lighthouse

A sixth book from the Truckee Meadows collection will join this club when it closes August 4th (bidding already at 130k and will certainly go higher). Four six-figure FF 1s in the same original owner collection is something I will certainly never see again.

Freshly unboxed.

Three received today.

Several of these are already dumpster prices compared to just two months ago. That 9.6 DD1 that just missed? One sold for $150k last year. That 9.4 FF 5 for $162k? I sold a 9.2 for $150k in April. That 8.5 FF1 for $240k? One sold for $375k in April. How deep does the dumpster go? Who knows.

Well considering I also sold the $1.5 million 9.2 in April (as well as the 7.5 in that auction), it’s hard to get toooooo disappointed. There’s still a 5.0 in tomorrow’s items as well. That’s four of the five Fantastic Four #1s from the Truckee Meadows collection.

As the seller of said book I agree. But there were lots of soft results. The 9.6 Daredevil 1 (not mine) went for 30% less than last years. My 9.4 Aquaman 1 went for 40% less than last year. There are 16 more Truckee Meadows books in this signature. Three tomorrow and thirteen Saturday iirc. And I’m expecting pretty much all of them to go 20-40% cheaper than they would have in April. Lots of folks don’t feel as wealthy as they did eight weeks ago. And bids rein in as a result.

Nice find! I have two copies of issue 23, but have never had a single digit issue pass through.

Northern Nevada.

Mine is secret even from myself. I’ll pull a box off the shelf because I can’t remember what’s in it, flip through, and go “wow that’s a cool book, when did I buy that?”

The only thing that should change with domestic variants is the cover. So since the contents of cover A have the Daredevil stamp, all the variants will as well.

We buy around 70% of the collections we look at. The remainder is about evenly split in five groups: Absolutely worthless drek. Books where the prospective seller has looked up eBay results for 9.8 signature series of every issue and expects 100% of that value for their unsigned raw 8.0s. Collections where we know of another venue that will pay more than we will and we send them there. (This is usually on really common stuff where I might be 15 copies deep already and there’s a local alternative likely to pay 20c a book). Collections of slabbed issues in combinations of grade and signature status that just wouldn’t work for our store. “Here’s a 9.8 signature series variant cover from 2006 of a title no one collects and the last eBay sale was 10 months ago at $100, would you give me $50?” “I also have a slabbed 5.5 New Mutants 86 and a 2.5 ASM 131!” * Collections where the seller really doesn’t want to sell but wants to know if they have valuable stuff. We charge for written insurance appraisals. But casual “the ones in this pile are all around $50-100 and the rest are like five bucks each” we do that for free. - - - We sell more than anyone in the area and also pay more than anyone in the area. So if books are good, a deal usually gets made. * this group isn’t really 6%. It’s probably more like 2%. But boy are they challenging to deal with.

With the rapid increase in remote work, you might check your local area for inexpensive unused office space. In many places it’s not that difficult to find space around a buck a foot including utilities. Far less issue with flooding and meth addicts and bolt cutters. Usable as a space to do some collection processing. And doubles as a place to escape to when unwanted family is staying over and you need peace and quiet.

As a shop owner who buys 50-70 collections every month, this thread is an interesting insight into how other folks do it. Percentages of “value” are very difficult to calculate, especially on large collections, because of the transaction cost associated with selling each book. After processing a couple hundred thousand back issues purchased in the last few years, I can comfortably ballpark it at $1.20 in labor and materials per post-1990 book to bring a comic from “seller’s boxes” to “my retail customer’s hands”. Books from the 1980s sit around $1.60 a book due to additional labor in checking for flaws that largely don’t exist in more recent books. Books from the 70s are around $2.40 (more labor and they go in mylar and fullback rather than bag and board). Silver are around $3.50 each (even more labor). And golden age around $6.00 each (ditto). We pay higher rent than most shops because our location has exceptionally high foot traffic (it’s completely normal to have 500 people through the door on a Saturday). And it works out to 53 cents per year per back issue to have them displayed. A cheap rent store is likely still paying around 20-25 cents per year. A $3 back issue from the 1990s that took me six months to sell has cost me $1.46 in direct costs to get it from purchase to sale, completely separate from what I paid for the comic itself. It’s not surprising then to find that such issues wholesale around a nickel a book. That’s the true wholesale value. A dealer who dumps said book at a show for a buck has put about 45 cents in labor and rent into the book to have it available in an unsorted bulk box in a twenty year old bag. He’s doubling his money at a buck. Same as I am at $3 in a fresh and clean bag and board perfectly organized in a well lit store. These costs are largely the same for a $16 issue from the 90s. Which is why a buy price on such an issue can get significantly closer to half. The fixed costs remain the same and the true wholesale climbs from a nickel to $6 or so (for a book that will sell “quickly” and isn’t already well stocked). A $600 golden age book? The $6 in labor and gerber costs are essentially irrelevant. They aren’t a factor in the dealer determining whether to pay 50, 60, 70, or 80% of “value” for the book. But a long box of $3 books from the 90s? Even ones that will actually sell in six months and aren’t in stock? “Ten percent of the value” is too much to pay. Thirty cents a book for such items is far too high a price to remain profitable. And none of this takes into account opportunity cost, which is the only cost that ever matters. Paying “5 cents on the dollar” for a long box of $3 books from the 90s is losing money if the spot on the table where they would go is already generating $1800 a year per long box in profits. It’s more profitable to buy those comics and immediately throw them in a dumpster than to replace inventory that actually sells. When customers bring this sort of stuff in to sell? I usually explain the economics to them, suggest alternative venues, and then give them 100 free comics from the same time period. “Add these to your pile when you go to sell them and hopefully you’ll get a little more.” The goodwill is worth far more to me than what the comics would ever bring. And they show up by the hundreds every month in collections of stuff I actually do want to buy.

More importantly, why is your left thumb pointed that way??? No wonder she’s blocking your swing. That’s an absolutely terrible grip!

Why are you only wearing one blue glove?

Think the 5.0 suffered from a combo platter. There are folks who don’t want C/OW in their Silver (even if they accept it in their gold). There are folks who don’t like pieces missing from the front cover. Finding two bidders who don’t care much about C/OW and ALSO don’t care much about that missing corner piece, who are ALSO in the market to drop $45k+ on a key that is suddenly available everywhere after three years of dry supply (my apologies for this last bit but it’s straight up my fault)… I think that combo was tough to overcome. (I obviously do care about this result since I have a Truckee Meadows 5.0 White in the June Signature, but I suspect that one will go somewhere in the $45-55k range barring major geopolitical or financial news.)

Three bucks each?

This is the only appropriate reaction to that book.

Here are four more upcoming World’s Finest. The 9 and 13 are in the June Signature, the 11 and 12 are in the May 30 weekly. All four with OW/W pages and all four with beautiful color.

The gentleman interviewing me graduated high school in 1962 and is still working as a tv reporter. That’s a man with no plans to retire. He’s doing what he loves. They spent over two hours in the store for the three-minute interview. I actually got him to break professional stride for a moment when he showed me his stack of comics his niece had bought him. He was fully expecting the whole stack might be worth $50. When I told him what his Spidey 50 was likely worth, he went into full stammer for about three seconds before getting back to “seasoned newsman never fazed by anything”. We had a nice chat about what it was like reading AF15 off the rack as a teenager (and no, his copy is long gone).

You’re not alone. If resale were not a factor, it’s on the long list of “pieces I wouldn’t pay $10,000 for even if I had the spare cash”, whereas there are literally thousands of pieces that are on the other side of that line. It would be an “I own this because other people want it”, not a “let me show you this cool thing I own” for me.

The record is also paper thin. Like if someone hands you the envelope with the record inside you will genuinely assume the envelope is empty until proven otherwise.

The books are just too darn glossy to be contained. Much as you might try, their gloss is going to reflect light from somewhere. Sadly I have a couple other projects I’m working on the next couple weeks. But I expect to push 200-300 of the Truckee Meadows books through CGC in June and July. And I need to send Heritage another 50 or so. In the meantime there’s two in the May 16 weekly (bidding started yesterday), nine in the May 30 weekly, eighteen in the June Signature (bidding starts next week), four in a June 7 weekly, and two (so far) in the September Signature. Donut has tried to talk me into bringing a couple hundred Truckee Meadows books to the Baltimore show in October. We will see.

Except Vision didn’t exist when this was produced.

Looks like a recent edit: Ink over graphite on Bristol board with airbrush color work, image size 12" x 18". Signed by both artists as "FM/LV" in the lower center. A few visible surface scuffs and finger bends; otherwise, in Excellent condition.