Heritage's Next Event Auction has started posting books ! 31 31

[LDarkseid1]

25 minutes ago, cmzare said:

People buy what they like and will spend $$$ on what they choose to spend their hard earned cash on.  ASM 667 variant is an interesting book.  A lot of people are going to rag on the sale, and that's fine.  That's why you collect GA books and others collect modern.  Overall, though... the book is quite rare and seems to be very difficult to get in CGC 9.8.  It is still a very speculative book, though.

I totally get it, and I definitely won't argue with you that "people buy what they like and spend their hard earned cash" haha. Although not sure it's always hard earned, maybe sometimes or most of the time. Is getting rich on Bitcoin hard earned , maybe these days . Regardless, I still can't fathom that sale any more than I did before. I'll admit I'm not much of a modern collector and the only comparison I can come up with is stuff like the UF4 variant selling for upwards of $15K-$20K or whatever it is in 9.8. At least that's a modern key with serious heat, and so seems a bit more justified to me. Speculation be damned on this though, if it's selling for this much speculation is out the door.

[cmzare]

20 minutes ago, SuperBird said:

if it's going for $35k or whatever, it's no longer a speculation. 

 

It's still a very young book, so that element still exists/persists.  As mentioned, there are a lot of sales in the five figures and it's a rare book.

[LDarkseid1]

25 minutes ago, szav said:

I try not to be dismissive of other peoples collectibles but what I really don’t get is how anyone knows or believes what the print run on something like this is.  If I played this modern variant game I would personally be vey worried that marvel pre prints1-10k of all of these supposedly rare variants and just warehouses and slow rolls out the 9.8s over the next 5-10 years, sending them straight to auction houses.

With what this book and a few others sell for you could easily pay for the warehouse space and staff a few people to do this for years.

If they dont do this, they should. Or am I way off, do they have some authenticated and verified tracking system for how many get made and it’s all kept in tight order?

I think being "dismissive" and just being generally confused is the difference. People in general seem to mistake the two more often then not. If this is what it's selling for then I say congrats to the seller, but I just don't get it. I mean there's the rarity and the artist involved, otherwise the book is ASM 667, and last I checked nothing special about that. Definitely impressive it can sell for this much though with the two main contributing factors. People are making bank that's for sure!

[LDarkseid1]

1 minute ago, cmzare said:

It's still a very young book, so that element still exists/persists.  As mentioned, there are a lot of sales in the five figures and it's a rare book.

Oh wow, so where do you think the speculation is heading to? You think this could be a $100K book someday?

[cmzare]

Just now, LDarkseid1 said:

Oh wow, so where do you think the speculation is heading to? You think this could be a $100K book someday?

It could bottom out with the rest of the modern variants.  Or it could jump to 100K.  If I had a crystal ball... only if...

[LDarkseid1]

3 minutes ago, cmzare said:

It could bottom out with the rest of the modern variants.  Or it could jump to 100K.  If I had a crystal ball... only if...

Crystal ball would certainly be helpful these days 

[lou_fine]

27 minutes ago, LDarkseid1 said:

I mean there's the rarity and the artist involved, otherwise the book is ASM 667, and last I checked nothing special about that.

That's the exact same feeling that I get with ALL of the variants, no matter what kind of variant they are.  

Even with the so-called price variants like the 35 cents Star Wars 1, which like you said, the book is STILL really nothing more than Star Wars 1. 

[LordRahl]

29 minutes ago, LDarkseid1 said:

I think being "dismissive" and just being generally confused is the difference. People in general seem to mistake the two more often then not. If this is what it's selling for then I say congrats to the seller, but I just don't get it. I mean there's the rarity and the artist involved, otherwise the book is ASM 667, and last I checked nothing special about that. Definitely impressive it can sell for this much though with the two main contributing factors. People are making bank that's for sure!

Look, I don't get it either buuuut... in regards to your bolded sentence above, the same thing can be said of Silver Surfer #4 (there's the cover and "supposed" rarity if that farce of it being limited in distribution is still being perpetrated) and we know what SS 4s are selling for in 9.8 these days. As for the "manufactured" rarity versus "real" rarity, I don't see why that matters. If you can't find the book and you want the book, who gives a flip if it's hard to find because of a super low print run or because most have been ravaged by time. The end result is the same, a hard to find book. 

That said, variants and the prices paid for them are not for me but I get WHY some people are attracted to them. If you're a modern collector and you want rare stuff, this is your wheelhouse. 

[LDarkseid1]

2 minutes ago, LordRahl said:

Look, I don't get it either buuuut... in regards to your bolded sentence above, the same thing can be said of Silver Surfer #4 (there's the cover and "supposed" rarity if that farce of it being limited in distribution is still being perpetrated) and we know what SS 4s are selling for in 9.8 these days. As for the "manufactured" rarity versus "real" rarity, I don't see why that matters. If you can't find the book and you want the book, who gives a flip if it's hard to find because of a super low print run or because most have been ravaged by time. The end result is the same, a hard to find book. 

That said, variants and the prices paid for them are not for me but I get WHY some people are attracted to them. If you're a modern collector and you want rare stuff, this is your wheelhouse. 

Yeah but come on now, that SS4 cover is truly a thing of beauty . No comparison to the ASM 667 cover. Well, not for me at least lol. I get the logic though.

[buttock]

43 minutes ago, LDarkseid1 said:

I think being "dismissive" and just being generally confused is the difference. People in general seem to mistake the two more often then not. If this is what it's selling for then I say congrats to the seller, but I just don't get it. I mean there's the rarity and the artist involved, otherwise the book is ASM 667, and last I checked nothing special about that. Definitely impressive it can sell for this much though with the two main contributing factors. People are making bank that's for sure!

We all create artificial scarcity to justify our purchases.  Higher graded, highest graded, white pages only, variant cover, I only want the OA, etc.  It all boils down to buying what you want and what you enjoy (part of which is the thrill of the hunt).  For a book like this, as silly as I think it is, I bet the buyer is just over the moon to have it.  And good for them.  

[LDarkseid1]

13 minutes ago, buttock said:

We all create artificial scarcity to justify our purchases.  Higher graded, highest graded, white pages only, variant cover, I only want the OA, etc.  It all boils down to buying what you want and what you enjoy (part of which is the thrill of the hunt).  For a book like this, as silly as I think it is, I bet the buyer is just over the moon to have it.  And good for them.  

Yeah I mean I have to imagine many people who buy these do actually want the book and are super excited. I've never met one personally lol, but I'm sure they exist. Anytime I've ever met someone whether at a comic book store or convention who drops the dough on stuff like this was a flipper or independent dealer. But surely, there must be a large contingent of people who buy for passion, or else who would the flipper/dealers be catering to haha.

[buttock]

7 minutes ago, LDarkseid1 said:

Yeah I mean I have to imagine many people who buy these do actually want the book and are super excited. I've never met one personally lol, but I'm sure they exist. Anytime I've ever met someone whether at a comic book store or convention who drops the dough on stuff like this was a flipper or independent dealer. But surely, there must be a large contingent of people who buy for passion, or else who would the flipper/dealers be catering to haha.

If I had a copy and someone offered me $30K for it I'd sell it in a heartbeat.  

[Cat-Man_America]

1 hour ago, LDarkseid1 said:

Crystal ball would certainly be helpful these days 

The closest thing I've seen to a crystal ball when looking at prices for modern era speculators...

[lou_fine]

3 hours ago, LDarkseid1 said:

3 hours ago, LordRahl said:

the same thing can be said of Silver Surfer #4 (there's the cover and "supposed" rarity if that farce of it being limited in distribution is still being perpetrated) and we know what SS 4s are selling for in 9.8 these days.

Yeah but come on now, that SS4 cover is truly a thing of beauty . No comparison to the ASM 667 cover. Well, not for me at least lol. I get the logic though.

The key thing to note here is whether that SS 4 auction result for 90K was an outlier, as one sale does not a marketplace make.  

The other thing is whether this pricing action or even anything resembling it will also filter down to the slightly lower grades or only in CGC 9.8?  

And come on now, you definitely can't compare SS4 to an ASM 667 variant because one book is over 50 years old and came into a marketplace where books were meant to be read with only the nerdy few collecting them, whereas the other is almost akin to a manufactured collectible right from the get go.  If I had a choice between these 2 books and money was not an object, I certainly know which one of these I would take in a heartbeat.  

[LDarkseid1]

5 minutes ago, lou_fine said:

The key thing to note here is whether that SS 4 auction result for 90K was an outlier, as one sale does not a marketplace make.  

The other thing is whether this pricing action or even anything resembling it will also filter down to the slightly lower grades or only in CGC 9.8?  

And come on now, you definitely can't compare SS4 to an ASM 667 variant because one book is over 50 years old and came into a marketplace where books were meant to be read with only the nerdy few collecting them, whereas the other is almost akin to a manufactured collectible right from the get go.  If I had a choice between these 2 books and money was not an object, I certainly know which one of these I would take in a heartbeat.  

Have to agree there 

[LordRahl]

36 minutes ago, lou_fine said:

The key thing to note here is whether that SS 4 auction result for 90K was an outlier, as one sale does not a marketplace make.  

The other thing is whether this pricing action or even anything resembling it will also filter down to the slightly lower grades or only in CGC 9.8?  

And come on now, you definitely can't compare SS4 to an ASM 667 variant because one book is over 50 years old and came into a marketplace where books were meant to be read with only the nerdy few collecting them, whereas the other is almost akin to a manufactured collectible right from the get go.  If I had a choice between these 2 books and money was not an object, I certainly know which one of these I would take in a heartbeat.  

Me too. But you and I and most of the folks frequenting the GA, SA boards are a bunch of crotchety old men yelling at the kids to get off my lawn... or stop buying variants for stupid money. Point being, we don't get it. And I think much of this comes down to just that, we don't get it because we don't collect moderns. But there are people out there that do and enjoy it. And the notion of "manufactured" rarity versus "real" rarity still doesn't matter as far as I'm concerned. Doesn't matter what you collect, GA, SA or moderns, there are "rare" books. Whether it's rare because they didn't survive as for GA or rare in grade because of x, y and z reason like some SA (Tomahawk 116 comes to mind) or rare because they only printed 200 of them as in the case of some variants. The end result is the same. Lack of supply and demand which outweighs the available supply. Honestly when it comes to rarity, I'd rather have it quantified like these modern variants. If there were only 200 or 500 or 1000 printed, you know what the possible supply is. It can never be over 200 or 500 or whatever. With a "rare" GA or SA book, we know the print runs were much, much larger and hey according to some on these boards, there are oodles and oodles of high grade books sitting in collections in people's closets. This can apparently be true of GA as well, given the recent Promise collection. So, in theory (and I know this is highly unlikely), but in theory, someone could uncover a couple dozen high grade Detective #1's next week. Or any other "rare" book which had a large print run but just didn't survive the ravages of time. 

[LordRahl]

50 minutes ago, lou_fine said:

The key thing to note here is whether that SS 4 auction result for 90K was an outlier, as one sale does not a marketplace make.  

Oh I hope that was an outlier. I'm sure it was, at least as sure as one can be in this current marketplace. But even as an outlier, the bar has been reset. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. I don't think you'll be able to buy a SS4 in 9.8 for anything even close to the $18K they were previously selling for. Even a 50% cut from $90K makes this a $45K book which is almost 3x what they were selling for a couple years ago. 

[cmzare]

Comments like, "with that kind of money, I would have purchased <INSERT MY FAVORITE COMIC HERE> instead," offer no value to this conversation.  You're just a back-seat driver who obviously hates freedom of choice.  Accept the bold move and move on.  ASM 667 Dell'Otto may not be your cup of tea, but to MANY others, it is definitely a key they wish to own.

This sale may also be quite an outlier if two people were in the hunt to finish off their collection.  Perhaps $20K-25K is where this comic really sits.  Obviously, that number seems to be 15K+ too high for many who've already commented.  Only time will tell if another copy becomes available again.  I know of at least one collector with THREE CGC 9.8 copies.  I doubt he will sell any of them, but you never know...

[10centcomics]

Sometimes I feel like we have to put down another type of collector to justify the legitimacy of the thing we collect. Let's be real, paying tens of thousands of dollars for any comic book, GA or modern variant, is pretty ridiculous in the grand scheme of things. As others have said above, let people collect what they want to collect. It's not hard to imagine that maybe it's a diehard Spidey fan, a diehard Dell'otto fan (maybe he likes Dell'otto the way we like Alex Schomburg or Matt Baker), a variant collector (a quick Google search tells me this is the top modern variant of the hobby), or a completionist looking to get every issue of ASM and its variants...

[buttock]

1 hour ago, 10centcomics said:

Sometimes I feel like we have to put down another type of collector to justify the legitimacy of the thing we collect. Let's be real, paying tens of thousands of dollars for any comic book, GA or modern variant, is pretty ridiculous in the grand scheme of things. As others have said above, let people collect what they want to collect. It's not hard to imagine that maybe it's a diehard Spidey fan, a diehard Dell'otto fan (maybe he likes Dell'otto the way we like Alex Schomburg or Matt Baker), a variant collector (a quick Google search tells me this is the top modern variant of the hobby), or a completionist looking to get every issue of ASM and its variants...

Exactly.  I hope that purchase made the buyer happy.  Who am I to judge them for what they bought?