s except when I knew otherwise ahead of time), but I've also gotten a lovely stack of books that just aren't slabbable... ...because this. Holy , this. I've gotten a book placed inside a Gemini mailer with no bag or board. I've gotten books in bubble mailers with no stiffeners at all. Just last week, I got a book that was bagged so carelessly that the outside bottom corner was wadded up into a pile inside in the bag. Luckily, most of what I've been picking up lately have been objectively inexpensive books (even if some of them aren't available in infinite quantities...). Getting the mangled remains of a big dollar book is more painful than getting the mangled remains of a ten dollar book, but it's still really, really frustrating.

His nomination was for set design. I'm not sure how much of a team effort that was, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Specifically, it was a nomination for a Suncoast Regional Emmy for set design. Regional Emmys are awards for productions that do not reach at least 50% of the US domestic audience. In this case, that means television that airs in Florida; parts of Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia; and/or Puerto Rico. That's not to belittle the accomplishment of winners (or, here, even nominees) of the regional awards, but it isn't quite the same depth of competition. As far as the presenting organizations are concerned, even the regional awards are Emmys, and the regional competitors are Emmy Nominees and Emmy Winners, as appropriate. But that's almost certainly not what most people expect it means.

These low-to-zero red/magenta FH books are weirdly frequent, such as you can call FH stuff frequent. I'm pretty sure FH did color control exactly the same way I deal with my printer. Magenta ink low? Eh. Magenta's a dumb color anyway, just keep printing. Anyway, the books definitely look better when they actually used ALL the ink colors. So there's no need to even auction these yellowy-orangeish copies off. Just send them to me.

Well... if the cover was trimmed, from a certain point of view the leaf casting could un-trim it. I mean, that opens up a whole different can of worms, but ...

I had missed that. Having pulled the full text of that decision, the case doesn't exactly do anything to better my opinion of Kaye. Who, I suppose it's worth noting, filed that lawsuit pro se. Indie comics publishing works okay. Indie law, typically less so. Although I'm sure most any copyright lawyer would have told him there was no there there from the start. "Has gems and magic" is not infringing...

That's sort of been the whole story of Amphoman. Guy makes a comic book when he's 13 years old and then stores it in his shed, as the story goes. Years later, seeing film adaptations printing money, he pulls it back out and, flush with cash from his career in television set design, has copies privately printed. Um, okay, that's sort of a cool story, if not an entirely unique one. See, for example, many -- many -- of the creators of ComiXpress or Ka-Blam books. So what happened here? Well, first, a local comic book store with a long history of supporting indie artists agreed to sell his books. Then, second, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel decided to make this a human interest story (very likely at the creator's prompting, frankly). And because there's no requirement for reporters to understand what's going on before reporting on it, Amphoman was described as this sunny success story that was now being sold "alongside industry giants like Marvel and DC Comics." Which I guess was true from a very literal sense; that one store in Florida had shelves of comics that physically displayed Marvel books, and DC books, and Amphoman books. But suddenly it attracted attention disproportionate to its quality. Some guy on a podcast said he was like a young Stan Lee. And so on. The book's creator is nothing if not a relentless self promoter. He signs carefully curated copies and, via creator agreement, submits them for Signature Series slabs. He keeps his books visible in auctions and on eBay -- often at ridiculously inflated prices to make it appear as though these are some sort of TMNT #1-esque chase book. There's no actual proof, that I know of, of shill purchases made used in an effort to provide the book a manufactured FMV, but it sure looks like there have been, and I wouldn't be surprised. He even produced a "rare version" of #1, advertised as a text error that went uncorrected in early copies. Of course, there's no way to tell if that's true, and it's sort of inside baseball regardless. After all, these books aren't just print-on-demand like ComiXpress books were, they're print-on-demand with the creator in control of the printing process. Their rarity, and that of any versions, is arbitrarily controlled by one guy with a vested -- and highly active -- financial interest in the books. Heck, he's even shown up on these boards arguing that Amphoman is an investment-grade modern book. Spoiler: It is not. There are a lot of indie books that I really love. A lot of them have great stories behind their creation, of struggling artists who fought to get into the industry. Some of the most successful either managed to make a career out of being the underdog, or earned their place with the bigger publishers. Their books are testament to their love of the art form. Amphoman's creator might be honestly passionate about his work, but everything about the way it has been presented and marketed is far more of a testament to the love of market manipulation and self-promotion. I will never own these books.

One of the biggest unanswerable questions is whether the market is going to continue to be dominated by a "covers and keys" approach to collecting. Right now, most long runs of comics -- especially modern comics -- do not appreciate in value. First issues of books that get adapted to television series become valuable; sometimes that drags a few other issues up with it. First appearances of characters that end up in a film (or, at least, are rumored to eventually end up in a film) become valuable; sometimes that trickles down to other earlier appearances or early cover appearances if prices get steep enough to push the original book out of reach. Some limited issue variants with distinctive covers have also become valuable (but many don't); either way, those aren't generally the sort of thing that you'd have in a random comic collection. In a sense, they're more like art prints that happen to be used as comic book covers. Everything else? Well... Is that going to change? It's impossible to know. Those "key" books are always going to be in demand because they're more exciting, but run collections were more popular at certain points in the past than they are now. Personally, I suspect that run value for some of these series will eventually start to be dragged upwards. We're seeing a little of that right now with Something is Killing the Children. Maybe also Canto to a lesser extent. Probably a few others. But predicting the future is hard, otherwise I'd have made zillions of dollars on the stock market, bought everything I wanted, and retired. The comic book industry is going through some pretty significant changes right now, too. The whole relationship between comics/tv series/films is still unsteady, and it's not clear how long that will continue to be a dominant factor in entertainment. And there are changes happening to printing, publishing, and distribution. How much of the industry will be replaced with digital distribution? No one knows. Not only is there no way to guarantee what collectors will pay big money for ten years down the line, it's not even really possible to know what people will be collecting at all ten years down the line.

I dug into this a little more, which is slightly challenging, with the company's website long gone from the internet. As I suspected though, they did sell books with un-numbered stickers and no COAs in addition to the numbered/COA books. As best as I can tell this far after the fact, they'd issue the COAs for specific, pre-planned signings, but would also sticker other books that they witnessed being signed. As CGC took off in popularity, they mostly transitioned to just creating Signature Series slabs. I couldn't find any indication that their holofoil stickers ever made it into the wild. So, yes, it's certainly possible that this is a forged signature using a surplus Excelsior sticker, that also fooled PSA. But I think the most parsimonious explanation is that it is legitimate and exactly what is appears to be. A book signed by Stan Lee, either sold or witnessed by Stan Lee Collectibles (the then-official outlet for Stan Lee signatures and merchandise), stickered by them, and later sent to PSA for their signature authentication service.

Indeed. I'm going to blame autocorrect and late-night phone posting there. Which I suppose means my phone was trolling my trawling. I think there's probably still some SA/BA out there in garage sale lots. But even then, most of what we picked up was < 10 years old. That did mean dodging the huge boxes of Valiant stuff that was everywhere (look, no one ever expected any of that to sell again...), but there was plenty of quick turnaround material. There's still a good chance to pull wins that way today (UF4 comes to mind), but there are probably fewer of that sort of collection in general, and a higher percentage of stuff with zero turnaround interest.

So, I've seen similar Excelsior holofoil labels before. They were produced by Stan Lee Collectibles, authorized as a sales outlet for official Stan Lee signatures and miscellaneous products. Many of them have a printed ID number (oriented vertically, on the left side of the sticker) that matched the ID number on a printed COA, and that could be looked up on their website (much like the CGC certification number lookup). The idea was that anyone forging such a product would have to forge the holofoil label on the comic and the holofoil label on the COA, plus make sure the entry matched the online database. As comic collectibles, they leave a bit to be desired because the stickers are applied to the comics, but in terms of signature authentication, numbered Excelsior stickers with matching COAs are probably the next best thing to witnessed Stan Lee autographs. Unfortunately, Stan Lee Collectibles has been out of business for quite a few years (shortly after Stan's death, I believe), and the online number check is no longer available. This sticker does not have a printed ID number. Honestly, I suspect that it's a legitimate Stan Lee signature, and that this book was sold through Stan Lee Collectibles, probably at a cheaper price point than the ones with a number-matched COA. The alternative would be that this is a forged signature, falsely-authenticated by the additional of a (presumably surplus) Stan Lee Collectibles Excelsior holofoil label, and well-crafted enough to fool PSA.

There's some weirdness with these sorts of supplements (I'm with Number 6 that these aren't "inserts" in the normal sense). Some of them are pretty defensible to have graded separately, like the handful that were shipped in various issues of Previews, and the like. This? Ehhh, not so much. I certainly wouldn't want this, and wouldn't pay for it, but it's tough to draw the line for when supplements are, erm, supplemental enough to stand on their own. Plus, occasionally, it turns out that one of these things was distributed separately as a promo (not this one, to my knowledge, but others sometimes were). I don't fault CGC for taking the approach that if you really want them to, they'll grade them.

25 years ago, when I was managing a store, one of my many jobs was to troll the local garage sales on the weekend as part of our acquisitions efforts. This was in an affluent suburban area, so while many weekends were strikeouts, there were enough hits that it was worth my time and trouble. Especially in the early fall, when there was always the annual crop of "kid went to college, parent garage sale'd off his comic collection". If I was still running a storefront, I don't know that I'd spend the time to do that now. Probably still the fall runs there, though.