Newsstand vs Direct Edition, At Grader's Discretion?? 4 4

[paqart]

8 hours ago, bababooey said:

If fixing the misconception of rarer newsstands for the 7 years prior to 1986 was the goal, congratulations!  You've done it at the expense of the 17 plus years after 1986 and beyond.    

I recognize that the chart's original intent but the five year increments on the bottom are clear and the equivalence of the "lessening" on the left/right is also clear. 

The lack of specificity makes its message defensible with the statements you've added above & on your own site....but those caveats don't carry over to places like RARE COMICS who can host your graphic as a stepping stone to their Chucky charts.  Unlike some here I have an appreciation for some of the content on that blog but the data sourcing flaw (chuck) hurts most of the conclusions reached.

You're more than welcome to "level whatever" my raw numbers above to create more clarity for 2004 ASM sales, direct sales vs newsstand copies sold.   Also a minor correction to my previous post ASM was a monthly title (14 issues/ year) at the time NOT 3X per month. 

I would even hypothesize that the 2000/2001 publishers statements are reflective of a secondary tipping point for this title's direct sales vs newsstands.  The direct sales boost ASM enjoyed during the start of JMS' run (v2 #30) doesn't create much change in the publishers copies sold.  Direct sales went from just under 50K to just under 100K in one year, that increase was obviously offset by lost sell-through at newsstands.  Marvel has revisited this post reboot diminishing sales model hundreds of times since but the steadiness of holding a "copies sold" range between 113K and 124K from 2000 through 2004 is indicative of some stability in total sales for the title.  A much larger portion of the copies sold during the Byrne v2 reboot were newsstand issues, in fact I would estimate that there are probably as many copies of some random ASM v2 newsstands as there are direct copies. 

That's 15 years after 1986.

RE: Byrne ASM V2 rarity: I buy a lot of these but they are nowhere near as common as directs, if availability is anything to go by. I have done counts of these on offer at HipComic and ebay and found that the newsstand editions were between 25x-75x less available than their direct counterparts at the time I bought them. That has changed recently, thanks to a couple of sellers who have dropped a few dozen slabbed newsstand editions of these on eBay, but they remain less common than the directs. I expect that will change as soon as those comics sell. Other comics, like ASM 300, appears to be more common (slightly) as a newsstand edition. 

Here is a case in point: I have been trying to put together a full run of the 2005 Supergirl title for the past two years. I just took a look at the first 300 eBay listings for Supergirl 1, keeping in mind that there are three covers for this and two of them have newsstand versions. Out of those 300 comics, two were newsstand editions of the same cover variant (Churchill, both offered by Mile High Comics for around $400), and zero copies of the Turner variant. I also checked the sold listings just now. There were five pages of listings (250 total), some of which had multiple direct copies of #1, but only one newsstand sale on March 13 (Turner variant). In other words, if you wanted that comic at any time in the last ten weeks, unless you saw that listing on that day, you'd be out of luck. By my "availability scarcity", that issue has a rating of 1:76, meaning available on one out of 76 days. With more data going back longer, that number would likely change, but for what I just checked, that is what it's rating is. However, try and find a newsstand copy of the last issue, #67. I've never seen one. eBay has none on offer right now, and no sold items come up for the default time period eBay searches for (around 3 months). The availability scarcity for that issue is 1:PrintRun until I find two or more copies.

For comparison, there are 10 copies of FC #9 on eBay right now and one (in 9.4) on Heritage for the discerning collector. Every time I've looked for that comic, I have found it instantly. Meanwhile, there are many newsstand editions from Supergirl and other titles that I have never seen. Try and put together a newsstand run of Amazing Spider-Man from #600-700. At the moment, I have multiples of #600 and #700, but only about 20 issues in between. I've seen about 25 others available at one time or another (at prices I didn't feel like paying at the time, or in the wrong condition), but the rest simply haven't appeared. I ran into a dealer at the last NYCC trying to put together this run but was only half successful at that time, despite the large volume of comics he handles.

 

[paqart]

8 hours ago, valiantman said:

 

Ultimately what survived means a lot more than what was printed, and if the charts are wrong... they're wrong in the opposite direction of your claims.  To follow your advice would actually make them worse... at the expense of common sense.

Thanks to this thread, I just made a post on Benjamin Nobel's RareComics blog. I think it is pertinent here, so here it is:

Benjamin, I think I have figured out a way to rank the scarcity of newsstand comics with a single numerical value. For the time being, I'm calling it "availability scarcity" or "availability" for short. To calculate it, just search through the offered and sold items on eBay for any given time period and find out how many newsstands were sold over that time period. Then, divide the number of days searched by the number of copies found. 

For instance, I just did this for Supergirl #1 (2005), without taking into consideration whether it was the Turner or Churchill newsstand edition, and came up with an availability rating of 1:76, or simply "-76" (negative 76) for the Turner version and -37 for the Churchill version. Meaning, over the course of any given 76-day period, you could expect to find only one copy of the Turner version on offer at eBay. None of the copies I found (two Churchill cover variants on offer and one Turner variant sold) were slabbed or in better than 9.0 condition. 

You could also compare the number of newsstands to the number of directs (that number was around 1:150 for Supergirl #1/Churchill and 1:300 for the Turner cover). However, I like the availability number better because it cuts through discussions of print runs and percentage of newsstand to directs printed, and then dealing with survivability rates.

For comics that do not appear at all for sale or as sold items, like the newsstand edition of Supergirl #67, which I haven't seen a single copy of in over a year of looking, would be given either a "print run" or "infinity" rating. That means that until copies are found for sale, the newsstand edition exists in a -1:PrintRun ratio for the purpose of finding one to buy. These comics theoretically exist (and likely do) but for collectors they may as well not exist until their existence is proven.

Now let's look at one of your favorites, ASM 300. Every time I've looked for a newsstand copy, I've found one. That suggests that its availability rating would be 1. However, I don't look every day, so let's take a look at the sales history. I just looked at the most recent 14-day period and found 57 sales. That means that on any given day, one could expect to find four or more copies available. That results in a positive availability score of +4. 

For any "non-scarce" comic like ASM 300, a 14-day period should be enough to establish negative scarcity (or positive availability). For comics that are truly difficult to find, like the Supergirls just mentioned, one has to keep going back until a sale is found, if any. Because the search window varies, that number should be included in the score. So, the ASM 300 score becomes +4/14 and the Turner Supergirl #1 becomes -76/76.

[paqart]

25 minutes ago, paqart said:

Thanks to this thread...

Although I have him on ignore, apparently Lazyboy's supercilious emoticon reactions remain visible. I think I see a way to improve the ignore function.

[Spawnfreak]

On 5/27/2021 at 5:34 PM, valiantman said:

Welcome to the board you joined yesterday.  Perhaps you don't realize how BIG of a "poser fanboy desperate to follow the trends" I actually am.

I'll give you a hint...

That's one aisle of my poser fanboy CGC slab collection.

You'll also find my poser fanboy photo in every Overstreet price guide for the past 15 years, but that's just poser fanboy central registry, really.

Just in case you need storage space, you can send all those to me!

[Get Marwood & I]

7 hours ago, paqart said:

Thanks to this thread, I just made a post on Benjamin Nobel's RareComics blog. I think it is pertinent here, so here it is:

Benjamin, I think I have figured out a way to rank the scarcity of newsstand comics with a single numerical value. For the time being, I'm calling it "availability scarcity" or "availability" for short. To calculate it, just search through the offered and sold items on eBay for any given time period and find out how many newsstands were sold over that time period. Then, divide the number of days searched by the number of copies found. 

For instance, I just did this for Supergirl #1 (2005), without taking into consideration whether it was the Turner or Churchill newsstand edition, and came up with an availability rating of 1:76, or simply "-76" (negative 76) for the Turner version and -37 for the Churchill version. Meaning, over the course of any given 76-day period, you could expect to find only one copy of the Turner version on offer at eBay. None of the copies I found (two Churchill cover variants on offer and one Turner variant sold) were slabbed or in better than 9.0 condition. 

You could also compare the number of newsstands to the number of directs (that number was around 1:150 for Supergirl #1/Churchill and 1:300 for the Turner cover). However, I like the availability number better because it cuts through discussions of print runs and percentage of newsstand to directs printed, and then dealing with survivability rates.

For comics that do not appear at all for sale or as sold items, like the newsstand edition of Supergirl #67, which I haven't seen a single copy of in over a year of looking, would be given either a "print run" or "infinity" rating. That means that until copies are found for sale, the newsstand edition exists in a -1:PrintRun ratio for the purpose of finding one to buy. These comics theoretically exist (and likely do) but for collectors they may as well not exist until their existence is proven.

Now let's look at one of your favorites, ASM 300. Every time I've looked for a newsstand copy, I've found one. That suggests that its availability rating would be 1. However, I don't look every day, so let's take a look at the sales history. I just looked at the most recent 14-day period and found 57 sales. That means that on any given day, one could expect to find four or more copies available. That results in a positive availability score of +4. 

For any "non-scarce" comic like ASM 300, a 14-day period should be enough to establish negative scarcity (or positive availability). For comics that are truly difficult to find, like the Supergirls just mentioned, one has to keep going back until a sale is found, if any. Because the search window varies, that number should be included in the score. So, the ASM 300 score becomes +4/14 and the Turner Supergirl #1 becomes -76/76.

I love that people like you exist Paqart, people who are so enthused about comic minutiae that they are prepared to stick their neck out and post their theories, thoughts and suggested ways of categorising the comics we love, and which some of us love discussing. Whatever the merits of your scarcity proposal (it doesn't work for me I'm afraid) I salute you for proposing it. 

[Cpt Kirk]

On 5/27/2021 at 3:09 PM, GarBear said:

I looked for any topic related to Newsstand vs Direct Edition without any success.  I use MyComicShop to sell my comics.  I was a collector for about five years starting in 1988 with my 14 year old son.  Stuck them away and close to retirement I was nudged by my son to start selling them, I start that in 2016 the year I retired.  Soon after I got setup selling them I noticed some comics would sell immediately and others at the same price wouldn't.  This puzzled me so I went back to see what I could see.  The only difference I could see was each comic that I sold right away had a UPC code and was dated after 1979 and prior to 2013.  After some fumbling around I found a few discussions on general internet sites about newsstand edition comics.  Walaa!  Some comics got rare for a reason!  Smart collectors were taking advantage of my ignorance and snapping up those more rare comics because they knew more than me.  That's the name of the game I suppose.

Well, since then I've been pretty careful about not just sending my comics in for grading, noting the difference of the newsstand vs direct edition but also how CGC noted if a comic was a Newsstand Edition or not.  Well, this week, I find CGC has a "policy" about this.  It's at the discretion of the grader whether a comic is "different enough" being a newsstand vs direct.  This doesn't mean the UPC vs Spider-Man's face (UPC missing) but rather "the grader" at CGC must decide if the whole cover is different enough to get the prize of being noted as a "NEWSSTAND EDITION"!

After reading a very good article by J-Monty Comics:  

What's the Difference Between Newsstand and Direct Editions in Comics? - J-MONTY COMICS There is a lot of confusion in the market about the difference between newsstand and direct editions. Knowing which newsstands are rare and which ones are common will keep you from getting taken advantage of and also help you find deals - and there are a lot of deals to be had if you know what to look for. jmontycomics.com

I found someone was pretty succinct on the matter!  This made me even "more well versed" in the overall issue!  So, when I noted a couple of my issues on MyComicShop were placed without noting its being a newsstand edition I contacted them and, as a customer, requested they add this notation to the description of my two comics.  Not-so-easy-I-found!  Their statement was if CGC, those "discetioned graders" don't put that in the label, MyComicShop "generally" doesn't either.  When I called CGC, noted above, their policy was very strict, thanks for calling, bye!

So, back to MyComicShop.  Did you know they've changed their pricing for consignment comics?  Coming by the end of the year is a monthly charge for comics that have not sold.  So, not only the 10% but now a monthly "storage fee" as well.  Oh, and CGC upped their prices as too!  Now to get the "professional grader" to do the "research" the cost went up another 10%, pressing went up 87.5% (no more quick press at $8 each, 15 comic minimum).  So a comic used to cost $28 (non-member) now costs $37.  My math tells me I just got dinged an additional 24.3% off the top.  So, after the initial charges for pressing/grading (not to mention handling fee and shipping back fee) I make that much less per comic.  For me those costs, which typically run around $550 for 15 comics when all is said and done  CGC has jumped my fee to roughly $683.65.  I'm a small guy competing in a corporate world of comic sales.  To stay even isn't an issue, I have no overhead but with taxes on my additional income, with the additional costs now by both CGC and MyComicShop, it's just getting a bit much!  My hobby just got a little less fun....

And now back to my original thought.  Newsstand Edition vs Direct Edition.  No help from either company in that arena!  Although I know they need to make money to stay alive, I'm not asking for something that costs a lot.  Simply, I'm asking for CGC to do the work I pay them for and note my Newsstand Editions.  It really doesn't take any extra time.  Gee, between 1979 and 2013, has a UPC code with only 2 numbers!  Goodness, that took me about one-second.  OK, now everyone can sound off on this when there's time.

Good Sales To You All!!

GarBear

Thanks GarBear.  That's one of the more interesting posts I've read in quite awhile.  Comic book collectors can be nutty completionists, and therefore those newsstand prices can get pretty nutty sometimes if there's a lot of demand.

And now that I think about it after having collected comic books since 1971, the collecting bug and pride of ownership has been a major driver in prices for as along as I've been collecting.  I can't explain why I needed to find every single newsstand issue of Batman, Detective, Superman and Action Comics... I just had to have them.   It was insane.

Edited May 29, 2021 by Cpt Kirk

[Cpt Kirk]

On 5/27/2021 at 5:34 PM, valiantman said:

Welcome to the board you joined yesterday.  Perhaps you don't realize how BIG of a "poser fanboy desperate to follow the trends" I actually am.

I'll give you a hint...

That's one aisle of my poser fanboy CGC slab collection.

You'll also find my poser fanboy photo in every Overstreet price guide for the past 15 years, but that's just poser fanboy central registry, really.

holy cats dude.....  and I thought I was crazy.... lol.   Congats on amassing such an amazing collection of slabs.

[ThothAmon]

I love newsstands especially because of the prices they garner and the surprising fact that I have lots of them. The numbers don’t lie. Like it or lump it. 
 

[Warlord]

1 hour ago, Cpt Kirk said:

holy cats dude.....  and I thought I was crazy.... lol.   Congats on amassing such an amazing collection of slabs.

Some of them are NOT bagged! Argh!  MUST... BAG...THEM...ASAP!

[MetalPSI]

3 hours ago, Get Marwood & I said:

I love that people like you exist Paqart, people who are so enthused about comic minutiae that they are prepared to stick their neck out and post their theories, thoughts and suggested ways of categorising the comics we love, and which some of us love discussing. Whatever the merits of your scarcity proposal (it doesn't work for me I'm afraid) I salute you for proposing it. 

It's as the English say, A brave proposal 

[paqart]

5 hours ago, Get Marwood & I said:

I love that people like you exist Paqart, people who are so enthused about comic minutiae that they are prepared to stick their neck out and post their theories, thoughts and suggested ways of categorising the comics we love, and which some of us love discussing. Whatever the merits of your scarcity proposal (it doesn't work for me I'm afraid) I salute you for proposing it. 

To each his own. For me though, I just realized while I was replying to a post here that I was making bidding decisions based on market availability. I hadn't made a rule of any kind, or a formula for testing how available a comic was, but if I'd been looking and hadn't seen one in months or years, I paid a lot more for it. Therefore, availability had a strong effect on perceived value to me. Whatever the relationship to actual extant copies, that meant that sellers got more money for their comics than if I didn't perceive market availability as scarce. Once I realized I was doing that, it was pretty easy to come up with a method to determine whether my perception of availability matched the reality. That said, when prices go up, comics become more available, hence the ease of finding ASM 300's. My newsstand Hulk #1's (2008) were very hard to find over the last couple of years but have recently become much more available now that the direct edition is selling for more than $500.

[paqart]

5 hours ago, Get Marwood & I said:

I love that people like you exist Paqart, people who are so enthused about comic minutiae that they are prepared to stick their neck out and post their theories, thoughts and suggested ways of categorising the comics we love, and which some of us love discussing. Whatever the merits of your scarcity proposal (it doesn't work for me I'm afraid) I salute you for proposing it. 

A question: In what way does it not work for you? This method compares availability over time as opposed to proportion of print run minus destroyed/lost comics. As a metric, it is easier to estimate. Even if it doesn't accurately reflect proportion of print run, estimating proportion of print run has a lot of problems also. On balance, what matters to me is whether I can get a copy, not how many were published. ASM 300, for instance, is so easy to find that I have very little interest in the comic.

[Get Marwood & I]

2 minutes ago, paqart said:

A question: In what way does it not work for you? This method compares availability over time as opposed to proportion of print run minus destroyed/lost comics. As a metric, it is easier to estimate. Even if it doesn't accurately reflect proportion of print run, estimating proportion of print run has a lot of problems also. On balance, what matters to me is whether I can get a copy, not how many were published. ASM 300, for instance, is so easy to find that I have very little interest in the comic.

It's a personal thing, but I can't get on with numbers like -76, +4 and such which are determined by multiple, changing variables. +4 doesn't mean anything to me, in the moment. It's a bit like Jon McClure's variant descriptors - Type 1a, 3b etc. They don't mean anything to me in isolation without having to look them up. I need something else to bring them to life, something that tells me what is going on without having to make a mental calculation or refer to something. If you told me a given Spidey newsstand was a -87 book, I would have to stop and think about what that meant, and what it meant in comparison to other issues. 

 

[paqart]

11 minutes ago, Get Marwood & I said:

It's a personal thing, but I can't get on with numbers like -76, +4 and such which are determined by multiple, changing variables. +4 doesn't mean anything to me, in the moment. It's a bit like Jon McClure's variant descriptors - Type 1a, 3b etc. They don't mean anything to me in isolation without having to look them up. I need something else to bring them to life, something that tells me what is going on without having to make a mental calculation or refer to something. If you told me a given Spidey newsstand was a -87 book, I would have to stop and think about what that meant, and what it meant in comparison to other issues. 

 

Thanks for the explanation. For reference, I tend to pass on anything with an availability score of -7 or higher (meaning, in the plus direction). 

[Get Marwood & I]

8 minutes ago, paqart said:

Thanks for the explanation. For reference, I tend to pass on anything with an availability score of -7 or higher (meaning, in the plus direction). 

                                                                                                                                         

[Lazyboy]

6 hours ago, ThothAmon said:

The numbers don’t lie.

Which numbers?

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics."

[valiantman]

@paqart

It feels like we're heading toward some kind of "comic-metrics" future where there are measures (always approximate) for things like availability, relative scarcity, CGC-worthiness (generally a factor of raw value and condition), and some other numbers that will be variable but still possible to estimate with some publicly-available source.

We're not heading toward something that will be accepted by everyone, so anyone thinking we'll eventually satisfy everyone should just forget it.  It has been 50 years and people are still arguing about which books are included in the Bronze Age and which aren't... and that ink has been dry for at least 40 of those years.

As far as the negative/positive numbers, I think I like them better than anything using the 1: symbol, since that's the standard for 1:25 ratio books, which already causes confusion because a 1:25 book might have been printed at 1:25, it might have been printed at 1:50 because so few retailers qualified for 1:25, and it might have been printed at 1:5 because the publisher can (and does) do whatever they want.  We're most likely going to need to abandon any 1: symbols since they're messed up in their original usage, and any future usage would inherit that baggage.

But the negative/positive idea doesn't automatically "make sense" to me, a data nerd, so I'm betting they're not going to work for the non-data nerd crowd either.  We might be better off with something like "copies available per year".  As you mentioned, there are books that wouldn't even score a 1 on the measure of "copies available per year" regardless of whether that's eBay, instagram, Heritage, or all of them combined.  Since you're focused on raw books, it will be very hard to do that kind of measurement, but for the books you follow, you may already have it.

For CGC graded books, we have the CGC census, so "copies available per year" for CGC slabs (or a particular CGC grade) might be very close to a percentage of the number on the census. Just comparing the census to the GPA sales records, we'll start seeing which books are higher percentage "hot potatoes" (they don't stay in anyone's hands very long) and which books are more often "locked away" (they don't come up for sale despite the CGC census showing the counts).

These thoughts apply to all comics, not just the newsstand subset - and I've always found that studying something very small in a lot of detail can help when you need to try to understand something much larger.  The Pareto Principle generally says the same thing, but we'll have to avoid using anything that has a name like "Pareto Principle" because people in hobbies really hate it when you turn their "happy, happy fun time" into something that feels at all like learning. 

[ThothAmon]

49 minutes ago, Lazyboy said:

Which numbers?

Since you’ve asked I’ll share my formula for determining the relative scarcity of  newsstands. Hope it helps. 
 

[paqart]

42 minutes ago, valiantman said:

@paqart

we'll have to avoid using anything that has a name like "Pareto Principle" because people in hobbies really hate it when you turn their "happy, happy fun time" into something that feels at all like learning. 

I have the feeling that I enjoy this aspect of the hobby because of my interest in statistical analysis, which led me to pursue my PhD studies (and complete them). In this case, the problem is that the data cannot be known, so it must be estimated based on circumstantial evidence (like many statistical problems). The question then becomes, what is the best evidence? Or, what is the most practical evidence to achieve the goal? In comic book collecting, I think the practicality of estimating availability outweighs the value of an estimate of existing copies in circulation. The reason is that online sales data is more readily available and more likely representative of the market than data on print runs. In other words, I have a higher confidence interval for an availability estimate than a copies in circulation estimate.

[Lazyboy]

2 minutes ago, ThothAmon said:

Since you’ve asked I’ll share my formula for determining the relative scarcity of  newsstands. Hope it helps.

That seems about as relevant as the rest of the attempts.