MyNameIsLegion

All of this is stupid. #comicsgeneral

whoa, what book is this?????

A bunch of new stuff, new old stuff, old new stuff, and just cool stuff!

this probably is rubbing salt in the wound, but payment method has never seemed to affect shipping time for me because they always ship before I've paid. The last time it actually arrived before I paid.

Great minds and all that! My first Marvel and DC: Only I took it a step further and I have pages of art from both.

We can now shut down this board. This boards mission is complete. We are done here.

Take a run of the mill Sal Buscema Defenders panel page: In the course of a few months, it could: Scenario A Sell on ebay for for $1000 (net $900 to seller1 after fees, paypal etc) Flipped to Comiclink and sold for $1500 (net say $1250 to seller2 for all his expenses, Profit: $250) Flipped to HA and hammers for $2000 (really 2400 with juice) Seller3 nets...maybe $1550? he paid shipping and tax from original purchase, etc. Profit: $250-$300) Current Owner: he paid HA $2650 all in, TTLSF etc. If he in turn sells another Sal Buscema Defenders page on CAF or worse HA for $3600 with BP to pay for it, using this new perceived market for Sal Buscema Defenders panel pages that seems to think that $1000 page is now a $3000. Yet in the course of 6 months, NOBODY made even a third of that in profit, but auction houses, payment services, sales tax and shipping costs account for over $1500 of that perceived market value. Scenario B: Seller 1 sells Sal Buscema Defenders panel page directly to seller 2 for $900 cash Seller 2 sells to seller 3 for $1200 cash Seller 3 sells to Buyer for the above for $1500 cash Buyer sells another page for $1500 to cover the above expense. Suddenly, the market for Sal Buscema Defenders panel pages don't seem so frothy. Same page flipped for the same % profit 3 times in 2 scenarios. Conclusion: Auction Houses have an outsized and artificial influence on the perceived market value of many item In both scenario's above, I don't just look at how much I have in a piece I'm selling. Most items people ask me about I don't want to sell. I would make a nice profit on them, but I look at the replacement cost. What would it take to replace that piece with something comparable TODAY. I could not afford to buy the collection I have or one like it. As we saw during covid- with extra cash, no conventions, and pent up demand- prices shot up as reflected in auction sales. factoring BP, Tax etc that really inflated prices more. Everyone I know says they are price out of the market. If the economy is contracting, inflation is going up, eventually that should be felt in the OA market in some fashion. It's harder to measure with art, but we all know the DKR underperformed at HA. A great number of slabbed comics underperformed. They made money, yes, but the only one's we know for sure that made a profit were the auction houses.

I consider #160 to be one the of the top 10 issues of the 2nd Cockrum run. (145, 146,147, 149, 150, 156, 160, 162, 163, 164- IMO) It's a pivotal issue, and I don't regard it as a fill-in in the same way as #159 which is unabashedly a fill-in. I fully expect that #146 pager on eBay to get flipped unless it went to a true collector. It originally sold on eBay 11 years ago, along with 2 others from that issue and I really had to flip a coin on which ones to go after but ultimately I got the other 2.

ah ok, I was a little surprised by that myself. These kinds of discussions about Stan/Jack fraud, misrepresentation, taking credit, faking credit, ghosting are all rather exhausting and tedious because they've been going on for 30 years in forums, mailing lists, chat rooms, FB, etc- some have an agenda, some don't and many just don't understand the business or the time, context during which it happened when they apply a modern lens to it. Art collectors and dealers are generally better educated about the nuance of it all than just pure comic collectors, especially the younger crowd. Not that certain dealers like the Donnely's don't misrepresent art they sell to overstate a tiny correction to a face as being penciled by Romita. Or calling full pencils by Kirby when they were layouts finished and inked by Royer.

correction, everyone but Bird. The Cabal specifically did not tell him.

Roy Thomas was ghost writing The Spidey Strip for years that had Stan's name on it. this is well documented. Frazetta's wife signed for Frank on many portfolios and prints., Frank drew years of Li'l Abner Sunday's for Capp. That is well known. Roz signed for Jack, also well known. Royer and Theakston heavily finished art jack might have laid out, or they light-boxed it. Also well known. Unless your under the age of 40 I don't get all the mock outrage. None of this is news. Art collectors have known this stuff for over 30 years.

I will also say that most speculative buyers now, fueled in part by CGC only buy keys, so there's a lot less run fillers out there. They're there, but 20 years from now I think that breed of collector is literally retired or dead.

and I agree with all of this- and I don't buy all that's offered me unless there's clearly substantial upside that more resembles buying collections pre-90's. I would take that run of Defenders #1-152 though. I think that's one that has upside in the next 10 years. M2in1 as well.

I think a lot of that gunk got cycled through 15 years ago. Scads of it went in the dumpster. I don't see it at shows, store or flea markets. I'm sure theres a few boomers with a palette of it amongst there other mega-hoard collection but what I see in dollar boxes these days is New 52 2nd tier titles and IDW books. Once in awhile you see beater copies of Trencher 3 and Prophet 2, and Brigade #5 is in a stack in some antique dealers booth, which is where comics go to die (it used to be photo-cover westerns, Classics Illustrated, and anything Gold Key.)

umm, I'd agree with you but then we'd both be wrong! You bulked out 100K books to get "free" storage? Not sure how that math works. Not as well as my selling half a collection at cost. Yeah it took time to triage, that was almost the fun of it, but not nearly as much time as you're implying. That time went into identifying what was worth keeping, and that's time well spent. As I said, I was in the black in a few months. A few months 7 years ago. I don't sell at flea markets or swap meets on a weekly basis. I think the max number of shows we did in a year was 6, and 3-4 of those were one day shows. Cherry picking at this phase in your hoarding collecting makes sense for you I guess and manages your PTCD (Post-Traumatic Collecting Disorder) after having 100-200K books. Ok, I'll give you some room to freak out there, but your math on cherry picking versus buying an entire collecting is still suspect. Math is math. I cherry picked it too, after I bought it, to it's maximum potential relative to the amount of effort I was willing to put into it. My ROI is unassailable. If I had cherry picked it, I'd likely have invested much of the profit into another collection to maintain a perpetual inventory worth taking to a show a few times a year.

I was still editing my comment when you quoted me, but the answer is 3. It was 2, but we brought in a third because they always helped with shows anyway, so we just made it a 3 way deal. We already had a running inventory of 3-5K books for a decade prior with just 2. this was not the start of our selling.

Mostly 2, sometimes 3 when moving boxes at a show. 1 guy now in his 50's and 2 in their 60's.

no, I made my point. You inferred something from what I said, that I did not say, to make yours. There's a difference. That difference is I've made much more money at it. . Seriously though, not trying to start a flame war. I've just done this on a bigger scale than most, but the logic applies if it's 10 books, 100, books, 1000 books, 10,000 books, or in my case 30,000 books. Now, 30k books, unbagged, in reverse order is not for the faint hearted. But when you have a complete run of DC from 1958 to 2015, Decent run of Marvels, Indy, no Image you figure it out. We triaged it, and sold 50% of the bulk in full runs to a comic store at cost, and did a couple shows. We were in the black in 3 months. We had some dollar boxes still, maybe 7 long that we disposed of in a year or so. But the bulk of what was left we split into 2 sets. Books over $10, and books under $10, and then we have boxes of "wall" books over $100. We seldom bring both sets to a one day show. The under 10 set was about 45 short boxes, all prices $2, $5, and $10. Only reason $2 books were kept were if the title was popular and had lots of $5, $10, or more books in it, then we kept the entire run- mostly pre-90's titles and companies, but the bulk is bronze. the only modern stuff we kept were popular titles. For a few years we sold these at 50% off. We stopped that the last year, and they still sell as well as ever. The over $10 stuff, also 45 short boxes of DC, Marvel, Indy gold, silver, bronze, some copper, mags, some modern 4-5 short boxes of "wall" books over $100. Mostly Silver Bronze and modern keys. Now some math: 45 boxes of $2-$5-$10. Average 125 books a box = 5600 books. call it $3.50 AIP, that's $20K retail 45 boxes of $10-$100. Even at $20 AIP, that's over $100K retail 5 short boxes of "wall" books. Even at $100 AIP that's $60K retail. Did I mention we got those 30K books in 2016? "free money" as Donut would say. and that's what I mean when I scoff at some guys with 10 books at a show he wants to sell me. Not worth my time. Had I cherry picked the original collection, say 500 books I would have spent 60-75% of what the entire collection cost, and left most of the money to be made on the table by a substantial margin. Every time some movie rumor pops up, books there were in the lower tiers are getting bumped to wall books. The wall books have been repriced twice in the last year. Cherry picking is a quick way to double or triple your money, and that is all. If you feel the need to press and slab, it takes even longer with TAT. We slabbed less than 10 books, not worth the hassle. Many of our books have been slabbed by others, go for it. Flippers spend a nickel to make a dime. I'd rather spend a dime to make a dollar. We've done exactly 5 shows out of town. We rented a van for that. Most shows in-town, one day, just used a pick-up and a car. Haven't scanned or sold any of it online. Too lazy, that's actual work. Packing and shipping. What a drag. Didn't do any shows or selling for 18 months during Covid and did 4 shows since and netted more than the previous 2-3 years pre-Covid. Somehow we still managed to pick up the equivalent of 10 long boxes of comics, mags, and ephemera, and if it wasn't at least $5 retail, it went to HPB without hesitation, so added another 10 short boxes. We seem fated to have 90 short boxes of stuff no matter what we do. It's horrible I tell ya. Horrible. All this paid for inventory. Anyone that's "fussy" about dealing with long boxes of comics on the front end of deal and wants to cherry pick half a short box is fussy with a capital "P." Buying is easy. Selling is only as hard as you want to make it. We didn't want it to be hard or have high risk. No buying books to press and hope you can wait 5 months to see if it's a 9.2 or a 9.8 and maybe is still a "hot" book by the time you get it back. So did I buy a collection where the majority were dollar books? Yes. That's how it works when you buy in bulk. Don't matter if its 1 box, 10, boxes, or 100 boxes. I also broke even selling half the collection and a few keys in a couple months. The only caveat is you don't do that with a collection that has been picked over by some "fussy" people. If you are the first person to buy any of it, you buy all of it. It's just math. But I did not sell a single book at a loss.

when you buy in bulk, the advantage is: YOU get to cherry pick it after the fact, at your leisure, on your terms, and not haggle over each book with the seller. You can bulk sell and even donate the dreck to your advantage. The ROI on cherry picking never pans out relative to bulk buying. Every time some guys at a show walks up with a backpack full of 10-20 random 2nd tier keys (if even that good) they want to sell or trade I roll my eyes. WTF do I need a 9.0 Sleepwalker #1 for? I have 80 short boxes of Gold/Silver/Bronze/Copper comics and magazines right here from $2-$2000.

Stock market and crypto crashing- consignors getting nervous they won’t get top dollar and pulling back?

perhaps- but for this particular flipper, they were usually a CGC slab commodity flipper. OA is a different animal. Touting 2 different 7 figure SW pages as justification for a 5 figure page was not swaying knowledge OA collectors. It would be like saying WWBN #28 is worth $$ because WWBN #32 is worth $$$$. OA, as much as there's been an effort to commoditize it, is still a unique one of a kind item.

if those were returns on stocks, I guess you are right. Of course this is a collectible, so the tax on that is gonna take a chunk of the profit if properly accounted. Shave another 22-28%? I've certainly seen less sensible flips when it's one less zero involved. all this does is cause the entire market to inflate. Hake's made 18% without having to sweat it at all. Some less educated person paid 29K for a piece that the original consigner got 18K for. The art is literally fading by the minute.....

And the flip is a flop: Original Price paid to Hakes: $21K. Original Flip asking price: $35K, (66% mark up) on ebay, CGC, and FB, where it's was universally mocked given how he tried to market it. Only though some enormous intervention on certain moderators part was the discussion about the deceptive comps shut down. Yet, here it is consigned to Glen, at 29K (38%). Assuming he gave Glen the standard 15% commission, he only netted 3.5K (17%) and that's being hopeful. If Glen traded something for the SW page, then who knows how much he actually lost on the deal. An expensive lesson learned. He will never dip his tow in the OA pool again I wager.

you mean like this? https://www.comicartfans.com/forums/comic_art_collecting/comicart_l granted, it's not really searchable. But there it is.