cheetah

CGC 6.0 and a CGC 2.5 of the Black Cat sold for almost identical prices in the last half of 2020.

I looked through it this morning. With the exception of our own member Timely, all the top people are SA Spider-man collectors. Mr. Illmannered and his PCH hoard is the only other GA collector that I recognized. As I said before, applying SA spider-man collectors’ approaches to GA collectors seems misplaced. And if you want the best copy of a GA book, it’s usually going to be Church’s copy regardless of what the slab says. I’ve owned enough to see the difference. There are other pedigrees that have beautiful books and, occasionally, there might be a superior copy. For the Promise Collection, I’d want to compare the books side by side before I decided if they really better than Church’s copies.

If I recall, there was some serious punishment bidding going on in that auction. People recognized someone was unwilling to lose so others made them pay for it.

Yeah, no. I’ve seen your books.

Truth is that it is not common with GA. I used to put all my books in the registry and typically I was the only person with more than one or two books in a title. While I never collected the ‘big’ titles like Action or Timelys, I never saw a push by anyone to maximize GA points. It might be common with Amazing Spider-man but not anything I ever collected. And, FWIW, there are registry sets that include scans of all the books. It’s not a waste of time to scroll through some of the sets and see the cool books that are out there. I’ve seen the counterphobic attitude that registry is for narcissists and point chasers for years. I’d counter there is plenty of pettiness in this just like there is in the ‘true collector’ tripe that comes out on the boards with regularity.

I guess it’s like starting out with modern and copper age trees then progressing to golden age stuff.

There are a lot of endangered species on the Osa Peninsula which I can see from my house but I only grow one species, cocobolo, in my nursery. Almost all of the really rare things need mature forest to thrive so planting them in fallow pasture is never successful. Give me a few years and I will start with the rarer things.

One of the local capuchins I managed to photograph.

I have two troops of white-faced capuchin monkeys that live in the surrounding forest. They’ve been as close a 25 meters to my house. Lots of howler monkeys in the surrounding forest but they don’t get as close to the house as the capuchins. Squirrel and spider monkeys occur at a lower elevation do I see them on the road to my house but never close to my property. I grow a couple of species specifically as good sources for the capuchins.

The bird life has been the biggest change so far. The number of species in the recovering pasture has nearly doubled and I recently found a species that had not been recorded within 80 km of the area before. There is an ocelot that lives on my property that comes to visit whenever we do planting. We often find his tracks next to fresh holes when he investigates things at night.

I bought a brittle paged book to fill a hole in a run I was completing. Always assumed I would buy a better copy when it came along. It never did.

I’m just pointing out that there are enough ‘real collectors’ out there with deep pockets that a book like AW 2 is going to receive plenty of attention. No way it slips through on a weak sale, regardless of the marketing.

This is my tree nursery when it was first set up five years ago, and what it looked like in December 2020. I think we could grow as many as 100,000 trees each year if there were active projects that could use them.

Thanks Michael. Costa Rica is typical for a lot of places in that reforestation consists mainly of monoculture plots for agroforestry. Teak and African Palm probably make up 70% of the reforestation work in Costa Rica. For the work I do, it is entirely native species that I hand collect the seeds, then germinate and grow them for a year until they reach about 1 meter in height. Then we either plant them on my own property or donate them to the People of Boruca for their reforestation efforts. We have grown over 50,000 trees that have been planted in southwest Costa Rica so far and hope to plant another 25,000-30,000 trees this year. I purchased two power augers to take back to Costa Rica that should increase out planting capacity by over 600% this year.

I collect seeds. Granted, not to keep but to grow trees for reforestation. This is the culmination of a week of collecting and processing seeds from the Talamanca Mountains in Costa Rica.

Some other goodies from the past.

I really enjoyed my Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish. I'm not sure if I realized how special they were until much later. I sold them all to a fellow collector who really loved them, too, but who never shared anything on the board. Kind of a shame given the quality of books he had/has. I got my best ones from a single collection out of Covington, KY. The story was a small shop had closed down in the early 1960s and the owner had taken all the comics and put them into storage. They had never been read and were probably only touched 2-3 times before I got them. There were a crazy number of highest graded copies at that time.

Also the only copy on the census.

Uno. Just this one.

I do hope it’s not a case where someone paid a pittance for the collection and stands to make a small fortune reselling it.

Most likely your books will be delayed by three to five months and you will still pay expedited fees. And not get the grades you want.

Heck, I’m not even collecting at the moment and I’ve had plenty of oohs and aahs over these books. Can’t wait to see more of them and get vicarious thrills watching this thread devolve into mayhem.

Very likely true.

Has anyone here seen them in person yet? The new light-table scans from Heritage make them pop but I'd be interested if it accurately reflects the way they look in hand.