tth2

I'm in Japan now, which is 13 hours ahead of US east coast time, which makes staying up even harder. I don't even try to stay up and bid during the floor auctions, I just put in my best shot during online bidding and then go to sleep (which is probably why I've barely won anything the last few years). Actually, the bidding will probably go so long now that I might be able to catch the back half of the floor auctions when I wake up!

I don't think they'll forget about the auctions per se, but those sessions are going to be such marathons that people targeting items that'll come up in the back half of a session might have gotten distracted, fallen asleep or lost the will to live, or all of the above, by the time that their lot comes up.

I'll take the over.

How about marvel chipping? Prices much stronger on non MC copies. The number on the label cannot hide that marvel chipping I don't follow transactions in lower grade books, so MC isn't too relevant to the books I track. But if the market is indeed penalizing books with MC that are getting higher grades from CGC than are warranted, then that's good to hear.

1. These Boards represent only a small minority of the market, and based on transactions in the market, I think it's very clear that people are buying the label and not the comic. 2. Based on many of the miswrapped/mis-cut monstrosities proudly posted on these Boards, I'd say that the "buy the comic not the label" group is also only a small minority of the folks on these Boards.

Wasn't the greatest comic book collection ever stored in a basement for decades? In any event, while I normally wouldn't advocate storing valuable stuff in a basement, we're only talking a couple of months here.

It's not pre-1970, but I knew the number of high grade copies in the Census was immense. It wouldn't surprise me if it is by far the most common 5-figure comic. I could've also picked any of the 1968 #1s (Cap 100, Iron Man 1, Hulk 102, Sub-Mariner 1), or really many post-1964 Marvel SA books. The point being that I believe the SA Marvel market is both deep and fungible. As I often like to say, the only thing stopping anyone from putting together a 9.4 SA ASM run within a couple of weeks is whether they can write the check.

Anyone know what the asking price was?

When people will still be arguing about it.

The collection had stagnated as very few new books were coming to market, and I was getting blown out of the water on those few that did come to market. Also, I was becoming disenchanted with CGC because of pressing and wasn't happy at the prospect of my books becoming middle of the road copies, so I decided that rather than fighting the market, I would sell into it. For the Flashes, that turned out to be a good decision because the prices realized remained the high water mark for a long time, even though as expected the Census ended up getting seriously diluted. For example, the Western Penn Flash 129 in 9.4 is now one of many 9.4 copies and below many 9.6 and 9.8 copies that have subsequently been slabbed by CGC.

Definitely don't store them somewhere in the house while it's being renovated. Why can't you store them wherever you're staying while you're waiting for the renovations to be finished? Or maybe in a friend's basement? There've been so many horror stories about theft from self-storage places that I'd be concerned about using off-site storage.

I am really enjoying this trip down memory lane to the 20th century, except this time it's to the 1950s!

To label collectors they're fungible, but we comic collectors are interested in and buy the comic not the label. I'm really enjoying these trips down memory lane to the 20th century!

This. As incredible as Marvel's record was from the release of "Iron Man" through the final Avengers movie, its record since then has been equally incredible. But unfortunately, incredibly bad rather than incredibly good. It seems like it's just been flop after flop.

If I'd read your post before the rise of the internet, I would've wholeheartedly agreed. Back in the day, dealers would sell at Guide or multiples thereof and buy at half of Guide (or less), to the extent they'd buy your comics at all, and price rises were incremental except for the hottest books. But post-internet, eBay, auction houses, CGC and GPA, transaction costs are around 10-20% at most and prices can move up very fast.

I'd be willing to bet the 145 9.8 copies, 369 9.6 copies, 567 9.4 copies, 758 9.2 copies and 1033 9.0 copies of Incredible Hulk 181 in the census that comics are fungible and there is a deep market.

Given that we've got a booming economy, full employment, wages rising faster than inflation, US and global stock markets at record highs, gold (the metal, not the age) at record highs, crypto at record highs, and real estate prices that remain very high, wouldn't that indicate that comic prices should be rising?

I'm suddenly getting this image of a bunch of workers on a Friday at the printing factory, after having had "a few" beers at lunch, saying "Let's do something that'll have all these nerds tearing their hair out in 80 years!"

It's no different than all those sports card guys breaking boxes. They were paying thousands of dollars to risk finding out publicly (because most of these guys were doing them live on Youtube) that there were no valuable cards in there. But if they did find some super valuable card in there, then they more than made up for their losses. So I guess the willingness of people to reholder their Superman #1s and take the gamble will really depend on the difference in value between the prints.

Uh, what do you think that picture was?

I always assumed it was long time friends, people who aren't that active in the hobby, and the increasingly high number of people turned away by heritage. That might be the case, but regardless of their motivation for consigning to Clink, I'm not sympathetic if they achieve lower prices than expected.

They're the Schrodinger's Cat Superman 1s.

People willing to take the “Oops, I’ve now got 2 Actions 1s” risk They're investors, not collectors. Acquiring another Action 1 for purposes of controlling the market is perfectly fine.

But anyone who chose to consign to Clink should've been aware of its limitations but decided to consign to them anyways. So they need to accept the consequences of their decision.

There are many comic collections that are significantly less noteworthy than the Church collection, but they're still given pedigree status. So I don't think pulp collections should be denied pedigree status just because they don't meet the Church threshold. Yakima sounds like it already has market acceptance as a pedigree, so CGC should recognize it, just like they recognized a number of pedigrees that had long been accepted by the market before CGC came around, even though some might not have received pedigree status if they'd been assessed under more recent tighter criteria.