Jelani's Journal

[Hepgwyn]

Just wanted to create a master journal to keep everything all in one place

 

Been on the boards for a few years but just finally decided to create a master journal. My last few journal entries haven't shown up on the boards. Hopefully this works.

 

See more journals by Hepgwyn

[Hutch88]

I see it...

[Hepgwyn]

My First Signature Series

 

When I was first collecting comics, my LCS was about 2 blocks away from home and I used to stop in at least once a week to pickup my subscriptions and occasionally check the new arrivals. One day, there had been a decent amount of silver/bronze books sold to the store. Since they hadn’t been there long they hadn’t been bagged, sorted or priced so they told me I could have them for 50 cents each. So I started picking through them and grabbed anything from my favorite titles. All I remember now was a few Amazing Spider-Man and Avengers books. These books were in pretty good shape but they all had a similar flaw a lengthwise crease right down the center of each book. Which I would later learn was a subscription crease. These books had clearly had weights put on them for a long time because the crease was only slightly noticeable on the front and hardly at all on the back. Back then this was not the kind of thing that would keep me from buying a comic especially for 50 cents.

 

Fast forward 29 years to ECCC 2015, I saw that Stan Lee was going to be signing and despite the obvious abundance of Stan Lee signatures out there I thought it would be nice to have one of my very own. Once, in college because of financial reasons I had passed up the opportunity to get Jack Kirby’s signature and always regretted it. Alas what single book would I choose to have him sign? Would I have him sign a major key in high grade, a low grade major key both written by him or a near perfect modern book starring one of his creations? I quickly ruled out anything not written by him, and eventually decided against any of the major keys. I just thought it would be nice to keep those unadulterated.

 

I had always wondered what kind of grade a book with the subscription crease would get. Does that count as one colorbreaking crease or 30, one for each page? So I decided to kill two birds with one stone and use one of those books for Stan’s sig. I checked to see which of them had been written by Stan and only one fit the bill.

 

Turns out that was the easy part. The hard part was waiting in line for 3 hours. I did enjoy trying to sneak a peak at Hayley Atwell signing nearby and chatting with others in line to see what they were having signed. It was kind of an interesting mix of key comics, general Marvel comics and comic book ephemera. I was happy to not see any DC comics. People can do what they want but that just seems weird to me. The signing organizers could see that they had way too many people in line for the time window allotted so they asked people who had multi-day passes to come back the next day and just let us one day attendees stay in line. I thought this was a very kind thing to do and I was happy to be in the group that got to stay.

 

I have to say that once Stan arrived and got to the business at hand, my pulse started to quicken. I’ve never seen anyone sign that fast, especially not someone 93 years old. That guy has great genes. As I steadily moved toward the front of the line I slipped my book out of the mylar and balanced it on one hand and dragged along the rest of the I had accumulated with me in my other. Finally it was my turn, I handed my book to one guy and he put it in front of Stan and fwoosh it was signed, another guy grabbed it and handed it back to me. Stan looked up, smiled and fwoosh was back at it. Heart officially pounding I walked it over to the grading facilitators and sent it off to CGC.

 

I think this book looks better than a 4.0 but I guess I’ve learned to ignore the crease and I’ve seen some of the horror stories and I think the signature came out pretty well. Glad I did it.

 

 

Thanks for reading this lengthy post.

 

 

[Hibou]

Great story and book to get signed... and if that's one of the books you picked up all those years ago for .50, that's a major double win.

 

Congratulations!

[Doc Joe]

how much does it cost to get him to sign something?

[Hepgwyn]

Doc Joe,

 

70 bucks per item.

[Hepgwyn]

Thanks Hibou,

 

It is one of those 50 cent books

[Doc Joe]

Doc Joe,

 

70 bucks per item.

 

so that works out to like a gazziolion dollars an hour signing - nice work if you can get it !

 

still, there is no way he needs the cash, and thats whats cool, he does it still for fans

[bagofleas]

It depends on which show he is doing, how far ahead of time he is announced for the show and how many days of the show he is signing,

I've seen him as low as $65 or as high as $120!

 

He's going to be at Heroes Con this weekend for Saturday only and he's $110 there.

[Hepgwyn]

Thanks for the correction. I guess I was lucky to be near the low end of that spectrum.

[surfer99]

Great journal hepgwyn, you had me captivated. Nice reveal on the book too, good choice. I agree the eye appeal alone warrants a higher grade than 4.0, but then again I'm no grader so I know nothing. Hope to see you at ECCC next year!

 

 

[Hepgwyn]

Thanks Surfer99,

 

next year it would be nice to finally meet up with some boardies that visit ECCC.

[Hepgwyn]

As is my tradition, I made my annual CGC submissions at ECCC last month. The first 2 books of that submission returned home this weekend with the hoped for grades. Now that the renewal bonus is a 150$ credit(boooooo!), I started looking at some of my moderns to have graded. I dug through the storage unit to find some worthy candidates. Most of which were relegated to said storage unit because I never expected their precipitous rise in value 8 years ago. So of course there was very little rarity in these submissions. In looking at the census it's obvious that many of us were readers and collectors in the 90s during the boom-times and many more, likely have these 2 books in their collections. Having said that when I relegated one of these 2 books to the storage unit I never imagined it would have become as popular as it has now. Especially not after that horrific first attempt at live action movie realization. Who would have thought that the third to last issue of the New Mutants would have even fostered a character worthy of the big screen. Even more shocking is that after that first portrayal of Deadpool as a mute, mutant hybrid, he would get another chance as a hyper-verbal wisecracking meta sociopath. And that it would be so damned entertaining. Of course I never expected a TV show to be made out of something as nuts as “Preacher”(sorry for the crappy photo).

 

Also after reading so much about the new cases I was interested to get one side by side with the older ones. They do seem clearer to me and I like the way the book just seems to float there. I also like the way the sticker on the top of the old cases has now been incorporated into the upper label and is now inside the case. Overall they feel a little more substantial to me. Not sure if it’s enough to make me re-holder the ones I have, but maybe just the ones with that unattractive bubbling.

 

Hopefully the remaining 8 will be along soon.

 

IMG_2814 by hepgwyn, on Flickr

 

IMG_2815 by hepgwyn, on Flickr