New pedigree - Suscha News

[TheLiamSturgess]

I have to ask, is it pronounced ˈsuka?

 

 

As in..."if you buy comics from this Pedigree you are a suka?"

 

 

 

Suka in Hungarian means b*t*h,

 

and russian

[blazingbob]

Suka is what your girlfriend does a lot of before you get married.

 

Lotsalucka is what happens after.

[Bomber-Bob]

That I am.

 

I was fortunate to be visting Vinny when the entire Spokane collection was on a table. I got to look at the whole thing, all in one piece. Amazing collection when viewed all at once. I also got to see the Northford collection all in one piece. While the page quality was not as spectacular as the Spokane's you still have to be amazed at how cool pre code horror collections are when viewed all at once.

 

I was in Chicago when the Northlands were unveiled to the buying public. I got to look very early in the show because I was buying for Tommy B. who couldn't be at the show. Another collection where 3X guide was the norm.

 

I have seen the Winnipeg's when they first came to market as well as the Golden States from Showcase New England.

 

I even saw the first batch of Boston's that Bechara sold to Doug. Barton and I got to look at the long box which frankly to this day was probably the best of the bostons. Imagine being told by Bechara that he has some high grade, you wait at the table and then get told you can only look at the book because Doug bought them all. We WERE not a happy pair that day.

 

Bob, I remember buying a lot of Oaklands at a Motor City show in Chicago directly from Vinny. You were there also. I vaguely recall Vinny saying this was the first show they brought the collection to. Do you remember if this was true ?

Interesting info above. Thanks.

[blazingbob]

I was at the first show he brought them to but I don't remember if it was a Detroit show.

[bluechip]

If you found it, it's a collection of bulk comics. If I found it, the collection is a pedigree.

 

If I found it, those markings on it validate the books as pedigrees. If you found it, those scribblings and markings are defects, or restoration.

 

If I found it, those sun shadows and mold traces are "indicative of the pedigree" and don't affect the grade. If you found it, the books are poor.

 

 

 

 

 

[Ghost Town]

I even saw the first batch of Boston's that Bechara sold to Doug. Barton and I got to look at the long box which frankly to this day was probably the best of the bostons. Imagine being told by Bechara that he has some high grade, you wait at the table and then get told you can only look at the book because Doug bought them all. We WERE not a happy pair that day.

Ah, sweet memories. And that was after Bechara told us about the books multiple times and telling me to come to that show as it opened to buy the books. Classy.

 

 

[DarkKnightReturns]

I was fortunate to be visting Vinny when the entire Spokane collection was on a table. I got to look at the whole thing, all in one piece. Amazing collection when viewed all at once. I also got to see the Northford collection all in one piece. While the page quality was not as spectacular as the Spokane's you still have to be amazed at how cool pre code horror collections are when viewed all at once.

Any big group shots ?

[ComicConnect.com]

Guys-

 

CGC did not decide lightly that they were going to name this a pedigree. They don't like giving out pedigree titles willy-nilly any longer because it dilutes the idea of a pedigree. Only after a trip made by Mark Haspel and Paul Litch to my showroom in NYC to inspect the entire collection, seeing an inventory list and over a month of deliberation did they come to a conclusion and that was to put the pedigree on the label.

 

Regardless of what CGC thought, I made it very clear to them from the beginning that I would be calling this a pedigree collection because, in my opinion, it has the attributes of a pedigree collection. Whether you think it is a pedigree or not is up to you, just the way it is up to me or CGC or Bob Overstreet or Bob Storms. When it comes down to it, as with any raw or CGC book, you should look at the book, not the label grade or pedigree, and decide whether or not you would like to have it in your collection. That you like a comic is the most important factor. If you like it buy it, if you don’t, don’t buy it. And one last thing, I am not saying the Suscha News Collection should sell at X multiples of Guide simply because it is part of a pedigree, just that it is a pretty cool original owner collection, with a great back story and filled with a ton of good books. Is every book 9.8? No, but the vast majority are in really nice shape. I hope you enjoy them. The first batch of 76 books we got back from CGC are available in the ComicConnect.com Event Auction happening right now.

 

Here is the entire story behind the collection.

 

Suscha News Collection!

Introduction:

Over the past 30 years, there have been a number of important pedigree collections brought to the comic collecting public. After you read this article, you will see that another is about to make news! Better than any description I can put together is the story of the collection, which comes from the original owner himself. However, before you read his story, let me say that I have been waiting for over thirteen years to find this collection. Why thirteen years? That is when I found the Oakland Collection, which by many collectors’ accounts is one of the finest collections ever found of late 60s to mid 70s comics. Over the last thirteen years I have fielded thousands of calls and purchased hundreds of collections from people with what they deemed “never opened and mint condition comics.” Sadly, those comics usually failed to live up to the condition I was hoping for, until that is, the Suscha (pronounced Susha) News Collection. What makes the collection so special is not only the fact that the books are in overall spectacularly high grade condition with very rich inks and gloss and reflectivity that is so high it hardly makes sense, but that the books go back to the mid 1960s and go all the way up to 1976, therefore actually surpassing the Oakland collection on both its beginning and end dates.

 

Vincent Zurzolo, COO

Metropolis Collectibles, Inc.

September 30, 2010

 

The Story of the Suscha News Collection in the words of the Original Owner:

There’s a big empty corner in my house. A few weeks ago, 50 boxes dominated the largest room in the downstairs level. Now they’re gone, shipped to Metropolis Collectibles in New York City. Those boxes represented almost half a century of toil and worry, dragging 1,200 pounds of fragile paper along with me as I moved from Wisconsin to Arizona to Idaho. Humidity, roof leaks, mold, fire, insects and burglars always were on my mind.

 

I didn’t start out as a “comic collector.” Born in 1949 and growing up in Sheboygan, Wis., in the 1950s and ’60s, I was the kind of fastidious child who always used the kickstand on his bike and dusted-off his model cars and planes every Thursday afternoon without fail. Because I treated my few possessions well – and had no brothers or sisters to help destroy them – I tended to accumulate things, including comic books.

 

My early favorites were war comics: DC titles like Our Army at War and Our Fighting Forces. Superhero comics didn’t appeal at all to me – That is, until a friend introduced me to Marvel in 1963, when I bought about a dozen comics from him for five cents apiece. These included Amazing Fantasy #15 and Fantastic Four #5!

 

I dug the real-world settings, character development and snarky humor of these Stan Lee creations, and began to buy every Marvel title I could find. By the time I finished high school in 1968, I’d amassed about a thousand comics, which had outgrown their place in dresser drawers and moved to shelves in a closet.

 

It was around this time that I began to think of myself as a “comic book collector.” Most of the titles were exciting works of art and imagination, and some were epic in scope, especially my favorites: Thor, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and Sgt. Rock. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert and Steve Ditko will always be the “Big Four” in my book.

 

By 1970, I was married and in my own place, although the comics remained in my parents’ house, relocated to the basement. After a few close calls with relatives rifling through the collection for poolside reading and even a threat to burn it all, I bought dozens of boxes and moved everything to a duplex I was renting. Over the next 20 years, I would move nine times, and the comics were always the heaviest, most delicate and time-consuming items in my household.

 

Although comic books were only 15 to 25 cents each at the time, buying more than a hundred a month represented a big chunk of my tiny, $3-per-hour paycheck. The books were mainly purchased at newsstands and drug stores. It was about this time that I got the idea to go directly to the local magazine and comic distributor, Suscha News (founded in November 1937), and propose a deal.

 

I explained to them how many comic books I bought on a regular basis, and how I’d buy a lot more if the prices were lower. To my surprise, they agreed to sell me newly arrived comics at half price off the pallets in their back room. This gave me access to the books as soon as they arrived in Sheboygan, so l was more likely to get certain low-distribution titles. I also got to “cherry-pick” books, and my comics from then on were free of shelf wear from browsers. I would carefully go through distributor boxes filled with the same issue of a book. I’d get it down to around a dozen or so mint copies of a given book to try to find the MOST mint copies in the group. I was looking for books with the best centering, the shiniest staples, the flattest covers and the sharpest top and bottom of the spine.

 

Now that the cost of buying comic books was cut in half, I also was able to buy multiple copies of each. Sometimes, I’d get a half-dozen or more copies of Number One or milestone issues, such as Thing vs. Hulk matchups.

 

My arrangement with the distributor lasted until 1976, when I decided to give up the comic book buying and boxing grind, and “lock” the collection. I bought very few comics after that – a few hundred at most.

 

In 1978, I moved to Tucson, Arizona, and two years later was in a new home with a special feature – a large, fireproof, walk-in vault big enough to accommodate the comic book collection, which by now took up a 6-foot wide by 5-foot long by 6-foot high stack. Property crimes, particularly home burglaries, are a major problem in southern Arizona, and the vault seemed a necessity to protect my comics, guns, cameras and other valuables. The arid conditions of Arizona were a godsend for storing comics.

It was now the early ‘80s. My wife at the time often tried to pressure me to sell the collection. In those days before blockbuster movies franchises based on comic books and the Internet, the books were worth a tiny fraction of what they bring today. Had I caved in and sold then, I literally would have realized just enough money to buy a used pickup truck, which would have gone to the scrap yard years ago.

 

Over the years, I had kept track of the collection with a big piece of graph paper, about five feet long by three feet wide. This pencil-and-paper record somehow disappeared over the years, so in 1998 I cataloged everything on a on an Excel spreadsheet and repackaged each comic book in a poly bag with a backing board. I put the bagged and backed comics back into the 1976 boxes.

 

Two years later, we moved to the woods of North Idaho, far from the desert of southern Arizona. The climate here is relatively dry and crime is very low, but I missed my big secure vault. The comics were kept on industrial shelving in a large room in the lower level of the house, where I kept humidity in the mid-40 percent range with a dehumidifier.

The collection was “hidden in plain sight” by turning the contents labels of each box toward the wall, and placing fake “Professor Owl Remedial Reading Workbook – Grade 5” labels on the visible side. I figured no burglar would be interested in stealing a half-ton of identical teaching aids.

 

When I reached 60 years old, I seriously began to consider selling the collection. I didn’t want to end up the guy with the most comic books in the graveyard. There were lots of things I could do with the money the collection would bring.

 

Because there were so many books – and none of them were CGC-graded ¬– contacting a large comic dealer seemed the best and most realistic way to sell them. I talked to several dealers, eventually going with Vincent Zurzolo of Metropolis Collectibles in New York City. He offered to pay to ship the collection to New York, and if we couldn’t reach a deal would ship them back, or he could come all the way out to the wilds of Idaho and examine it in person. I didn’t want the comics to move so far out of my control, so we went with the second option.

 

It was more than two months from my first contact with Zurzolo to the day of his arrival in Idaho. I spent that time un-boxing and re-bagging every comic, checking them against the inventory on my spreadsheet. To my horror, I found most of the “archival” bags I used back in 1998 had wrinkled and needed to be replaced. Fortunately, the wavy wrinkles didn’t imprint on the comics inside. I also placed the comics in new boxes, replacing the ones they had been stored in since1976.

 

Mr. Zurzolo spent more than a day looking at the comics, making notes. When I would check on his progress every few hours, he’d explain how he was evaluating various issues. After a short negotiation, I arrived at an agreement with Mr. Zurzolo. We then spent half a day preparing the collection for shipment. He took about 75 of the most valuable books in his carry-on backpack for the flight home to New York City. Now that they’re gone, I feel easier leaving the house for extended periods. Pretty much anything I owned was replaceable – except for my old comic books.

 

As I re-bagged the comics this year prior to selling them, I couldn’t resist reading my favorite stories again. I was struck at how those thousands of issues made up an impressive heap of imagination and creativity: More than 100,000 pages of storytelling and art from some very talented people who often didn’t get the respect and financial reward they deserved.

 

There was a defining moment for me in the whole process of negotiating a deal and packing and shipping the collection. Mr. Zurzolo and I worked for five hours, tightly packing each short comic box and securely padding and taping each one. At one point, he ran out of space to sort the stacks of comics, even though we were working on several large tables. I started to take a bunch of comics into an adjacent room, to free-up some table space. Mr. Zurzolo saw what I was doing and sprang up to quickly take them out of my hands – the same hands that had nurtured and coddled those fragile books for more than 40 years. But I understood what he was thinking. “They’re my comics now,” he said. And they were.

 

Epilogue:

The story of the Suscha News Collection from the original owner himself is a great one. The comics are mine now, but hopefully they will be yours soon. I hope you enjoy the books and their back story as much as I have. – Vincent Zurzolo

 

[Foolkiller]

Well, I hope to get a look soon at these books, and will happily report back. If they have lots of rich colors and gloss, I'll be excited to own them regardless of whether it's "really a pedigree or not".

[fantastic_four]

Regardless of what CGC thought, I made it very clear to them from the beginning that I would be calling this a pedigree collection because, in my opinion, it has the attributes of a pedigree collection. Whether you think it is a pedigree or not is up to you, just the way it is up to me or CGC or Bob Overstreet or Bob Storms.

 

You'd know better than we would--you've seen the books, we haven't. I'm guessing the scant amount of examples you've got on your site so far aren't the cream of the crop.

[lizards2]

cool story :thumbsup:

[ComicConnect.com]

Out of the 76 books already graded and in the auction, 26 are 9.6 or better, 16 are 9.4, 14 are 9.2, 16 are 8.5 or 9.0.

 

I really enjoyed buying this collection. The owner was a nice guy who cared a lot about his books. They have great colors and good eye appeal. When I was a kid collecting comics I couldn't even dream of a collection like this.

 

-Vincent

[supapimp]

the ASM 28 CGC 8.5 is beautiful. black

[cheetah]

Any chance a list of books in the pedigree will be posted anywhere?

[BigLeagueCHEW]

Any chance a list of books in the pedigree will be posted anywhere?

 

X2

[tth2]

Regardless of what CGC thought, I made it very clear to them from the beginning that I would be calling this a pedigree collection because, in my opinion, it has the attributes of a pedigree collection.

Of course, that is entirely your prerogative, and it's up to the market whether they assign any premium to such "pedigree". Unfortunately, however, whether we like it or not, it seems in this day and age that CGC has to a great extent become the market's accepted arbiter of which collections get "official" pedigree status and which ones don't and this pedigree has now become "annointed" and thereby will have an easier time getting market acceptance.

 

When it comes down to it, as with any raw or CGC book, you should look at the book, not the label grade or pedigree, and decide whether or not you would like to have it in your collection.

Of course. So in that case, if the books stand on their own, why did you care so much about the pedigree designation that you brought in Haspel and Litch to NYC to view the comics and apparently put in quite a bit of effort to campaign for the pedigree designation?

 

What makes the collection so special is not only the fact that the books are in overall spectacularly high grade condition with very rich inks and gloss and reflectivity that is so high it hardly makes sense, but that the books go back to the mid 1960s and go all the way up to 1976

Ah yes, the legendarily difficult 1965-1976 era.

[Norrin_Radd]

This thread is pure unadulterated win! Lot's of great info here.

Agreed. Finally reading through it.

[benz]

Regardless of what CGC thought, I made it very clear to them from the beginning that I would be calling this a pedigree collection because, in my opinion, it has the attributes of a pedigree collection.

Of course, that is entirely your prerogative, and it's up to the market whether they assign any premium to such "pedigree". Unfortunately, however, whether we like it or not, it seems in this day and age that CGC has to a great extent become the market's accepted arbiter of which collections get "official" pedigree status and which ones don't and this pedigree has now become "annointed" and thereby will have an easier time getting market acceptance.

 

When it comes down to it, as with any raw or CGC book, you should look at the book, not the label grade or pedigree, and decide whether or not you would like to have it in your collection.

Of course. So in that case, if the books stand on their own, why did you care so much about the pedigree designation that you brought in Haspel and Litch to NYC to view the comics and apparently put in quite a bit of effort to campaign for the pedigree designation?

 

What makes the collection so special is not only the fact that the books are in overall spectacularly high grade condition with very rich inks and gloss and reflectivity that is so high it hardly makes sense, but that the books go back to the mid 1960s and go all the way up to 1976

Ah yes, the legendarily difficult 1965-1976 era.

 

[blazingbob]

I'm not really following your "annointed" comment.

 

For the purposes of getting it noted on the label CGC has to recognize the pedigree. Frankly if I'm reading your note correctly the issue should be more with CGC publishing their "Pedigree standards" versus Metropolis's "special interest group" annointing their collection.

 

My pedigree standard is one that the pre-65 material should be pedigree worthy.

[fantastic_four]

My pedigree standard is one that the pre-65 material should be pedigree worthy.

 

So you're not a fan of Oakland, Boston, and Rocky Mountain then I take it...and from what we can tell so far, Suscha News.