MyNameIsLegion

all you boomers can't cash out at the same time yo!

It's not a Bill Everett cover either. It's a Marie Severin cover inked by Bill Everett.....

ok, not really, but just as rare, one of only 3 pages of original Marvel Triple Action interior art from 1978 by our pal Sal. Pardon me while I geek out over acquiring this. As a kid I did not have much access to new comics, much less back issues, but in the late 70's I got to go to a flea market once in awhile, and they had a dealer who sold new comics, back issues,and Sci Fi paperbacks. This was where I first learned about the Avengers, and would pick up whatever looked cool, and was a complete story. So I was more than a little confused by the line-ups and continuity of the Avengers because there were stacks of Marvel Triple Action and Marvel Super Action starring the Avengers, and these were on sale for a quarter. It took me a bit to realize these were reprints of issues that came out before I was born. This was my intro to the Silver Age, and it would be even later that I came to learn that it was common practice for a few pages and panels to be omitted from stories to make them fit the reduced page count. So when I learned there was only one issue of Marvel Triple Action that actually had NEW PAGES of art added to bridge 3 issues and the cross-over between the X-Men and Avengers, that piqued my interest like no other, since this title was my gateway drug. Marvel Triple Action #45 pg.2 X-Men, Avengers, Red Raven, Grim Reaper Art

my point above is: OA has priced me out of the hobby as a viable pursuit relative to other things that I can enjoy. I'm not going to be like some sad soul living in squalor eating canned ravioli with a 7 figure art collection or comic collection. I've seen that, and I don't want to be that. there's a tipping point somewhere, in our minds, or driven by the market. When hobbies become obsessions that conflict with practical considerations and life goals and pursuits: it's time to jump. Don't let your obsessions or FOMO pack your chute.

emphasis on the bolded above. And that is even more so now, we are in a golden age of reprint material in a myriad of formats, both print and digital. Now, they are also competing with, and diluting each other as well as competing with every other form of mass media so there has to be some fragmenting and specialization and segmentation that ultimately impacts future nostalgia. Right now, as a Gen-Xer I've got competing interests in comics, books, magazines, pinball, toys, games, electronics, music, art, etc. That's just my personal window of Wonderbread years of personal experience, consumption, or unfulfilled desires. Specifically with Original Comic Art: The above means that the OA market, which now has demonstrated an average 10x-50x per unit price inflation in the last 10-15 years (speaking strictly about published comic art, which is all I collect). the net effect of this for me: while I could afford to buy any of the 30 or so lots I was tracking in the Sept. HA I bid on absolutely ZERO. I didn't even watch the auction like I normally would with one of my friends. I'm not going to drop 5 figures on any 11x17 panel page and I'm not going to drop 5k for a panel page I could have bought for $300-500 in 2009 either. Not when I could buy a vintage pinball machine, airfare to anywhere, completely overhaul my home theater or sound system, any number of things where the value proposition is much, much higher. If I dropped 50K in the Sept HA and all I got was 4 panel pages from the late 70's and maybe, maybe a title page by Ed Hannigan or Don Perlin from the early 80's I'd shoot myself if my wife didn't shoot me first for being a complete fool.

I took screenshots of page 5 of the thread which was still in my browser cache for posterity and so you can add them to your scrap book.

oooh, as close to a Jack Sparling thread as we are gonna get! Even ironically! Let me post mine! BRB. (clicks on CAF link).......lesseee, Smith, Spiegle, Springer....got it! Wait. Not Springer, Sparling. Well this is awkward. (Turns on hidden sold gallery). Damn, I wish I had never sold or traded a lot of this stuff now, anyways....Smith, Spiegle, Springer.... Surely, at some point....but perhaps not,

Feet. He could add feet.

“Coke” dealers in the OA hobby have been propping up and pushing up prices for over a decade. They don’t have to win every lot, they just need to bid, and they do. If there’s any price pull back, dealers will just pick up cheaper inventory. There’s a half dozen whales that can do that for a considerable amount of time and blunt any steep price volatility. They’ve adapted their business model now that everyone is savvy enough not to sell in bulk to a dealer but go the auction route instead. However, those dealers have such an overwhelming native advantage from 20-30 years of hoarding art. Now they just need to prop up the market. Sure, the Bechara’s of the world will eventually burn out, but not the real deep inventory dealers.

Ok, that's fair.

Is that one of Roger's old Terry Toons in front of you? I'd like to see a sped up video of this shot being set up.

here we go: Rey's character in Star Wars was even more riddled with fear and doubt than any character in the franchise. But you just couldn't get past the fact that from the opening scene that the hero was a chick. Captain Marvel, she was a pilot. Pilots are cocky. If it was Tom Cruise as Captain Marvel like Top Gun, no one would bat an eye.

Here's a more succinct response to the majority of comments in this, and every other thread about MCU/Disney+ shows.

What you describe here and what has been revealed with CGC is that absent any real competition, the grading authority has absolute power. As the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. CGC can employ any manner of corporate doublespeak to justify their actions but at the end of the day they can make up whatever rules they want and to make justifications based solely on those rules with impunity. They don’t grade comics, they manufacture collectible labels. Eventually the encapsulated house of cards that is modem submissions may collapse upon its own weight but not soon enough or hard enough to alter their quarterly financial forecasts. They’re content to wait this storm out. I’d be more intrigued if Disney or Warner took an interest in tapping into the high upside aftermarket of their books and just cut out the middleman with their own LE “slabs”. They’re halfway there now with variants and such. Imagine a $19.99 Marvel certified pre-order MINT copy enshrined in a faux acrylic frame with Marvelous branding that’s lighter and cheaper than a CGC slab that can only come direct from a pre-order. Everyone of them is “Mint” I’m sure CGC would scramble to try to certify and slab a slabbed book, and everyone would perhaps come to their senses and realize “well this is dumb” and just stop doing it. But just think of it, a slabbed Marvel book straight from the publisher with a QR code to access the digital edition. Total print runs contract even further, but unit profits go sky high, 3rd party grading returns to its original purpose of grading vintage books and CGC is sold off by their investor overlords as a write down to Metropolis.

Does anyone honestly believe they submitted exactly 750 to be graded 9.8-10? I don’t. They sent 775 or 800 just to be safe and tossed the ones that didn’t hit that threshold in prescreen. For that reason alone, a blue label is not appropriate. Most collectors can’t manufacture additional copies of a book to ensure the grade they want.

Fixed the 4 grammar mistakes for ya!

Another thought exercise: how does CGC really regard whether these aftermarket acetate books are considered adulterated or augmented by the addition of extra staples and another cover: What if you remove them and submit them to be slabbed? is it restoration? Preservation? You gonna get a PLOD or a blue label with grader notes that it had 4 extra holes from staples? Or is it now a coverless copy and it gets a .5. I mean, the previously added acetate cover that they legitimized is gone. If it got a blue label with an acetate cover then logic demands that removing it makes it coverless. Amirite?

CGC is in the business of making money. Nothing will dissuade them from this. They make most of their money on the volume of slabbing moderns. They would really love to not have to fool with a 7.0-9.0 GA, SA, BA, non-key, ‘They suck up a lot more time to press, pre-grade, grade, etc and they can’t get as much of their FMV in the submission all the while being much more subject to damage and the resultant customer service hassle of some crabby boomer or Gen-xer. Even Keys are a hassle for all the same reasons. Cranking out 9.8 expedited modern slabbed card stock and acetate covers is much simpler. CGC now is like eBay was 20 years ago: They realize the real money is volume and quick turn. That’s when eBay introduced BIN and did everything they could to maximize that business model over the auction format. They didn’t do away with it, they just set the terms in their favor to make it worth their hassle. The only happy divorce the comic community will ever enjoy is if a competitor sets out to peal off the vintage funny book grading business, no moderns, no signatures, no manufactured collectibles. And if they did it cheaper and faster with less involved holder etc they might have something. Otherwise, you are all stuck with CGC and they will continue to “optimize” their business specifically to favor modern subs over older books. Now that slabs are the product, and not a service, you are not a client of CGC, you are a retail customer. Pre screens and pressing services are just the ante you pay to buy the grade you want. BF just had the audacity to do it on a bigger scale and resell them.

Fixed that for ya!

sooo, what did Marvel and DC do to squash NFT's? How is this different? this won't last.

Sooo, CGC is now primarily in the manufactured collectibles business, not the independent and impartial grade certification business. Basically they are Dynamic Forces. Got it.

This. Los Bros aren't in the comicart business. It's not a business. they did not make a living of comic art. It's not subject to the "normal" rules of business and the laws of supply and demand. Los Bros used to have booths at SDCC that had nothing to do with comics or art, but some sort of talent agency, artist rep things. they may have since sold that, but they used ot be involved in that as their real business. Hollywood money and such. the got lucky and scooped up tons of art along the way, but their business was the entertainment business. Once you accumulate tens of thousands of pages of comic art pre-1990 you are set for life and and set whatever rules you want. Their pathology to horde, and fix/fake art is afforded them by their extremely ridiculous accumulated resources.

so, let me ask a perfectly innocent question about grading. If the original book was not inclined to grade so highly, leading to speculation that the was a pay for grade thing: because an acetate cover was added to the book, and then graded, is the acetate cover now the cover that's graded, and the original cover is not subject to the same grading criteria because now it's considered part of the interior? Is this the real CGC-hack to get a blue label? An acetate cover of course can get a higher grade because it's not paper.

I never knew such a thing existed.