Sabretooth coming back?

[tod09]

Check out the winning bid on this Iron Fist 14 CGC 9.4. It isn't even centered well!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2185941283&category=35765&rd=1

 

I figure at 9.4 $200 to $250 is a fair price but that is insane. Not even a zoom in picture to truely guage if it's a 9.6 breakout canidate.

 

Tod

[musicmeta]

I thought this book was cooling off!

[shiverbones]

its weird, but prices on even non slabbed copies have been pretty high lately, routinely in the $80 range for a VF, which is pretty strong by ebay standards. Who Knows

[deathlok]

The high bidder has been buying a lot of HG key issues.

 

Daredevil #168 9.2 $161.50

Spiderman #300 9.2 $96.00

Spiderman #300 9.4 $122.50

Hulk #181 9.4 $2550.00

Hulk #181 9.2 $1300.00

FF #48 9.0 $1544.19 (inc raw 49,50)

 

Should be interesting to see if he flips them.

[chrisco37]

Ugh! Back to this over-hyped book again!

 

What's the big deal? Do you guys really think that Sabretooth is that important a villain? (This is to newer posters that haven't heard me rant about this book already).

 

I'll never understand it!

 

Chris

 

[shiverbones]

i read your rants, and found them entertaining! I have no love nor hate for the book. Its got a decent cover and i remember it from when i was a kid, so i have a copy. I would certainly let it go for a book i like better, but its not a dog. I do agree his importance is over rated, and has no bearing on anything these days. Maybe its the movie thing, who knows why, but it keeps selling....

[chrisco37]

Yeah...I know. It just burns my @$$ that a second-rate villain like Sabretooth generates all this excitement, when the character whose book he first appears doesn't get as much glory. I've always liked Iron Fist, and feel that his first appearance (MP#15) is more significant (to me, at least). Yeah, it's a bias, but it's also alot harder book to find in HG!

 

I loved the old IF series. Really good Byrne work.

 

Some many things have been "hinted" about Sabretooth that you can't even keep them straight. And none of those things have ever materialized into anything of importance. He's a bad Wolverine clone.

 

Chris

[tod09]

MP 15 is harder to get in high grade though there are a good amount out there in all grades. Iron Fist 14 came out in 1975 when they changed the policy of returning books. Before 1974 they would mark when a book came in via distributor's ink spray on the edge or a date stamp. This will let them know when they need to return the unsold book to get credit back. The unsold returned books would/should get destroyed thus lowering surviving issues. In 1975 Marvel dropped the cost to the stores but also told them that they can't return any more books for credit. This is one of the major reasons why there are so many more post 1975 books then pre 1975 books and why pre 1975 books would be the best books to buy for investment potential. Also you should see any books after 1975 with stamps or ink. In short, there are a ton of IM 14's out there and he is a lame villian but you got to love that sweet cover which might be the main draw to owning this book.

 

Tod

[BronzeBruce13]

MP 15 is harder to get in high grade though there are a good amount out there in all grades. Iron Fist 14 came out in 1975 when they changed the policy of returning books. Before 1974 they would mark when a book came in via distributor's ink spray on the edge or a date stamp. This will let them know when they need to return the unsold book to get credit back. The unsold returned books would/should get destroyed thus lowering surviving issues. In 1975 Marvel dropped the cost to the stores but also told them that they can't return any more books for credit. This is one of the major reasons why there are so many more post 1975 books then pre 1975 books and why pre 1975 books would be the best books to buy for investment potential. Also you should see any books after 1975 with stamps or ink. In short, there are a ton of IM 14's out there and he is a lame villian but you got to love that sweet cover which might be the main draw to owning this book.

 

Tod

 

Good info... MP 15 in 9.6 is not common at all. Maybe 4-5 total ever circulated that I saw.

[shadroch]

MP 15 is harder to get in high grade though there are a good amount out there in all grades. Iron Fist 14 came out in 1975 when they changed the policy of returning books. Before 1974 they would mark when a book came in via distributor's ink spray on the edge or a date stamp. This will let them know when they need to return the unsold book to get credit back. The unsold returned books would/should get destroyed thus lowering surviving issues. In 1975 Marvel dropped the cost to the stores but also told them that they can't return any more books for credit. This is one of the major reasons why there are so many more post 1975 books then pre 1975 books and why pre 1975 books would be the best books to buy for investment potential. Also you should see any books after 1975 with stamps or ink. In short, there are a ton of IM 14's out there and he is a lame villian but you got to love that sweet cover which might be the main draw to owning this book.

 

Tod

 

Going to have to disagree with some of that statement.

While it is true that by 1975 Marvel was selling to some stores direct, the majority of sales were still done on newstands and those books were fully returnable. You can still find inking up to about 1979 when Marvel started trying out different boxes to indicate if book was non- returnable. Anyone who has read any of Charles ramblings on his Mile High 2 collection knows where an awful lot of returned books ended up

The US went thru a severe recession in 1973-74 and less books were printed and bought but by '75 the economy had picked up nicely and having more discreationary income,kids began buying more comics.

[tod09]

Thanks for correcting my info. I had always thought that 1975 was the cutoff date for not being able to return books. It is good to know the exact date since I didn't intend to provide any misinformation on this board.

 

Tod

[Kevin76]

Check out the winning bid on this Iron Fist 14 CGC 9.4. It isn't even centered well!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2185941283&category=35765&rd=1

 

I figure at 9.4 $200 to $250 is a fair price but that is insane. Not even a zoom in picture to truely guage if it's a 9.6 breakout canidate.

 

Tod

 

And some people think what i pay for books is stupid.

[500Club]

1975 was also about the time that Phil Seuling was able to get his direct distribution system up and running smoothly...

[shadroch]

Seagate Distributors were the first to handle non-returnable books as far as I know. They had a bunch of mis-starts before they got the thing up and running smoothly. some of their accounts would buy at the nonreturnable discount and try to return them elsewhere and the newsstand distributors were a shady bunch which did not care or any competition.I'm not sure what year it was that the majority of Marvels would be sold on the direct market. I would think it was in the early 80s, but that would be conjecture.

[OldGuy]

Check out the winning bid on this Iron Fist 14 CGC 9.4. It isn't even centered well!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2185941283&category=35765&rd=1

 

I figure at 9.4 $200 to $250 is a fair price but that is insane. Not even a zoom in picture to truely guage if it's a 9.6 breakout canidate.

 

Tod

 

And some people think what i pay for books is stupid.

 

I think this falls under the same category as you and your ASM 14. As long as he likes it and feels good about what he paid then how is it different then you over paying for your ASM and feeling good about it?

[HighVoltage]

Regarding direct market & newstand distribution - this info comes from Steven Grant's 'Permanent Damage' column, hosted by Comic Book Resources. (just FYI stuff for you guys - I don't claim to know exactly how accurate it all is, but it is interesting - apologies for the lengthiness...)

=======

 

"Technically, newsstand distribution of comics became problematic around 1974, when there were great changes going through the magazine market (not to mention massive inflation), and comics sales were plunging (particularly for DC, but across the board). This perhaps not coincidentally also corresponded to the rise of interest in specific comics, such as CONAN THE BARBARIAN (very popular on college campuses throughough the early '70s) and HOWARD THE DUCK. A problem was the distribution system: due to the economics of distribution, distributors were credited for every unsold comic returned, and this led to the regular process of whole comics runs being pulped by distributors – they'd simply pick, oh, this month's CONAN, strip all the covers and send the whole lot back without ever putting the books on the stands to see if they'd sell, and since all comics were equal to the distribution chains, they didn't really know which comics were hot properties and which weren't. It had seriously gotten to the point where they could actually make more money "pulping" comics for return credit than they could by putting them on the market.

 

Around the same time, antique stores etc. were starting to sell old comic books, and the back issue market -- particularly of Golden and early Silver Age comics -- was taking off and becoming an economic force. This period saw the first publication of the Overstreet Price Guide, which eventually became the Blue Book for the collector's market. Because these shops were getting comics fans in, some shops got the idea to also sell new comics, which they had to get from distributors. Before long, it wasn't rare to see these shop owners, who generally did know what was hot in the market (CONAN; HOWARD THE DUCK) and what wasn't, into the distributors on delivery day to pull their own comics, which some distributors allowed and some didn't. (I briefly worked for one of these distributors in 1973; I know whereof I speak, as I watched them in action.)

 

NY comics retailer and convention boss Phil Seuling as early as 1973 began trying to convince DC specifically to sell their comics directly to him. DC was loathe to go around it's "real' distributor, IND (the national chain, paradoxically called Independent News Distribution), which the company had longstanding ties to and which was now a brother part of Kinney Corporation (which a couple years later would change its name to Warner Communications). But IND turned out not to be particularly upset by the development; they were just as glad to not have to fill precious rack space with comics when PENTHOUSE and PLAYBOY were so much more profitable in the limited space. By 1974, DC was experimenting with directly supplying comics to Phil, and by 1975 others around the country were trying to get comics directly from Marvel and DC. As the back issue venues started getting more and more new comics in, the comics shop was born.

 

Also feeding into this was underground distribution. Since the late '60s, the counterculture had developed its own magazines, newspapers and comics, and a haphazard distribution system had sprung up. As the Supreme Court's obscenity decision of '73, making the definition of obscenity a matter of "local standards." quickly shut down a lot of underground publishing, including a lot of underground comics, the counterculture distribution chains scrambled for new material to distribute. They caught wind of DC and Marvel feeding comics directly to outlets, and decided to get in on the act.

 

The benefit of the system to Marvel and DC was that all this product was non-returnable. Don't know whether it was Phil who proposed this as a carrot to get the ball rolling, or whether it was an unassailable condition before the companies would even consider such a "risk," but it meant Marvel and DC were no longer subject to the weird system of credits and paybacks; even if sales were down, the new system meant money came in and stayed in.

 

By 1976, these "underground" distributors (and by then I was working in an advisory capacity for one of them as well) were feeding comics to record shops, head shops, etc. - anywhere they could get them in. A problem they had was that they were still taking returns, but had nowhere to send them, so their economy was shaky even as DC and Marvel's became more stable. But they also made putting a comics shop together much easier, because they were generally much more eager to accommodate customers than IND was, and neither Marvel nor DC was ready to start dealing directly with hundreds of little stores all around the country; they just didn't have the marketing set-up for it. Underground comics had spurred a lot of "fan publishing" in the early '70s, but now there were comics springing up, like STAR*REACH and the Eclipse line, designed to hook into these new systems when they wouldn't have had a prayer of hooking into IND, so there was new product getting out there too.

 

By the late '70s, several things were happening. A lot of comics shops had sprung up, and it wasn't lost on Marvel and DC that a) an increasingly large part of their business was coming from that sector while their newsstand sales continued to shrink. New publishing houses, most of them short-lived (it's easy to underestimate the financial burdens of comics publishing, something that continues to be true today), were springing up right and left. The back issue market had fueled a new issue market. And the underground distributors were collapsing from their own weight; their economics were catching up with them. >From the ashes of one of these collapsed distributors, WIND, rose Capital City Distribution, owned by the two men who had handled WIND's comics distribution, to service comics shops throughout the Midwest that had come to use WIND as their source. About the same time, Steve Geppi opened Diamond Distribution to serve comics accounts on the East Coast. These became feeder systems to basically the specific, captive, growing market of comics shops, which were now using new comics as a lure to get customers in to buy back issues, which was still where the profit was for most of the shops. CCD and Diamond (and the other handful of distributors) were subject to the same conditions Phil Seuling had been subject to: all purchases were final, no returns. And both distributors received their comics directly from the comics companies (actually, they were drop shipped from the printers), hence what became known as the Direct Market. This was an enormously profitable set up, particularly for Marvel, and it fueled the growth of comics in the '80s. The existence now of shops dedicated to comics and distributors whose business it was to move comics also led to the explosion of comics publishing in the '80s."

 

[500Club]

Here's another IF 14 9.4 to watch...

 

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2186703492&category=35761