I drank too much! It turned out to be a terrible weekend to have Argentinian and Italian friends. I thought I was going to get some R and R but ended having drinks with them celebrating their football victories, exhausting! I even ended up having a quick nip in the parking lot of the Serbian deli I frequent, turned out a couple of tennis fans I knew felt a quick drink was in order, why they had a half-full bottle in their car was a question I didn’t ask. Good thing I avoided the Ye Olde Squire Pub on my way home, nobody drinks more than crying Englishmen.
Apologies for last week’s lack of a Comic Culture podcast. It turns out that little chip I thought the show was on wasn’t the chip I was looking for. I have lost the chip I was looking for!! All is well though, a new chip has been purchased because … the show must go on.
Slowly but surely we’re finally starting to grind out lots of last year’s warehouse purchase books down to CGC for grading. We’ve received hundreds of books back, many of which you can see up on our ICE website. I had a quick peek at my CGC order status page today and it surprised me just how many books are down there now awaiting grading. As of today, I have around 50 open invoices totalling well over 1,100 books and we have another 200 or so books to send down by the end of this week. Things are now settling into a monthly shipment of around 200 comics.
Thankfully the market has been quite favourable to most of these submissions, many books I thought were marginal submissions, sending them in just to have beefed up stock numbers, are turning into solid choices as their values have seen steady gains these past six months. The whole issue with a terrible CGC turnaround time has ended up being a benefit to many of the books we’ve sent in. Still, I can’t wait to get these things back!!
I can’t imagine how many comics are sitting down at the CGC facilities at this moment, I bet they are bursting at the seams. Let’s hope they’re keeping the water out.
We’re also finally starting to throw up a half-decent number of books up onto our vintage comics section on bigbcomics.com, though we’ve still only scratched the surface as far as that warehouse collection is concerned. Baby steps.
I still can’t seem to strike a balance with feeding the Big B shop old books, our eBay auction old books, the Big B Dot Com vintage section old books and CGC to grade old books. On top of that, I have a few guys that like to trade a quality graded book for an assortment of quality raw books. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll never be able to satisfy all those buckets so I’ll just trod along forever flipping allegiances and priorities.
Our internationalcollectiblesexchange eBay auction this past week gave us some great results. We had a CGC 7.0 Marvel Spotlight #5 sell for a healthy $3,150, well above the previous sale. Marvel Spotlight #5 is such a tough book in high grade which is why a CGC 9.8 recently set a new record for a Bronze Age book selling for $264.000. Ours seemed a bargain! Advantage buyer.
Walt, I have a suggestion to save you time from creating new posts every few days.
Why not make an ‘OPEN’ topic every few weeks, allowing us to post comic-related questions, answers and topics for open discussions?
It would free up your time and allow us to post whatever we want, providing it’s within the boundries of good taste, historical comic context, and things we always wanted to chat about, but held back because it didn’t fit the defined outline of your topic
Thoughts?
Klaus, I would love to try something like this. How could we do it? Post a piece that says “ask a question in the comments field below” ? That would make the main content of that post the actual comments section? Could work.
Maybe I should try it? Or were you thinking something else?
I was thinking of just the banner saying “Open For Discussion! #1”, to start, and if it goes well, there could be future open discussions. You would just need a small blurb that this column is open to you, the reader, to raise questions or provude answers and discussions on whatever pops up.
I’ve been noticing the lack of participation lately, even though, I think, we have a lot of readers. It’s possible many folks are away for the summer, or they’re checking in occasionally, to see if the topic interests them. In a open forum, it would almost be like a letters of comment page in the old Buyers Guide or comics, allowing people to form their own topics of interest.
I believe this may revitalize the group as well as buy you some time off to get caught up on your other work. It must be hard to come up new topics every week.
Great thinking Klaus!
another idea why the crowd is so quiet: The brilliance of YOUR poetry. No one is going to try and voice an opinion next to the eloquence and insightful verbosity of your prose!
And so you propose, if I dumb down my prose,
We’ll be able to win back the crowd,
Sounds like a plan, our real Spider-Man,
I’ll try to do us all proud.