andyborehol

First appearance of baby Hope Summers and the last issue that I needed to complete my newsstand run of the 1991 X-men series (up until it was renamed “X-men: Legacy” at issue #208…still need about another 30 issues from that point).

Kelly has been co-hosting with Ryan Seacrest ever since Michael Strahan left for “Good Morning America.”

So if I’m understanding correctly, those “Paquito” issues have one page of Action Comics #1 on the back cover, and CGC actually put most of them into the slabs backwards so that the AC1 page and the grade can be seen together? That doesn’t sit quite right with me…seems like yet another example of CGC breaking its own standards just to try to inflate market value.

Lol, I can’t give away all of my secrets, but in this case these all came in one single lot purchase on a certain auction website that has a name with 4-letters that rhymes with “we pay.”

Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na Newsstands!

I love all of the background info, thanks! “X-Mændene” seems to be the literal translation of “X-men”…any idea why they made the change to “Projekt X?” Do you think that it was just a marketing decision, or does “X-Mændene” sound odd in the context of the language?

In honor of all of these books from Denmark, here’s my entire Danish collection: Last but not least, this comic includes Incredible Hulk #179, 180 & 181. Interestingly, Wolverine was originally referred to as “Ulvemanden” which translates to “The Wolf Man” (according to Google Translate). Since then he has been “Jærven”, which is a more accurate translation of “Wolverine.”

Hit up an LCS that’s about a hour drive away this afternoon and found that they recently bought a MASSIVE collection of newsstands from the late 90s and early 00s. I bought a ton and probably left twice as much behind! Most of them were 99 cents.

Variants of Amalgam Comics are a pretty unique topic, especially because half of them were actually published by DC and half were actually published by Marvel, with each company using their own standards at that time. “Legends of the Dark Claw” was published by DC, and here’s 4 distinct versions of it (Direct edition, Newsstand edition, Multi-pack edition and 2nd printing): The DC multi-pack versions have no UPC but are still indicated as “first printing” in the indicia…to valiantman’s point, whether that is actually true really depends on whether DC intended to sell these in multi-packs at the time of the original printing. The 2nd printing is properly indicated in the indicia, and it also has a small Roman numeral “II” on the cover (as was standard for DC 2nd/3rd/Nth printings in this era). On the Marvel side of things, I don’t believe that they ever released any 2nd printings of their Amalgam titles. They did have multi-packs, but I don’t believe that the comics are distinguishable from normal Direct Editions…I won’t crack open this 3-pack, but “Spider-Boy Team-Up” appears to have the same barcode as my raw copy: End of the day, my take is that if there is any published feature that made some copies of a book distinguishable from others, then you’ve got yourself a variant.

I would go get one on eBay, but I hear that some sellers are out there canceling bids if they don’t think that they’ll get enough money from you.

Isn’t that the first comic McFarlane penciled for Marvel? Not a bad book to have with his signature…

Cool set! I remember having all of those on my giant wishlist back when raw copies of each were selling in the $15-$25 range and thinking “meh, I’ll eventually find a cheap deal on a full set.” Then I went and bought a bunch of Peter Panzerfaust, Rat Queens and Great Pacific back issues, secure in the knowledge that those would skyrocket in value.

Yep! $15 at my LCS, which is about what the direct edition in similar condition goes for these days.

So anytime someone asks if something is “worth getting graded” I assume what they’re really asking whether getting it graded would increase the resale value. I think that the resale value of a modern newsstand key would absolutely go up if it were slabbed in high grade. However, newsstand copies of common back issues are a different story. Obviously I don’t speak for everyone, but when I work on collecting newsstand runs my primary goal is just to find a copy of every issue, regardless of condition…high grade is preferable, but simple completion of the run is the main goal. With that in mind, I personally wouldn’t pay a premium for a slabbed common newsstand issue — I would much rather buy a raw copy and use the extra money to buy other issues from the run. Honestly, the same thing applies to any common issue. Slabbing is only going to increase the value if there is a low enough supply of/high enough demand for high-grade copies that someone is willing to shell out extra for a copy that’s already slabbed. This is why you can buy 9.8 slabs of some books for less than the cost of a grading fee.