Arkham

As an international buyer, I can 100% confirm - eBay's global shipping program is more expensive (base rate comparison) and then eBay also charge an "import tax" that I do not get charged when I get anything shipped from any where other than eBay's Global Shipping Program. It feels like a rort. MCS is far more economical as a buyer for international shipping. I've also been lucky enough to have the experience that MCS is more reliable. Add to that the quality of packing from the MCS team, the hassle-free support on the rare occurrence something goes awry, and not having to worry about whether the book was a scam or not... It's simply a no-brainer for me. I don't buy slabs from eBay anymore, only MCS or other boardies (or businesses with a presence here). I will only (grudgingly) resort to eBay for raws if I cannot source them elsewhere.

“I apologise if you feel”… Wow. Wow. Wow. Weak as p*ss. This is not an apology. It doesn’t take any accountability or any real responsibility… it should at least read “I did not communicate with you at all. I left you hanging without the book you paid a significant amount of money for. While I was going through a rough time, there is no excuse for not communicating with you about this. I am deeply sorry! What can I do to help make this right? In the meantime I will contact CL and provide a supporting statement to confirm I did not send you the book.”

What are people’s impressions of CovrPrice? I love the CLZ app. It’s phenomenal. I was always disappointed in the GoCollect integration… wished I could hide it - the pricing data was always so bad. (FWIW, I think that this was a short-sighted move by GC - CLZ was the only reason many people would’ve seen their data points). When CLZ’s Alwin announced that a new partnership was coming, I had everything crossed for it to be @gpanalysis - who, like many of you, I trust and have invested in for years… I can’t see myself buying a different membership to integrate with CLZ… I wouldn’t ditch GPA and I don’t see the point in paying for two. But I’m still interested in CovrPrice user’s thoughts/experience.

Saw this and thought of you OP:

Meh.. I wouldn’t pay the asking rate - but Crain is an awesome artist and I dig his pixel-perfect signatures. It’s very niche to develop and market your own variant signatures and, while I wouldn’t fork out, I suspect that the diehard Crain fans are hip deep into it.

I miss the days when you could tell it was a Friday just from the ludicrous crud that was posted in CG.

I have always loved the art in Spawn but have always struggled to engage with the writing.

Today’s mail…

Mail call!!

I’ve snagged a single copy of cover B… and think I’m going to end up with a bit of a Spawn collection just for the cover art!! There are a couple that I want to buy from @Wall-Crawler and that got me digging around… So many amazing covers.

Rad books!! How is Monkey? I assume it’s based on Monkey Magic? Love the red & gold cover.

That’s a haul and a half of cover B! Big Todd McFan?

Even though this statement followed directly on the heels of a "errr.. dunno - no real process, people say stuff and we think about it", I would still buy to read this article.

Today’s mail call:

Yes! Sorry team - I meant orders/distribution when I wrote "print-run". (I've got print-runs on the brain at the moment). The rest of the bolded text was implied by the source.

If it is only a small step between the 9.6 and the 9.8, I’ll often buy the 9.8. But not when it hundreds of dollars different. Given I often can’t spot the flaws between the 9.6 and the 9.8 in a slab, I’d literally only be spending the money for what CGC had written on the label. For example, when I wanted to pick up a 1st Batman Who Laughs the 9.6 was $190 and the 9.8 was $780. I 100% went for the 9.6 without a second thought. I used the money saved to pick up a sweet bronze book for my personal collection.

I hate it.

Definitely a bug and it does sound like one that would be beyond typical support tooling - leaving them no option than to escalate to level 3 or level 4 engineering for resolution. But there is definitely a customer service issue. From what Wall-Crawler has written above, this sounds like an embarrassing display of service management for a company of eBay’s resources and size. It says a LOT about what they value and how their teams are being managed. Instead of each instance of account suspension being treated as an individual incident and closed when the account is manually re-enabled, these should be being grouped as a problem (it’s obviously not resolved). There should be a singular point of contact where Wall-Crawler can communicate back and forth with the customer service team and be provided updates to the problem resolution. Ideally, this will be managed by an agent or a small team of agents - not requiring their customer to re-explain the issue at each point of contact. Their team should be assisting in restoring the store and all listings or providing tips and work-arounds for a quicker restoration when this happens for the fifth time… (Which I think is a safe bet at this point, sorry to say. It’s some kind of dunning process being triggered periodically by an incorrect debt recorded against the account. Manually re-enabling the account is not removing the dodgy record that is triggering the dunning process). It’s obvious that, while individuals in the team might care - the internal structure and supporting processes don’t support them in providing customer care. I understand - many products/services/service providers make it difficult to log a ticket, because managing tickets is complicated and expensive. It is far cheaper to have someone engage in self-help. You don’t have to handle as many tickets, so you don’t have to hire, train, retain, and insure so many customer care representatives. But even if that is (in my opinion) a (barely) OK approach, it doesn’t make up for poor service management practices from a company that reported more than US$2.1B in revenue in the second quarter of 2021. I would be freaking furious if I were you, Wall-Crawler. I think you’re 100% justified in being peeved by this and the difficulty in escalating this issue. Losing your account four times in three months and what that represents in lost sales and loss of time in re-listing items and chasing support to end-up not feeling supported. It’s just not cool at all.

A good point that is well made! The census data you have shared above represents effectively 1% of ComicChron's estimated print-run. My post was way too minimal in effort - when I said "criminally undervalued", what I really meant was "it's the only 1st app of a Batman character widely available in 9.8 for less than US$499 on eBay that I have seen". One of my focuses is 1st apps of Bat-related villains. In the past two years in particular (like nearly every typical or mainstream category/focus in the hobby, I guess) it's become nearly impossible to get a 9.8 of a modern book featuring the 1st app of a minor character for less than US$500 (and currency conversion is not my friend). So I was very surprised, given all that hyyyyype for Hush back in the day, to see Tommy Elliot's 1st app regularly priced between $150 and $175.

That’s good feedback! I didn’t realise you’d already read through this. I’m up for the physical’s too. What a creative team!

Batman 609 is criminally undervalued book. Was shocked to see its price a couple of weeks ago and pulled the trigger on a copy last week. Very glad I got in before the storm. Edit: just checked MCS - all the copies on consignment are up _significantly_ since I was there Friday (US Thursday evening).

Stoked to add this Frankie’s exclusive Dell’Otto Variant C to the collection. Massive shout out to @Blankedboy who knew I was struggling to find this and put me onto a seller. I’m now only missing the DF signed & remarked by Ken Haeser variant #1 and I think I’ve got the whole run. (Or will by end of April anyway). Thanks mate!!

An early birthday present from my missus arrived today :

100% what Terry said. I pick them up where I can to have a reader copy of a slabbed book. I have noticed some variant covers for facsimile books recently that are pretty awesome. That’s a new concept that, again, won’t take away from the original - but is an interesting way to add some cool covers into the mix. Like what Image are doing at the moment with Prophet #1.

I’ve done a similar thing and been happy to do things like turn a short box of nothing books into one big key. No regrets. There were times I sold keys outside of my core focus and it was the right decision at the time, and I’d do it again today, but I do miss some of those books and couldn’t afford to add them back to my collection again now. As a collector, storage space is often an overlooked premium. Downsizing to a smaller, more meaningful collection can be a great thing. At least, it was for me. I’d say go explore the idea with serious consideration and intent… Perhaps ease into it by offloading some nothing books and some drek - just don’t rush into flipping big books, even if they are not your core focus.