clobberintime

Greetings CGC comic lovers! Have finally gotten around to doing a complete inventory of my CGC collection and found around 40 or so doubles that i need to part company with in order to fund ongoing purchases and cover upcoming wins. So tomorrow will start an official sales thread with pics etc. The first 10 will be : Hulk 144 cgc 9.0 ow/w $115. Defenders 2 cgc 9.4 ow $225, Defenders 7 9.4 white $175. avengers 50 cgc 9.0 white $65. Avengers 61 cgc 9.0 ow/w $60. Thor 127 cgc 9.4 white and stunning $500. Thor 168 cgc 9.0 ow/w $110. Fan Four 60 cgc 9.0 ow/w $90 . Fantastic Four 40 cgc 9.2 ow/w $1300. More to come - mainly FF, Thor, Hulk, Spidey Ann #1 cgc 8.5.

This is a pretty fun thread as I am constantly re-thinking deals. The good - bought a cgc 8.5 FF 1 a few years ago for $19,000 and Hulk 1 8.0 pac coast for $10. That was a lot at the time for the books but has turned out to be a very good move. The gut wrencher - had a chance to get a Hulk 1 cgc 9.0 just before the movie for $20k but only wanted to pay $18,000 so someone bought it for $20 after I couldnt pull the trigger. about a month later, Blazin had one and offered it to me for $26 and we got into a huge fight about it because i thought the price was insane. When he listed it, it sold within an hour at his price! And the price now is about the cost of a new Hummer. The really bad - bought a Hulk 1 from a "friend" / dealer in 1995 for $1500 graded as vf. it was one of my first big purchases. It was allegedly given to him by his grandma when he was 7 and he had stoered safely etc. It looked pretty darn nice to - very glossy and ow pages. Well when cgc came about, I decided to get it slabbed. To my horror, it came back as a frankenstein -purple label of death mess! It had extensive resto including - trimming, color, re-gloss, pieces added etc. I had Josh sell it and I think we got like $500. looking back i should have just kept the book to be able to look at it because I still hate to think about that $1000 hit - much more than that if you take into account the passage of about 8 years.

Many thanks to crusty old Bob Storms for working a really big deal and getting me some great marvel comics that I can actually read! Basically traded a few high grade cgc doubles for something like 50 or so ungraded books and and a bunch of cgc vfs that I can crack out. All the ungraded books were right on! Also thanks to Vinny Z. for bringing my FF golden record reprint from metro and nice to meet him in person - although impossible to haggle prices with, still a nice guy!

Thanks to all of those who bought books from me! I forgot what a pain in the neck getting them shipped was but I think I have mailed just about all the packages now.

Bruce - to answer a couple of you earlier questions: I do agree with CGCs grading most of the time. The things I don't agree with are high grade books -9.4 up - with miswraps and date marks/writing. I just can't see books that are severely off center or have big date stamps grading over a 9.0 - but I see it all the time. The spine centering thing bothers me in particular. I have never considered those miswrapped books nm but CGC grades them up to 9.8 from what I have seen. I have been buying back issues for nearly 30 years now and think I am a tough/tight grader but have learned that sending in books is sometimes a [!@#%^&^] shoot. Out of the 20 or so books I have had graded, most have been in the range I thought. I sold FF a spidey 9 that I thought was a vf/nm to nm- and it came back a 9.2 but with slight color touch. Out of a batch of 10 books I was involved in having graded which I thought were all 9.0/9.2, two came back 8.5, 2 were 9.0s, the rest were 9.2s and one came out a 9.6. Unless you are employed by cgc or are a profesional grader, I think it is very presumptuous to say "this book is a 9.4, 9.6 or 9.8 " until they slap a label on it. I think CGC has created the standrds for those kinds of books - as I have said in many other posts, never before cgc did I ever hear of people paying 6 to 20x guide for a book. Try pricing a non-cgc book like that even now! That's why these ebay sellers that list unrestored 9.6 or whatever books for sale are laughable. And people go after those books trying to make money with the thought"I"ll buy it on the cheap, cgc it and get rich!"

Do you get paid by the word or something? The bottom line to this whole issue is money. Say what you will in several paragraphs, the driving idea behind resending a book is get it up a notch and double your money - or triple it or whatever merely by paying another fee to cgc. Why don't you add a poll question about motivations for resubmitting?

I think it is a bunch of baloney and a problem as far as CGC goes. CGC was supposed to eliminate the hazards of onlining buying so you could tell what you are really getting. It was also supposed to eliminate problems like senseless haggling with dealers whether the book was vf or nm. But because grading is so subjective even with the professionals at CGC, you get stuff like "it is a matter of opinion, we make mistakes,etc" So now you have different problems - you get undergraded so you have to pay another fee to get it regarded so you can try to sell the book and make more money. If I knew a book had been graded and was originally a lower grade but was regraded and came back higher, I would never pay the higher grade price for that back without carefully studying the book in person. Overall the resub game sounds like schemes by folks trying to make some easy money by buying cheap on "undergraded" books , then getting the grade to magically change so they can make a lot of money on an item that is the exact same. To me it is the same situation as the dealer who buys stuff on the very cheap by talking down condition to the seller and then who turns around and sells the books as a few levels higher than what he bought the book at. It smells. Especially since in the 9.0 to 9.8 range every little tick up means a lot of money - great potential for problems in my opinion. For more on this topic, see some of the threads about Heritage and their "funny" examples of resubs.

Yeah - I thnk you should call him Gunga Thin. That would be really funny. And then you could explain how it is great to be 5'3" and 250lbs - always the argument of the gravity challenged. If bodybuilding comes from the classic Greek ideals of proportion and symmetry, todays bodybuilders have passed into the grotesque and missed the point - size with any sense of anything else sacrificed. Die huge! Life is too short to be puny!

Like my old football coach use to say - "son, if you're lookin for sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary between sh*t and syphillis." Another drama queen leaves the fold - I had never even heard of this guy prior to this wimpy good bye thread!

I also like Bauhaus a lot! Have all of their stuff plus Love and Rockets. The Hunger is a damn good vampire movie despite what a lot of others say - any movie with a guest appearance by Bauhaus and starring Bowie and Denueve has to rock! Did you see the band on the reunion gig? They did not get close enough for me to see them. I am also a huge Cult fan and have seen them 4 times since they got back together and will be seeing the 21st Century Doors( fronted by Ian Astbury) next week in Orlando! The 80s will never die!

Aurora monster models - old and new, Bowen statues, hero clix although I know nothing about the game, wacky packs to a degree, transformers old and new , and superhero action figures. I have a few megos but the new stuff is so good that that is the main focus - new JLA line is awesome as is Superman and the Marvel series.

That gives me an idea! aRE YOU SURE WE CAN'T INTEREST your folks in some pristine gem mint funny books? Someone should figure out how to market this stuff to all those who have lost in the stock market. Oh wait - I think JP already does that doesn't he?

When I got that gut feeling about my mutual funds, my banker talked me out of switching too. She said - "all you are doing now is guaranteeing yourself a loss." Every time I think back about 2 years and what I wanted to do with that money and where it would be now, I get furious. I think trusting your own instincts is a good thing most of the time. If something looks too good to be true or just doesn't pass the smell test, follow your gut feeling!

Well as i have said a couple of times in this thread, nothing is guaranteed. I have no idea what the next 10 or 20 years will be like - no one does. But I think certain characters will remain popular - I hope - and there will continue to be an audience. The specific stuff I would look at would be high grade meaning vf and up Marvels from 1961 thru 1979. Focus on the great artists and stories and keys in the $50 to $500 range. If you are good at grading, by all means by them non-slabbed. You may hit the jackpot like Greggy has a couple of times or Bob did with that Hulk 162. Spcific books - Spidey 39,40,41,44,46,50,51,53-56,97-102,119-122,129: Hulk Ann1; Ghost Rider 1, Spotlight 5-11; FF 21-60,100,112; X-men 10-19,49-66, 94-101; Journey into Mystery ; Suspense. I am pretty much a Marvel collector and that's where my experience lies so I am not as sure about DC investing . I am assuming with your stated amount of $5k you are relatively financially secure and have other investments? I would not tell someone with $5000 and that is all to blow it all on comics - you should only invest as much as you are willing to lose is a good phrase to go by.

I have had discussions myself with some of the real big wheels in comics and a lot of them put their money where their mouths are and only buy the best. They feel there will always be those that have to have it. Folks in that category are Josh, Toychef, Bronzebruce, Brulato, JP and a few others. If you have the money and can stomach the risk then fine. I think it is too risky with price volatility and cgc being fairly new. I will buy a few 9.6s and 9.8s if the price is right and it is a favorite book otherwise i don't even pay attention. There are only a handful of folks that spend thousands per comic but there are a vast amount that can spend $50 to $500.