Tales from the Comic shop

[Jiminy_Cricket-migration]

The person who stole from me was a relative, who confessed when I bailed them out of jail on unrelated charges.

 

It just crossed my mind that had the owner still had the book and the police forced him to give it back to you, you and your relative could have kept the payout. (Providing the owner had no way of fingering your relative.) You could have been paid again by your homeowner's insurance. CHA-CHING!!!

 

Could your relative have been fingered? Would he have appreciated being fingered? Does he enjoy being fingered? Have you ever been fingered?

[comicwiz]

The person who stole from me was a relative, who confessed when I bailed them out of jail on unrelated charges.

 

It just crossed my mind that had the owner still had the book and the police forced him to give it back to you, you and your relative could have kept the payout. (Providing the owner had no way of fingering your relative.) You could have been paid again by your homeowner's insurance. CHA-CHING!!!

 

Could your relative have been fingered? Would he have appreciated being fingered? Does he enjoy being fingered? Have you ever been fingered?

 

Is the stupidity you are demonstrating really necessary? I discussed the details (stuff I consider to be personal) to better explain the situation and when questions arose, not to have someone mock it.

[Jiminy_Cricket-migration]

It's never necessary, but it does seem to be natural.

[comicwiz]

It's never necessary, but it does seem to be natural.

 

Keep it in check, because you don't know me and that's the problem.

[Jiminy_Cricket-migration]

It's never necessary, but it does seem to be natural.

 

Keep it in check, because you don't know me and that the problem.

 

Flyers are better than Maple Laughs.

[ChrisInBaltimore]

It's never necessary, but it does seem to be natural.

 

Keep it in check, because you don't know me and that the problem.

 

Flyers are better than Maple Laughs.

 

While I couldn't agree with you more about the Flyers, your comments were a little insensitive.

[Jiminy_Cricket-migration]

It's never necessary, but it does seem to be natural.

 

Keep it in check, because you don't know me and that the problem.

 

Flyers are better than Maple Laughs.

 

While I couldn't agree with you more about the Flyers, your comments were a little insensitive.

 

I agree. I got caught up in the moment of the Friday CG postings. I apologize.

[mikephoen]

The person who stole from me was a relative, who confessed when I bailed them out of jail on unrelated charges.

 

It just crossed my mind that had the owner still had the book and the police forced him to give it back to you, you and your relative could have kept the payout. (Providing the owner had no way of fingering your relative.) You could have been paid again by your homeowner's insurance. CHA-CHING!!!

 

Could your relative have been fingered? Would he have appreciated being fingered? Does he enjoy being fingered? Have you ever been fingered?

 

What you are describing here is a very common grift. I know a few retailers that this has happened to. We have both cameras throughout the store and also pay only by company check. Since those are both big deterrents to those sorts of people, this has never happened to me, thankfully.

 

It's pretty easy to do. Just report your items stolen and fill out a police report. Get your friend/wife/cousin to sell the stuff to the unsuspecting store. The more well dressed and innocent they look the better. Call the police and tell them you think you know the store that bought your items. Police go and 'recover' your items. Store is screwed, you have profit.

 

Sad that these people get away with it more often than not.

 

NOTE: I obviously do not think anything like this was going on in comicwiz's story.

[Jiminy_Cricket-migration]

What you are describing here is a very common grift.

 

That's what I was alluding to. It's very common, since comic/card shops don't take fingerprints, like pawn shops. (, I said "finger" again.) I tried to make a joke out of it, so as not to offend the OP, but I didn't do so well.

[Disco Stu]

Not the craziest, coolest, or funniest comic shop story but just last month... (cue flashback sequence).

 

I was in Seattle for a conference and decided to check out a local shop. I look up on my phone comic shops and see Golden Age Collectables with the moniker "America's Oldest Comic Shop!" Sounds great, they have to have old comics. I find it hidden away in Pike Place Market with a neon sign above the door.

 

It's a Thursday, but it's pretty packed. I see cardboard cutouts of Captain America, a blow-up Spider-Man hanging from the ceiling, and other geek chic. A decent store with Simpsons toys, tumblers, t-shirts, games, Robotech, and much more, but no comics. I turn the corner and see a wall of longboxes. Of course they're filled with mostly 90s drek at about $3-5 a pop. No thanks.

 

I'm about to leave when I see a small glass case in the corner with, finally, some Silver Age Caps and X-Men. I stare into the case like a six-year-old waiting for someone to come by. About six people were obviously employees and ignored me. I made my way to the register and asked to see the comics in the case. A teenager says he doesn't have the key and hasn't been over there before but finds the key and opens it up.

 

I look for a couple minutes. Prices are okay. I'm interested and then I notice a gun safe. I ask the teenager what's in there. He says the really good comics, but he has to get the owner to open it. He stands there for a moment, I assumed me being the only one asking about comics at this store would mean I would like to see what's in the safe, but I ask the teenager if he could get the owner to show me them after another silent moment.

 

Owner comes over and is a little skeptical. He tells me he is close to retiring and has been bringing his personal collection into the safe to sell over the next couple of years. After a few minutes schmoozing I ask if he could show me some of those personal comics in the safe. He turns his back and covers my view while he turns the dial. He pulls out Spider-Man 1, X-Men 1, FF 1, and a butt load of other keys in VF or better condition. Amazing.

 

Then I look over his shoulder and see a Marvel Comics #3. He brings it to the counter, it's in VG to F. All of these are raw by the way. I ask if he has any more in the safe, but the rest are at home. I've never been that close to a beautiful raw Golden Age book like that. I wish I could see the rest.

[KONG]

Not the craziest, coolest, or funniest comic shop story but just last month... (cue flashback sequence).

 

I was in Seattle for a conference and decided to check out a local shop. I look up on my phone comic shops and see Golden Age Collectables with the moniker "America's Oldest Comic Shop!" Sounds great, they have to have old comics. I find it hidden away in Pike Place Market with a neon sign above the door.

 

It's a Thursday, but it's pretty packed. I see cardboard cutouts of Captain America, a blow-up Spider-Man hanging from the ceiling, and other geek chic. A decent store with Simpsons toys, tumblers, t-shirts, games, Robotech, and much more, but no comics. I turn the corner and see a wall of longboxes. Of course they're filled with mostly 90s drek at about $3-5 a pop. No thanks.

 

I'm about to leave when I see a small glass case in the corner with, finally, some Silver Age Caps and X-Men. I stare into the case like a six-year-old waiting for someone to come by. About six people were obviously employees and ignored me. I made my way to the register and asked to see the comics in the case. A teenager says he doesn't have the key and hasn't been over there before but finds the key and opens it up.

 

I look for a couple minutes. Prices are okay. I'm interested and then I notice a gun safe. I ask the teenager what's in there. He says the really good comics, but he has to get the owner to open it. He stands there for a moment, I assumed me being the only one asking about comics at this store would mean I would like to see what's in the safe, but I ask the teenager if he could get the owner to show me them after another silent moment.

 

Owner comes over and is a little skeptical. He tells me he is close to retiring and has been bringing his personal collection into the safe to sell over the next couple of years. After a few minutes schmoozing I ask if he could show me some of those personal comics in the safe. He turns his back and covers my view while he turns the dial. He pulls out Spider-Man 1, X-Men 1, FF 1, and a butt load of other keys in VF or better condition. Amazing.

 

Then I look over his shoulder and see a Marvel Comics #3. He brings it to the counter, it's in VG to F. All of these are raw by the way. I ask if he has any more in the safe, but the rest are at home. I've never been that close to a beautiful raw Golden Age book like that. I wish I could see the rest.

 

And?...

[Disco Stu]

My wife said the same thing...

[Sqeggs]

Not the craziest, coolest, or funniest comic shop story but just last month... (cue flashback sequence).

 

I was in Seattle for a conference and decided to check out a local shop. I look up on my phone comic shops and see Golden Age Collectables with the moniker "America's Oldest Comic Shop!" Sounds great, they have to have old comics. I find it hidden away in Pike Place Market with a neon sign above the door.

 

It's a Thursday, but it's pretty packed. I see cardboard cutouts of Captain America, a blow-up Spider-Man hanging from the ceiling, and other geek chic. A decent store with Simpsons toys, tumblers, t-shirts, games, Robotech, and much more, but no comics. I turn the corner and see a wall of longboxes. Of course they're filled with mostly 90s drek at about $3-5 a pop. No thanks.

 

I'm about to leave when I see a small glass case in the corner with, finally, some Silver Age Caps and X-Men. I stare into the case like a six-year-old waiting for someone to come by. About six people were obviously employees and ignored me. I made my way to the register and asked to see the comics in the case. A teenager says he doesn't have the key and hasn't been over there before but finds the key and opens it up.

 

I look for a couple minutes. Prices are okay. I'm interested and then I notice a gun safe. I ask the teenager what's in there. He says the really good comics, but he has to get the owner to open it. He stands there for a moment, I assumed me being the only one asking about comics at this store would mean I would like to see what's in the safe, but I ask the teenager if he could get the owner to show me them after another silent moment.

 

Owner comes over and is a little skeptical. He tells me he is close to retiring and has been bringing his personal collection into the safe to sell over the next couple of years. After a few minutes schmoozing I ask if he could show me some of those personal comics in the safe. He turns his back and covers my view while he turns the dial. He pulls out Spider-Man 1, X-Men 1, FF 1, and a butt load of other keys in VF or better condition. Amazing.

 

Then I look over his shoulder and see a Marvel Comics #3. He brings it to the counter, it's in VG to F. All of these are raw by the way. I ask if he has any more in the safe, but the rest are at home. I've never been that close to a beautiful raw Golden Age book like that. I wish I could see the rest.

 

Did he quote prices? Did you make offers? Did you wake up in a cold sweat back in your hotel room and realize it was a dream?

[mikephoen]

Here's a (long) story about the best comic collection to ever come in my door.

 

It's a slow to moderately busy day and I'm working behind the counter, sometime in 2003 or 2004. A customer asks if we have any price guides. He is an average looking guy, nicely dressed, mid 30s or so. Nothing remarkable in any way about him.

 

I show him the latest Overstreet and he asks a few questions about grading and pricing. Pretty typical stuff. I pick up on the possibility that he is looking to sell. I ask him what he has and if he wants to sell. He says that he is. He says he used to be a big collector years ago. He has a lot of books, runs of most major Marvel titles. I ask what his best books are and he names some low number Amazings, 4, 7, 10, mostly complete from 20 up. He mentions that he also has lots of doubles. One book in particular that he has a lot of copies of is Iron Fist 14, and he wonders what that is worth.

 

Everything is sounding great, we keep chatting since the store isn't that busy and the other employee working can handle the people. He mentions that he didn't know he still had these, he thought his parents had junked them. It's at this point that I realize that something might be up. I gently press him a little more about when he bought these. Since he is in him mid to maybe late 30s (I'm kinda a bad judge of people's age), and he says his parents bought them for him mostly when he was a kid. Hmm.. unless his parents were very rich, these books would have been expensive even in the mid 80s. If they had spend a lot of money on these, why would he think they might have thrown them out?

 

And Iron Fist 14, that is not the kind of book you buy multiples of when you're a kid. I know the local collector who does buy multiples of that book though...

 

Flashback about 3 months. One of my best customers brings bad news. Over the Xmas holidays his house was broken into while he was on holidays. Among other things, they took the longboxes where he kept his high grade Silver Age runs. Like many collectors he had an area for his good stuff, and an area for his drek. They had scooped all his good stuff.

 

He is a super anal collector though, so he had an exact list of the books stolen, including his grades. He is a very conservative grader, and most of his books are listed 9.0 or better. Over the years he was one of the collectors who would buy the absolute best stuff from any collections that came in. None of his books were graded at that time, so no cert numbers. He also stored them in a very unusual way. All of his books had a backing board in the middle of the book, then slid into a mylite. The book then got a thicker backing board behind it, and everything slid into a 4 mil mylar.

 

I remembered enough of the list to know he had a smattering of single digit Amazings, lots of doubles of higher numbers and 4 or 5 Iron Fist 14s. I just knew this was his collection. I played it cool though, and let him know that I was very interested in buying the collection. I let him know that it would take me a few hours at least to grade and price a collection of this size. It would be best if he brought it in and dropped it off while I went through it, and then I could give him a call when it was done. He balked at bringing it all in, but agreed to bring in one box. I asked him to start with the Amazings, since those were the most valuable, but I didn't want to press him too much.

 

He said he had some classes on Friday at a nearby technical school and he could drop them off in the morning and then come back after class.

 

I call my customer and also the police to get their opinion. They say to call them if/when he brings the books by. Friday comes by and in comes the guy with a box of books! Instantly I recognize that they are my customers. Every book is bagged and boarded exactly as he did them. I play it cool though, and the guy agrees to come back in a couple hours.

 

I call the police and they send a couple officers by a few minutes later. One of the officers is actually a comic collector and is an occasional customer. He isn't a silver age guy, but he knows that the stuff is valuable and that the unusal bagging and boarding is a very good identifier. My store has multiple floors, so the officers agree to hang out upstairs and wait for the guy to come back.

 

One hour goes by, then another, then another. The officers are being good about it, and fortunately this isn't a busy day for the police force so they can stay another hour. We are a little worried that the guy has figured out what is going on and isn't coming back. The one box he brought in is good... but it is mostly bronze stuff, not the really high end stuff. About 50 minutes into the final hour, the guy comes back in.

 

I tell him the stuff is great! I really want to buy it and I've gone through all of it and priced it out. I invite him upstairs to discuss price. As we're heading up the stairs I keep up the chit-chat and when we reach the top I say 'Oh, and these guys want to talk to you about the books too.' The cops are both standing at the top of the steps, just around the corner looking super intimidating, the way only cops can.

 

The dude is just stunned. They sit him down and start talking to him. I exit to the bottom of the stairs, but I stay where I can eavesdrop. They ask him the typical stuff, where did you get them etc. He starts with the parents bought them for him as a kid story, but then quickly changes tune. He gives them a story that he bought them for $5000 from a guy in a truck parked in a trendy area of town. The comic collector officer says to the guy 'Unless you were walking down the street dressed as Green Lantern why someone offer you a comic collection on the steet? And why would you have 5K on you?'

 

I don't listen to everything, I do have other customers to serve, but they get enough out of him to arrest him and get a search warrant for his house. They tell me I can give the comics we've recovered back to my customer, which surprises me. I thought they would have to be held for evidence or something, but they say no, they won't need them. I call my customer (who has been frantically emailing me from his work all day for details on the sting operation) and give him the good news.

 

Later that night the police recover the other boxes of books and return them to my customer as well. In the end it turns out that about 17 books are missing from the collection. They are lesser graded double of Amazings (probably in the 8.0 range). No idea what happened to those books, maybe they were sold separately before bringing the stuff to me.

 

The police also let us know that 'Green Lantern' has a prior for breaking and entering from a decade before, but he has been clean since then. He has a decent job, and has been taking classes to move up in his profession (some sort of red ticket trade). They don't believe that he did the break in at my customers. The theory is that some of the guys he used to run with probably did it, but gave the books to him to sell. He definitely knew something about comics, most likely he had been a collector at one time. He refuses to flip on anyone though, so he is charged with possession of stolen goods.

 

A couple of months later, his court date comes up and I'm called in to testify. I'm there, the arresting officers are there and also my customer. They bring in the crook and he also has some people with him. I wonder if they were his 'friends' that actually did the B&E.

 

Before the trial begins, the prosecutors want to talk to me. They are unsure if they can make the charge of possession over $5000 stick, since these are 'just comic books'. I tell them that if my customer asked me to buy them for $25K I would write the check on the spot. And that I would have doubled my money by the end of the month. My best estimate at the time was that they were worth 50-75K. Looking back, and knowing more about the high grade market post CGC, I'm sure my estimate was very, very conservative.

 

Armed with this, the lawyers approach the defense and tell them that I'll testify to the value and give him my statement that I would buy the books on the spot for $25K.

 

The judge comes in, we stand etc, then the judge asks the lawyers to approach. I can't hear what they talk about, but a few minutes later it's all over. I never have to take the stand. Turns out the defense decides to take a plea bargain and he pleads guilty.

 

The sentence is very disappointing to me, and seems incredibly light considering he already had a prior. I think he got 30 days, which he could serve on weekends and 2 years probation or something like that. Might have even been less... I know I was disappointed.

 

I worried a bit about some sort of 'retribution' from his buddies, but it never came. I'm glad about that, and I'm very happy that my customer got almost all of his books back.

 

I wish someone ligit would bring me a collection like that some day though!

[Jiminy_Cricket-migration]

Excellent!

 

I'll bet if they were baseball cards of the same value, his sentence would have been more harsh.

[KONG]

Outstanding story. Well done sir.

[Shaven Kev-migration]

That is a good one. I bet it is very rare for a collection like that to be recovered intact. Good job!

[mikephoen]

That is a good one. I bet it is very rare for a collection like that to be recovered intact. Good job!

 

I think the bigger the collection the harder it is for crooks to move, especially if they're trying to maximize their return. Also the more easily identified. It's the small collections that are nearly impossible to recover. This one had enough 'weight' to matter to law enforcement as well, which always helps in recovery.

[Shaven Kev-migration]

MOAAAAAAARRR

[HotJuicyBurgers]

That is a good one. I bet it is very rare for a collection like that to be recovered intact. Good job!

 

I think the bigger the collection the harder it is for crooks to move, especially if they're trying to maximize their return. Also the more easily identified. It's the small collections that are nearly impossible to recover. This one had enough 'weight' to matter to law enforcement as well, which always helps in recovery.

 

I feel like it depends on the caliber of comic book shops around... If you got some LCS owner that is kind of a jerk, (unlike OP) and doesn't care, I'm sure someone would have no problem.