• When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

TOS 39 CGC 9.4! Wow!

Started by DiceX,

125 posts in this topic

fantastic_four

fantastic_four

Posted
Posted
The most interesting bit of trivia on the Curator books is that the Curator used the money to pay for a sex change operation. Yes, the famous Curator comics have an origin of the stuff the Jerry Springer show is made of!

 

A few people have told that story here in the forums before, but it's always fun to hear it again. smile.gif

 

I called John to ask if it was true, and he verified that it was, but that he regretted that was the only part of the story people were remembering because he knew it would hurt his (her) feelings. He said the driving reason for selling the collection was that the museum the "Curator" was working at was going through renovations and that the temperature-controlled vault the comics were kept in was going to no longer be available to him.

 

That part of the story isn't quite as controversially interesting as the sex change bit, but I find it compelling nonetheless. I wonder if there are any other museum collections like this where the vault HASN'T been opened yet? confused-smiley-013.gifcloud9.gif

Link to comment
Share on other sites
tth2

tth2

Posted
Posted
Actually he collected a broad range of stuff. When I saw the first stack I saw some pre-hero and misc. I said to John like an insufficiently_thoughtful_person (I don't collect non hero books) Keep in mind I'm not selling any comics at the time, nor was it in my mind that I would sell any in the future. John shared with me that there were many other titles and that the collection was vast. I believe it would have included Gold Key and the like.

 

Yes, a few GK Curators have appeared from time to time. I picked up a gorgeous GK Tarzan (9.6) from Hauser a few months ago, but he said he had no more.

 

John did not buy all of them. His focus was primarily super hero. He bought the Avengers run as well. I did see the Avengers 1 in their 1st showing to me as well. That graded a 9.4, low for Curator standards.

 

Yes, but the Avengers 2 graded out as a 9.8, white pages. Stunning book!

 

There is a person who owns the FF run and he's not selling. So the collection was split and is floating around out there. Some TOS were bought ungraded that we found out later were Curators. The buyer had a hunch as soon as he bought them that they were Curators and it was confirmed.

 

The identity of the owner of the Curator FFs is one of the best kept secrets in comics, I haven't been able to find it out despite pressuring all my usual sources. The Curator TOS 47 graded out as a 9.9 893whatthe.gif, I'd love to see what the rest of the run graded out as, or if they've been graded at all. Most of the top of census early TOSs are still Pacific Coasts, or so I've heard.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
tth2

tth2

Posted
Posted
thanks for all of the insight. this is a welcome relief from the recent strife on the boards. the "Pedigree" boys are probably wetting their pants over the possibility of learning more about this fabulous collection. grin.gif

 

welcome to the boards!!!!!!!!

 

893applaud-thumb.gifheadbang.gifyay.gifyay.gif

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Silver Surfer

Silver Surfer

Posted
Posted
Actually he collected a broad range of stuff. When I saw the first stack I saw some pre-hero and misc. I said to John like an insufficiently_thoughtful_person (I don't collect non hero books) Keep in mind I'm not selling any comics at the time, nor was it in my mind that I would sell any in the future. John shared with me that there were many other titles and that the collection was vast. I believe it would have included Gold Key and the like.

 

Yes, a few GK Curators have appeared from time to time. I picked up a gorgeous GK Tarzan (9.6) from Hauser a few months ago, but he said he had no more.

 

John did not buy all of them. His focus was primarily super hero. He bought the Avengers run as well. I did see the Avengers 1 in their 1st showing to me as well. That graded a 9.4, low for Curator standards.

 

Yes, but the Avengers 2 graded out as a 9.8, white pages. Stunning book!

 

There is a person who owns the FF run and he's not selling. So the collection was split and is floating around out there. Some TOS were bought ungraded that we found out later were Curators. The buyer had a hunch as soon as he bought them that they were Curators and it was confirmed.

 

The identity of the owner of the Curator FFs is one of the best kept secrets in comics, I haven't been able to find it out despite pressuring all my usual sources. The Curator TOS 47 graded out as a 9.9 893whatthe.gif, I'd love to see what the rest of the run graded out as, or if they've been graded at all. Most of the top of census early TOSs are still Pacific Coasts, or so I've heard.

 

A 9.9 for a book that old? That almost seems impossible and what kept it from being a 10.0. Can you imagine trying to put a price tage on that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
sfilosa

sfilosa

Posted
Posted

How far back does the Curator pedigree go?

 

One of the things I was discussing with Doug Schmell is that the Pacific Coast pedigree only seems to go back to Nov 1962 (FF #8). I believe there are a few books that go back farther but are in low grade. The assumption is that these were bought used but I thought of a different scenario.

 

What's to say that the older books are low grade, because it didn't dawn on the purchaser to take care of them yet. Simply put, maybe the owner of the PC run, read the books and just put the comics in boxes, but then in Nov of 1962 decided to preserve them differently (i.e. not read them and just store them).

 

I would guess this would also be the case with the San Francisco pedigree as eventually Tom Reilly went to war (so all books after that were not read at all).

Link to comment
Share on other sites
tth2

tth2

Posted
Posted
A 9.9 for a book that old? That almost seems impossible and what kept it from being a 10.0. Can you imagine trying to put a price tage on that.

 

You can see the 9.9 TOS 47, it's on the CGC gallery.

 

There is at least one 9.9 GA book, believe it or not (from the Church collection, natch).

 

Mr. Valiantman, if you're checking this thread, how many 9.9s are there pre-1968?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Silver Surfer

Silver Surfer

Posted
Posted
A 9.9 for a book that old? That almost seems impossible and what kept it from being a 10.0. Can you imagine trying to put a price tage on that.

 

You can see the 9.9 TOS 47, it's on the CGC gallery.

 

There is at least one 9.9 GA book, believe it or not (from the Church collection, natch).

 

Mr. Valiantman, if you're checking this thread, how many 9.9s are there pre-1968?

 

893applaud-thumb.gif

Link to comment
Share on other sites
fantastic_four

fantastic_four

Posted
Posted
How far back does the Curator pedigree go?

 

I interviewed Hauser on Curator last year when I was planning to write a series of articles for CBG on Silver Age pedigrees. I also interviewed a few other people, and was going to keep interviewing more until I heard Matt Nelson was writing his book on pedigrees. I have no desire to compete on the topic, so I decided to drop the articles.

 

Hauser told me that he wasn't sure exactly when the Curator started collecting comics, but he knew it had to be at least at some point in the 40s or 50s with the 50s being the most likely starting time. He wasn't the first to find the collection because the Curator wasn't a typical ignorant original owner. John said he met him at a convention and that he was a well-known collector in his local area. He was the original owner of what we're now calling the "Curator" collection, but he also had collected backwards into the Golden Age. Most, or all, of the Golden Age books were already sold by the time Hauser met the Curator.

 

The Curator consigned a big chunk of his collection to a local comic shop in his area. John knows that the FF #1 sold to one person from that shop, as did the #2 to #100 run to that single, famous person that tth was referring to. There's a reason his identity is kept secret--if people freely shared it, he's a well-known comics figure, so the fact that he's sitting on $100K to $300K of comics would spread like wildfire and he'd certainly get a LOT more calls about the books than he already has. Hauser doesn't know exactly where the Curator's Golden Age books or most of the DCs went to, but he has heard rumors that the Curator may have owned the lion's share of the Golden and Silver Age. He feels rather certain that there are far more unidentified Curators than there are identified ones. He said he thinks the FF #1 has sold and re-sold a few times. I wonder whether the CGC 9.4 copy Jay Parrino has shopped a few times the last few years is it, but that's really just a wild guess based upon its quality.

 

The Curator also collected straight up to the Modern age; the most recent issue I remember John mentioning was Spidey 300. John tried to get the Bronze Age books pedigreed by CGC, but they wouldn't do it on most of them. When I talked to him, he still had most of the Bronze and Modern books, so if somebody wants to give it a shot, you may still be able to contact him and buy Curators in the raw...

 

Another interesting thing John told me was about the storage of the books. The books John got to were the ones the Curator hadn't consigned to his local comic shop friend, and if I'm remembering correctly (I taped the conversation with John's permission and could double-check), the Curator took him to the walk-in vault at the museum where the books were stored. John said that all the Silver Age Curators he bought were stored in what he referred to as "bricks." He described them that way because the Curator had shoved as many comics into a single bag as would fit. I can't remember how many he said that was--I think it was 5 books per brick--but they were very, very tightly "pressed" together into multiple-comics-per-bag bricks. I think he said the first brick he opened up was the Spidey 1 to 5 brick, and just as we all still continue to be, he was absolutely amazed at how well preserved the comics were.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Go to topic listing