NYCC, Chuck, etc.

[The Less Blob]

I'm not giving a report of specific purchases (and I've already added commentary in other reports), and my only photo is of my kid with his head in one of those spidey things and after that I seemed to forget I had a camera phone.

 

I am glad I went. I live in NYC, but had not gone to any of the others after the first one where I drove by and saw people getting frost bite waiting outside in sub arctic conditions to get in. Thankfully they have moved it to a better time of year. I assume the space was cheaper in Jan/Feb, so that's why they did it then when the show was in its infancy. Barring a conflict in my schedule, I will be back next year and actually not irritated about spending $50 for a weekend pass. I'm a cheap ba**stard, but I think that is actually a pretty reasonable price for 3 days of the show and there is 3 days worth of stuff going on if you are interested in this stuff.

 

Getting to Javitz from the subway is a huge PITA. buses will get you closer, but they can take forever. As a NYC taxpayer I'm ashamed they stuck this convention center (costing billions in tax dollars) in a place this hard to get to without building some infrastructure to get you from the Penn Station/Madison Sq. Garden/Macys area to Javitz. The old convention center at Columbus Circle was 20 feet from the subway station, but they decided it was too small (and it probably was). Cabs were really hard to come by. I lucked out twice (Friday and Sunday), but it took work and 15 or 20 minutes of hunting. I drove in Saturday and by some miracle of miracles was able to get a free spot on 33rd street. I was sooooo happy not to have to spend $30 or $40 on parking!

 

Friday I got in a little before 2 and did a lot of buying and calling shortstack to pick up his extra pass (cell service is tricky inside Javitz), which I would need later that weeked for my son (on Saturday, when kids weren't free) and, after my brother and his son bailed, my best friend and his son on Sunday.

 

It took my about 15 minutes to actually find any comics as I walked in through artist's alley. I'm not used to the scale of this show. The old Javitz shows in the 90's would occupy one of the halls, maybe (but they'd be 90% comics, so maybe they were on par for the collector)

 

There were lots of inexpensive comics at reasonable prices at the show. It has been a while since I've gone after "expensive" (over $20!) books, so I wasn't following that market, though it did seem that stuff was sticker-priced very aggresively, both new and old. $100 for Walking Dead 4 seems like a lot, no? $300 for the first appearance of Invincible (raw!). Then again, I didn't try to find out how negotiable anyone was.

 

I buy cheap stuff and tend not to negotiate that much. I like them to round down a bit on a big stack, but if the stuff is pretty good, I have a tough time being aggressive. I didn't have the carrying capacity to do a "how much for a long box?" type proposition. I do find it a little irritating when I buy $52 or $103 worth of stuff and the dealer doesn't just round down to $50 or $100 on his own. i would. then again, i guess it's their money, but it's not like I want a $2 discount on $12 of stuff. In the future I should bring sandwhich bags of pennies and pay dealers the extra dollar or two in loose coin. but some guys get ticked off if you ask them to round down a little bit, even on $150, $200, $250 purchases. I don't get it, wouldn't you rather have me buy 103 $2 books at once rather than having to deal with 10 guys buying 10 at a time picking through all your stuff? Criminey, I don't even open the bags to examine the books at that price level and I generally trust the dealer's counting of the books (which I shouldn't). I only had one guy (who I won't name) even infer the "buy a long box and I can really make something happen" type of deal. I dunno, maybe inventory is getting harder to come by or they feel less free to negotiate when they're paying $2K to Reed for the weekend.

 

On Friday I wound up buying about 3 short boxes worth of comics from various dealers, lugging 2 home and leaving one with Dolgoff to pick up later. Looking back I probably did get a little worked up in the frenzy of box diving.

 

Maybe because all my shows are in NYC, with higher table charges, but it does seem like there has been some inflation at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of vintage stuff the last few shows. What was once a dollar book now seems to be in a $2 box (though, depending on the dealer, there might be some flexibility on the $2 price if you buy a lot), $2 books are now $3 and so on. Stuff from the last 20-25-30 years, generally, has not been impacted, it is still $1 or less other than some key issues/variants/hot titles and what not.

 

Saturday I came with my son for 2 1/2 hours and it was mainly about him...though I probably did buy about a half a short box of comics from a couple of dealers. he is not so patient and gets irritated when I make him sit. I will not repeat my "daddy I have to poop" story again as I told it in gregreece's thread. Needless to say, it was entertaining to find out that I went to jr high and high school with pointfive here, who, by the way, in high school was a more talented artist than half the artists in artists alley, though he's no doubt too modest to agree. Of course, Saturday was extra terrific because of the free parking spot a short distance from Javitz. I would not have wanted to take my son home to Brooklyn on the subway or murder someone to grab a $35 taxi ride home.

 

Sunday was with my son (5) and my best friend (who used to go to shows with me in the early/mid 90's, but grew up into other things) and his son (7). I wasn't going to torture them with a lot of comic buying, so I kept it fairly limited. He hunted for stuff for his son (who doens't like super heroes!), but mostly we just wandered around saying "no" to our kids who wanted us to buy them every toy there. I wound up buying my son a big stack of recent vintage Scooby Doo comics from katz comix for 50 cents each as well as a bunch of kids Dells/Gold Keys and Archies from Mile High Chuck. Yes, believe it or not, Chuck had a little spot ad was selling dollar comics (6 for $5) and was very pleasant and everything and the books were priced appropriately. actually got a bunch of 10 cent cover price Dells that were not that horrific. I get the feeling (just a hunch) that he bought the comics there or in the NY vicinity or on the road and decided to just set up a tiny little space as a base of operations. His kids seemed to be there. I actually wound up leaving the show with $200 of the $300 I came with on Sunday still in my pocket. (It helps that I had already picked up a magazine box of comics from my "I can't stand owning a comic shop anymore, please, just take them away" guy earlier in the day for next to nothing, so that kind of sated me for the day.)

 

Some of the local guys I usually hit at these shows weren't there selling. Some of them had done the Big Apple the weekend before and couldn't do both. Oh well.

 

Next year I will have a more organized approach to this. I would like to get some autographs from some old timers before they're no longer with us. I'm not so interested in waiting on line for Jim Lee, but there didn't seem to be one for Joe Kubert.

 

 

 

 

[nocutename]

I thought the comic prices were quite high myself. I was looking for moderns and what I was use to finding in dollar boxes were priced higher at 2 to 3 dollars. I didn't haggle with anyone just didn't buy that much. I actually paid $6 for a Harley Quinn which wasn't priced and I believe the guy was making up prices on the fly.

[The Less Blob]

on sunday there was a table near an exit where they were trying to move moderns -- 60 for $20, $100 for a long box (60 for $20 actually sounded like a better deal as they were bagged/boarded). i just didn't have the energy to find and drag home another 60 comics, particularly ones I wasn't excited about. it was perfectly decent stuff. and katz comics had a big selection of 50 cent moderrns. keys, desireable books, i have no idea, but he had about a longie worth of kids titles from the last 10 years. I'm surprised a shop didn't snatch them up.

[The Less Blob]

Also, among regulars here, at the cheap end of the spectrum, GAcollectibles and Dale Roberts had some nice $2-$3 books, mainly BA. Dale had them all snazzy looking in mylars. I'm sure others here also had nice inexpensive stuff, but I'm not good at matching names with tables.

 

it was certainly a show (as are most shows I guess) where you could have come home with some neat vintage stuff for $100 if you aren't fixated on buying a big book.