Darthbryan

What are the GSX1 results in higher grade?

Sounds like the shart I was getting in claim sales when I experimented with that. Had been in the lookout for ASM 298, 299 and 301. Seller claimed all were 9.0+. I get them and they were what I call “comic shop near mint” which means CGC 7.5/8.0 with Spine wear and blunted corners.

Absolutely, especially with comic shops. In retrospect it’s hard to determine if a lot of the old school comic shops didn’t know how to grade, or just didn’t care.

Yea my guess is the bulk of what we’ll see hitting will be higher grade Bronze and Copper Age keys. We’re not going to move the needle on desirable Silver Age. Again, just a complete gut feeling but some of the record prices on really high grade books likely shook loose some books from collections where collectors have eschewed CGC.

There is an oversupply that is on the horizon. With CGC backed up for months and months that means people emptied the short boxes and sent what are likely to be desirable keys into CGC with hopes of cashing out. Problem is they’ve now missed their window. The next 12 months will be interesting, as those books hit mailboxes and start finding their way to market.

I got in at pre-pandemic prices on a few books that had been on my bucket list: X-Men 1, FF1, GSX1, X-Men 94, DD1 to name a few. Unfortunately the ones that are left not yet purchased have gotten so far out of reach at mid-grades that I may just not ever bother going after them. I had been holding out on a TOS39 for awhile since I’m in cash preservation mode with kids going to college next year, but now people want $60k-$70k for a 7.0 which is ridiculous. Last year it was a $20k book and one sold at auction recently for nearly $50k and people are losing their minds thinking that’s the new normal. Seems this is happening with so many books these days.

I have several desirable Marvel BA and CA key slabs sitting on eBay right now with pricing that is below GPA and is also the lowest price on eBay for that grade and very few have moved. I’d rather not go the .99 cent auction route because I’ve been burned on that before. Things have definitely slowed for the majority of the books out there.

I’ve been watching a lot of these Facebook and Instagram claim sales lately, primarily just to see what the real world looks like in comic books - I just don’t trust the results of these big auction houses. It seems that raw books continue to move fairly well but I have to say that slabbed books tend to sit on these sales. The main problem is that these guys are trying to sell slabs for 25% - 50% over 90 day avg or even last GPA sale. They’re just flipping slabbed books that I’ll bet they didn’t get at much of a discount - they don’t seem to be newly cased raw books - so for them to get profit they just need to keep pushing asking prices up. I saw one last night where a particular books ask was 25% above GPA, and you could find the same book on eBay for well less then GPA. I’m not sure who these people think their audience is - maybe uneducated people or collectors who don’t do their homework? A local dealer has a really nice book that he wants $1k more than last sale, and the last sale was a high water mark. It’s sat for over a month unsold of course. At some point I just wonder if people are throwing out collection books with prices and they don’t really care if they sell or not.

Guess I’ll show my membership card at the door before coming in. Anyone know what kind of premium the MJ Insert brings on this book?

I didn’t think cgc took off for centering and bad cuts. There was a long discussion in a Facebook group about it since it’s so important in card grading.

Over the past three decades of collecting, I’ve spent a lot of time and money in two other hobbies - Star Wars collecting and Movie Prop Collecting. What some people spend on vintage Star Wars prototypes and /or movie props would make your brain spin. That being said there are plenty of people who could afford $70k on the highest grade of one of the most important non-Silver Age books ever made. TAnd there seems to be more cross-over in collecting genres these days bringing in more people to the hobby. There’s plenty of money out there to keep pushing this stuff up especially with the MCU speculation. I think the faith in what Marvel has done on film with this title in the past, coupled with their current MCU movies, is driving people to invest in these books because they know the brand won’t in any way be diminished through poor quality movies or streaming shows. My biggest question is what happens to the “yield curve” with this book - does it continue to spike or level off. I don’t see it dropping significantly. I’ll also say that what is happening is exciting, unnerving, and to a point sad. I’ve spent the last few years really investing back in the hobby and acquiring books that I coveted as a teen in the 80s: FF1, X-Men 1, FF48 to name a few. And of course a GS X-Men 1 9.6 which I landed a few years ago. It’s a bit sad to me that even decent quality books in the 7.0-8.0 range are starting to price people out on titles like GSX1 and Hulk 181. You always want people re-entering the hobby to have hope that they can move the needle on their collections but with what’s going on now that’s going to be tougher for all but the very rich if this continues.

You don’t need anywhere near 200 people willing to drop that kind of cash on a 9.8 because there aren’t 200 available. In this auction there was one available, and all you needed was two bidders willing to push it up. I know sooo many collectors who have these SA and BA books in super high grade that just don’t ever think about parting with them - they’ll die with them I’m sure. So if there are 200 graded at 9.8 how many are actually available to purchase - that’s the question.

So the Disney / Marvel MCU has done just fine for 13 years without Wolverine. As a matter of fact, they've done multiple times better than that Sony X-Men universe that had Wolverine. With Fantastic Four and a bevy of other cosmic entities for the next phase, Wolverine isn't needed in the least. Wolverine is the MCUs safety net and will be brought out when it's both appropriate and needed. Nothing would be more detrimental then to do this wrong with improper casting. I'll bet it's another 5 -10 years before this role is recast.

The thing that people need to be prepared for, in terms of hard core X-Men SA fans, is that we aren’t likely to see the X-Men that we want. I sincerely doubt that K Feige is going to reboot Jean Gray, Beast, Cyclops etc. out of the gate. My gut tells me they’ll take a fresh take and it could likely be a mix of later X-Men characters and some from the New Mutants (properly canonized, not like that terrible horror movie). I’ll be shocked if we ever see Magneto in the MCU. He’s had too much non-MCU exposure. And I’ll probably be shot for saying this but I don’t thing Marvel will tap Wolverine for a long, long time.

I think barring being independently wealthy or having some kind of huge unexpected financial windfall that’s what I’ll have to do moving forward and with what’s going on now it’s probably the prudent thing. Comics is a small part of my life and I’d like to retire some day and do some other things rather then collect.