Suspense Comics #3 Church copy just showed up 2 2

[streyouttacomics]

15 hours ago, Sqeggs said:

Did we ever get the back story on where this book came from?  I was hoping Heritage might include something in catalog write up, but they didn't.

+1 also interested.

I think the book sold in the expected range 

[Sqeggs]

Someone over in CG was inquiring about the Crippen collection, which inspired me to look at some of the books in the HA archives.  I thought this writeup of the Crippen Suspense 3 might be of interest:

Suspense Comics #3 Davis Crippen ('D" Copy) pedigree (Continental Magazines, 1944) CGC VF 8.0 Off-white pages. The sole highest-graded copy of the book everybody wants... do we have your attention? The classic bondage cover by Alex Schomburg is what all the fuss is about, and there's a lot of fuss indeed about #3, which is a Gerber "9" that Overstreet calls "scarce." This comic was a well-kept secret until it appeared on the frontispiece of Gerber's Photo-Journal a decade and a half ago, causing demand to skyrocket thereafter (in the 1992 Overstreet guide it had the same price as issue #2, namely $235... by the 1995 Overstreet update, "top of Guide" had hit $7,000!). It seems every longtime collector has a Suspense #3 story, with the upshot usually being that a beaten-up copy was sold for a small fortune, or that someone got his hands on one only to find that the six-pager "83 Days On A Life Raft" at the center of the comic was missing. No such worries with this high-grade copy. Also of note is that there is no Edgar Church/Mile High copy of this issue, and almost all of the other famous pedigree runs are missing it as well! We suspect that the issue may not have made it to many newsstands because of the controversial cover, accounting for its absence in other famous comic hoards. We've heard different estimates of how many copies exist, but all of them are very low numbers, and the chances of a nicer copy ever surfacing strike us as extremely slim. This book is one of Overstreet's 100 most valuable comic books, and it's one of the highlights of the Crippen collection and of our auction. Overstreet 2006 VF 8.0 value = $12,000. CGC census 6/06: 1 in 8.0, none higher. From the Crippen Collection.

[Pickie]

Any news about where the Church copy had resided all the years and about the original purchase from Chuck R.?  

[comicjack]

27 minutes ago, Pickie said:

Any news about where the Church copy had resided all the years and about the original purchase from Chuck R.?  

The collector held on to it all those years from what was told and made a little profit 

[Pickie]

Fair enough. Glad it wasn't a losing deal.

[Sqeggs]

I don't think the backstory was ever made public, which I find disappointing.  Particularly since a lot of people (including Heritage!) had been arguing for years that there was no Church copy.

Maybe the consignor still has other high-dollar books and didn't want any publicity.