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Rhino_Comics Tardy Chicago Report (and FIRST post!)

Started by Sharkey,

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Sharkey

Sharkey

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Hi all, here's my experiences at the Con, for what it's worth. Being a newbie and all, this is my first post! Woo hoo! laugh.gif

 

THURSDAY:

Left work in Northbrook (north Chicago suburb) about 4:00 to head to the convention center. Traffic on I-294 South SUCKED. Got there around 5:00 and luckily nabbed a parking spot right outside the side door to the center. Woo hoo! My friend Razor from Iowa was already there, sharing a booth with Kevin Forbes of Rainbow Comics (Lexington KY). Kevin and his biz partner have a shop and are about to open a second. The booth contained lots of toys, busts, statues, and original art (more on that later).

 

Razor is a HG collector and I recently submitted some books to CGC for him. They were his first submissions of his own books, although I had purchased some miscellaneous stuff from him a few years ago and had submitted a lot of them to CGC and the vast majority have been high grade returns. So, for his first submission, his FF48 came back 9.8 (yowza!) which honestly was expected. It was the nicest copy of that book I’ve EVER seen. His GS X-Men 1 came back 9.6 which was also what I had expected. So anyhoo, I needed to get those books to him as they’d just been returned to me and I’d been keeping them in my safety deposit box. He was happy to see them in all their newly slabbed glory! Visions of big bucks danced in his head. He hoped to shop the FF48 around the show but wasn’t expecting any real hard offers. More likely he’ll need to sell them through an auction house or a site that specializes in HG books like ComicLink.

 

My goals for the weekend were to introduce Razor to Steve Borock (cuz I’d like to see him get more of his awesome books slabbed but he's hesitant to let his babies out of the house and into someone else's care even to get slabbed) and introduce him to people like Josh Nathanson and other possible sales outlets for the FF48. And I was looking forward to seeing the CGC crew and other friends. Of course I was going to peruse the show and look for original art (Ditko and Kirby) and I was going to take a few books to sell in order to raise a bit o’ cash if a nice piece of art caught my eye. I sniffed around a bit but most people were busy setting up and I figured I could wait. I’d bought some stuff recently and didn’t really have anything I was specifically looking for at this show.

 

I went looking for Steve B but he was nowhere to be found. Ran into a local collector/dealer, Jeff, who was sharing booth space with Superworld. [sIDEBAR: Ted Vanliew is a great guy and so much fun to talk to because he LOVES comics. He ain’t just a dealer, he’s a FANBOY dealer. The best kind!] As we walked back to the Rainbow booth, who was standing there talking to Kevin but Steve B himself. Gotta love karma like that. So I introduced Razor and Steve and had a fun time as Steve recounted how I had called him to let him know these books were coming in and that they were really, REALLY nice books. Of course Steve was real nice about it and was probably rolling his eyes into the back of his head having heard THAT a million freakin’ times. But he recounted that when he was checking the orders that were going out, he saw my sheet and that the book had got a 9.8, and he said “holy %$&!, he was right!”. We got a good laugh out of that. Steve suggested I come to the CGC dinner and I said I’d try cuz it sounded fun. I’d been a non-registered lurker for a while, so I figured what the heck.

 

So mission #1 was accomplished. We went to Gibson’s and had dinner (mmm, red meat…). Razor crashed in our guest room at home; it’s a 30 minute drive from the Con but the price was right I guess... We ended up dueling on my Addams Family pinball machine until about midnight. “Nice shot, Thing, you’re really on the ball!”

 

FRIDAY:

I had to work so I wasn’t at the show. I called Comic Link headquarters and got Josh’s cell phone, gave him a call, and agreed to meet up with him Saturday to introduce him to Razor and see the FF48. Was curious if he could give an estimate of what such a book would sell for on ComicLink or if he had any customers he knew were looking for that book in that grade. Called Steve B and confirmed that I’d go to the dinner Sat night. I had intended to head down and hit the Heritage Auction but was a bit tired and decided to have an early night and be rested for the show.

 

SATURDAY:

Rolled in about 10:00 am. Razor had gotten there about an hour earlier to finish setting up his stuff at the Rainbow booth. The show was PACKED. This year they moved the registration booth outside and the line was running WAY down the street. Wow! Kevin and Razor loaned me a dealer badge so I got right in. The displays were great, and the con was boomin’. I mean BOOMin’. It was great to see such a huge turnout. And the Con keeps getting bigger and bigger every year. I feared for a long time that having it run by Wizard would mean a trend to newer stuff and not as much G/SA but the big dealers keep turning out for the show and EVERYTHING is represented. That’s why I love this show. I didn’t attend any panels but just walked the floor (well, walk is a relative term; the floor was PACKED). Hopefully those souls were buying.

 

Met up with Josh, and it was great to meet him in person after having sold books through ComicLink as well as buying a few things, art included. I like the way he runs the business and especially like the revamped site he launched a year or so ago. He looked at the FF48 and had talked to a few people about it. No hard offers, although one dealer (I don’t remember who) walked up while we were discussing it and said he’d give $10k for it right now. Don’t think he was full on serious but Razor said he’s hoping to get more out of it. There was a supposed confirmed sale for $14,500 for another FF 48 in 9.8 (the census says there are 7 out there, including this one). Josh said it was not quite accurate because it was part of a package deal of cash and trade, and $14,500 of the deal was attributed to the FF 48. But given the importance of the book maybe $14 - $15K is possible. Time will tell. After all many of these are buried in HG collections and likely won’t see the light of day for a long, long time.

 

Next stop was the CGC booth. Said hi to Shawn. They were SWAMPED. Excellent! Poked around and went to Albert Moy’s booth. Saw some things there I liked like an FF splash, but BIG BIG$$$$. Likewise at Conrad’s (great prehero stuff), Romitaman’s (I’m drooooooling over the Kirby/Ditko collaboration pages from the backup story in FF Annual 1), and G & A booth (nice splash from Strange Tales Annual #2). Sigh. So much art, so little time and money….. I had lugged a few boxes of Silver including some of my pre-hero Marvels and some dupe Ditko Spideys. Ran them by a couple people (including Ted). Much interest in the pre-hero books by several people, but I was probably asking too much in my hopes of landing the cash to buy some of that art I saw. I ended up selling a handful of Pre-heros to Ted (thanks Ted!) and over the course of the weekend a bunch of the early Spideys. Went home with about $1,000 in my pocket that I will use on art.

 

Kevin had a lot of nice art at his booth, including a great FF Perez 2-page spread/splash, and somebody (see below) snatched that up on Saturday. He has a ton of Buscema (John and Sal) on Conan, Avengers, Spectacular Spider-Man, etc. A few nice covers, including recreations of X-Men 100 by Cockrum and Iron Man 150 by Layton. He sold a nice Rosa duck pencil to Eega Beeva and also sold a page of unused Gil Kane pencils that was meant for ASM 123. He also had a Bloom Country strip original and I believe he sold that during the weekend too.

 

THE DINNER: Much has already been said in the other reports. But the dinner was the highlight of the weekend, no competition. Steaks as big as your head. Baked potatoes too. And enough booze to punish yer liver reeeaaal good. My first impression was walking in and seeing those gorgeous Golden Age books on the mantle (see the other Con report posts for pictures). Jeez Louise, nice books! Meeting so many of the people behind the boards was great. Jeff, the guy sharing space with Ted, went with me and we had a blast. Drummy, Rob_React, FFB, Beyonder, PedigreeMan, Centaurman, Donut, BassGMan, hi.gif etc etc etc etc. It was great to meet you all after lurking on here for so long. Ended up that Drummy bought those awesome Perez pages from my buddy Kevin at Rainbow. We were all drooling over those pages. Went home around 11:00, but after seeing the other reports, I’ll be sure to stay later next year for the serious drinking (long as I don’t have to drive home)! Razor and Kevin had gone to the casino that evening but Razor was at the house when I showed up, yep, playing Addams Family….

 

SUNDAY: Blowout day was good. Picked up some trade paperbacks at a nice discount, including the hardcover “Art of John Romita” book. Didn’t seal any big deals but have my eye on several things I saw at the show. I will probably follow up on one of those splash pages once I raise some spending cash….

Went home a happy dude! Can’t wait for next year! Cheers!

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Sharkey

Sharkey

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Oh, and a late shout out to Jerry Stephan who joined CGC a bit ago. Jerry used to do some of the same Midwest shows that I did back in the early 90s and he promoted his own shows in St. Louis. They were good stuff and Jerry was always a guy I enjoyed dealing with and talking to at the shows. He sat at the table with us along with a couple other CGC staffers including the new VP Mark Haspel. Thanks again, guys, much fun had by all!

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