MyNameIsLegion

I think there's one in #116? A Savage Land shot. I know where that is. Used to be on CAF

Los Bros aren't going to put up a price. It's going to be like a Bizarro The Price is Wrong. Highest Price Offer wins, but not the art, but a chance to buy the art for 2X whatever the offer was.

c'mon guys, tone it down. Let's just agree you're both wrong! or you're both right. I think the dimension you are missing here, is for whatever reason, the likes of Sparling, Grandinetti, Morrow, and I'll add Mayerik, and Spiegle is this: they're more than competent artists, BUT a large body of their work was not on the big mainstream titles & characters or even publishers in some case. Therefore, no nostalgia, not enough anyway to measure year over year as reflected in art prices. The only bump they get is just general OA price inflation (high tide raises all ships, etc) These artists are no worse that Heck or Werner Roth (better in IMO) BUT they didn't draw TOS Iron Man, or SA X-Men. Those titles and history and nostalgia trump the art- didn't matter who drew it. Larry Leiber drew lots of mediocre classic silver age twice up art, guess what, he get a considerable bump for that. Look at Richard Giordano, he drew and inked a ton of mediocre titles for DC, pinch hitting and batting clean up and prices reflect that. He's an awesome artist, but unless it was Batman or the like, no one cares. summary: good artist + mediocre title = low prices bad artist + mainstream title = high prices I'm glad we got that settled!

threads like this about the ratios of a Venom comic with 47 different covers are what make modern collecting suck. I wouldn't urinate on this book if it was on fire. Collect things worth collecting, not this contrived hype machine manufactured collectible nonsense.

what about the NFT?

pardon me, but who is TIm? They won the IRS auction? I have a couple Marvel B&W Magazines that I bought at SDCC in the late 90's that have a COA for the IRS collection with them. There was nothing remarkable about the condition or the prices ($10-15 bucks maybe) I think I have a Tales of the Zombie and maybe Vampire Tales.

all Dell's will be dead money in a decade, especially photo covers. the only, only exception, is of course...

there's no such things as second generation nostalgia. When Gen-Xers bail out of their plastic CGC tombstones in 20 years, and they start showing up at Goodwill, we will start to see viral videos of Gen Covid dropping them from roofs, burning them in fire, smashing them with hammers, shooting them with shotguns, etc.

umm, I wasn't joking. 1998

Imagine if we'd been stuck with the David Hasselhoff Nick Fury and not the Sam Jackson Nick Fury!

you have to keep "abreast" of these things.... oh...you mean that pump and dump.....

"I heard a rumor"....wait that's the gal from Umbrella Academy.

filing a complaint and filing out a questionnaire is how they know who NOT to invite!

@valiantman

and I will argue all these new, more detailed attributes will get used and abused, ignored and mis-identified, and a year form now it will be a holy mess. The non-comic dealers, the casual listers, pawn shops, listing services don't really have the time or inclination to be product experts. Again, eBay is pounding a square peg in a round hole with a screwdriver. They want it to be like an orderly catalog, with very tight commodity and product definitions for these product widgets to neatly place them in the right bucket by size, shape, color, function, brand, manufacturer etc. That's way too high an expectation to think crowdsourcing it via all the myriad types of listers will achieve that, without active category management. If they had machine learning behind it, to help analyze, steer and sift the products and their respective attributes, that would be one thing. I see no evidence of that whatsoever. The more complex the taxonomy, the more errors you will get. I've seen products that now no longer appear in the seller's store or item list, yet they have active listings that you can access from old links that have become orphaned from their sellers page. This is FUBAR.

and, the last 20 years, since BIN was introduced, we know that eBay HATES auctions. They want everything to be BIN. Sure, in some categories auctions seem reasonable and even expected, but on the whole, their core business is to just turn product as quickly as possible, and auctions slow that down. If a savvy competitor were to come along that ONLY did auctions, they'd really have the advantage...oh wait. The jokes on us ha, ha, HA HA.

if you are having trouble with anything ebay related in the last 48 hours, it's likely related to this thread:

the fact that they didn't map era category to the individual listing era is possibly the most egregiously incompetent thing I've ever seen from a billion dollar tech company- I mean it's several orders of magnitude dumb. You don't throw away product attributes and expect all the individual sellers to re-enter the same or similar attributes for 6 million listings just in the comics category. You map it in the database and run a ---script, not push that responsibility to paying customers and tank all search options, ruins search filters, and royally PO buyers and sellers off all at once. They've broken their own site and made it each individual sellers responsibility to fix when most don't even know what or why or how. Rank amateurs and rank extreme arrogance. I hope they just go out of business.

this change confirms what I've long suspected. Ebay's gone all in on curated search results. The net result of that, when it comes to hobby's and collectibles is that more granular search results dissuades casual browsing. We've all trained ourselves to "browse" not search for specific results. Ebay want's to be like google and have the most targeted and relevant search results (according to what they think the user want's not what we ask for) and not show anything else. I did a search in Comics for "Buscema" By default it gives search results that say only the most "relevant" results are shown, all others are filtered out. Result: 998. Uncheck the most relevant filter and you get over 6000. Thats just an example. I tried a few others and the disparity in the number of results could be quite huge. HTH Ebay's determined what "relevant" results are is a black box. But they want to only show what they think you want to see. They don't want you to browse, or shop, they want you to just search and buy. They don't want to facilitate people like us scouring the new listings in broad categories for under-priced BIN, poorly described listings, items in the wrong category, or auctions closing in the dead of night that look ripe for sniping. They just want you to search for a specific item, get an immediate result, put it in your basket and checkout.(and I don't doubt they will tweak the results to favor showing what they will make more money on in terms of fees) I bet over the years I've bought more things that I wasn't searching for than items I was searching for - this all but kills that.

what a cluster. The Original Comic Art category is now a flaming dumpster fire, along with the rest of the comics categories.

I agree with all of this, but Ed and I are the same age.

ehhh, I'm sorry, but Dan's right. Copper ended when Image began, its one of the most definite, easily pinpointed events that defines any of the eras which everyone debates as being fuzzy by a few years. The only thing left to debate is when does "modern" end since we is in Now, and now is "modern" given that we are now almost 30 years since 92, we probably need to carve out 2 ages hence in addition to now. Let's just try to agree on the major high-points of the last 30 years. You mentioned a couple in the late 90's What defines the earlier 00's? Low distribution, the rise of CGC, Decompression? the 1st wave of comic book movies? the MCU starting in 2008? The Key/1st appearance focus of the last 5-6 years and the death of run collectors? The end of Diamond Exclusivity?

I just have a hard time extending Copper into the Image era, and post Image era, which is what Heroes Reborn really was, the concession that the big talents that defected to start Image (mostly) couldn't create enduring characters, so kiss and make-up with Marvel (and DC later for Jim Lee ) because we aren't as rich as we thought we were gonna be. Copper to me is quintessentially the Direct Market, Pacific, Eclipse, The Dark Knight, Miller DD, Crisis, Secret Wars, Mutant Madness, Watchmen, Sandman, it was the Writer's era, they dominated what defined comics, Image was the next age, all style without substance, looks over depth, gold foil scratch and sniff covers, flooding the market with unsold copies of Turok, Trencher and Brigade. Carl Ikahn, trying to license everything to raise cash. Oversaturation of popular characters. etc etc. Very different from what was going on in 1983. Once Shooter left Marvel and was ousted from Valiant, the lunatics were running the asylum. 61-72/73-82/83-94/95-2007/2008-Present (hindsight in the future may say the MCU era ended with Endgame in 2019)

What to call "now" is always a challenge compared to time and distance from the past, but clearly the "modern" era can't be 20+ years. I'd argue that the modern era (now) began with the MCU in 2008. The Movie era, specifically the MCU has transformed the hobby as we know it today. Previous movie hype never had as dramatic an effect with Batman, Super-man, the Fox Movies (any of them) or even the Raimi Spidey films. I'd mark Copper's end with what defines the beginning of the Chromium age in my mind- with the launch of Image.