Rock Star

I thought only rock stars set up in front of sold out venues, in different towns, weekend after weekend, turns out I was wrong. I have a pal that just called me to report that he did great at the Ottawa Comic Con that happened this past weekend, he also did well two weeks back at Toronto’s Fan Expo. Next Weekend he’s setting up at the London Comic Con, and the weekend after that he’ll be setting up at the Hamilton Comic Con. This guy is the hardest working man in comics, and a rock star! It’s called paying you dues, and he’s not shying away, diving in deep, going hard. This type of work pays well for the weekends in question if you’re smart enough to bring the right stuff and have the sense enough to adjust your prices to the current market condition. The real payday though will come years later, if he’s personable enough he’ll have built up a nice base of customers and contacts to take him through those later, less ambitious years.

I went through a nice pile of “going to eBay auction” this past weekend, from the pile I’ve pulled out Weird Chills #2 as our Cover of the Week. Bernard Baily’s 1954 pre code horror cover has always been a fan favorite, I have a feeling this one will do great at auction. The Pre Code Horror genre is one of the best preforming comic book genre during these last two years of sliding prices, it turns out we all should have sold our Spidey #2 and bought a copy of Weird Chills #2 to replace it. Scarcity plays a huge roll, cover appeal also plays a huge role especially in this increasingly cover driven marketplace.

Our Splash of the Week was almost our Cover of the Week, Daredevil #37 has a kick ass Doctor Doom cover but then I found the Weird Chills. Gene Colan does some great work here. I like how easy it was to identify the writer and artist back in the Marvel Comics of the 60s, they were so proud and corny with their little pet names, Gene “the Dean” Colan! I seem to recall having difficulty drawing the same information out of DC books from the same era, especially the early and mid 1960s. Does anyone remember when DC started prominently giving the credits on the splash pages?

Our ad of the week comes from Green Lantern #80, its an ad for a Giant Play Farm Animal collection. For some reason the first thing I think of when I see this ad is Intellectual Property. I bet kids loved playing with these farm animals, I bet parents loved it too, I also bet these toys have very little collecting value today. A cow is a cow, a chicken is a chicken, unless you give them the anthropomorphic treatment. Bottom line is I think the advertiser may have done fine with these ads but the collector of these things most likely saw little return.

Our weekly icecollectibles eBay auction that ended Sunday night produced some interesting results. One of the books that impressed me was the Scooby Doo #1, Marvel, 1977 that closed out a$338. What is it about old Scoob that gets people bidding and bidding? This is the third Scooby Series after the Gold Key series then the Charlton series. Didn’t DC do a series recently? I think there was a CGC 7.5 copy of this book with the 35 cent price variant that went for something like $5000 recently. Cheepers!