A week full of Wow
Wow, what an eventful week! I’ll start with the big Original Art sale on Heritage Auctions. The original art page where Spider-Man first appears in the black costume (as was meant to be as canon) sold last week for $3.36…
Comic Book Daily
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Comic Book Daily
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Tag Big B Comics
Read MoreA week full of Wow
Chasing Geese
A few years ago I made a mistake, in hindsight, when I started my Covered 365 posts. I picked only one cover for the matching day. As the year went on I modified it to pick a “cover of the…
Looking Ahead
Happy New Year everyone. I wish you all health and happiness and some great comic book finds (which go a long way to making the first two wishes realized). I tried to crystal ball this upcoming year when it comes…
2021, Who Knew`1`
It was quite the year, 2021. This stubborn pandemic did not go away, not at all. We fought on though, finding things that helped us push through. One of those things apparently was collecting comic books as the year 2021…
It Looks Like a Tight, Solid Copy
We’ve sold a lot of raw ungraded books this past year through our eBay auctions and as the year went on demand just kept going up, the prices we realized kept going up too. We were consistently bringing quality run…
Blame Old Saint Nic
Today was my Slava for Sveti Nikola, (Saint Nicholas), my family’s patron saint. With all that is going on, we played it cautiously and held a very small family gathering with my side on Saturday and entertained only my wife’s…
Edward Scissorhands
A couple of weeks ago the gentleman listing his incomplete books on our eBay auctions dropped a bombshell on me when he said “I think I still have the clippings”. Amazing! I asked him if he could bring them in…
Kirby and Ditko Splashing Around
Yesterday I was counting pages and noting defects on books for next week’s eBay auctions. It was tough slogging but I perked up when I came across what I’ll describe as a three-issue set of dueling splash pages. I did…
Reprints
Last week I sold a guy some early 1980s Marvel Tales reprints. I got $20 for a nice crisp copy of Marvel Tales #152 from June 1983; the book features the reprint of Amazing Spider-Man (ASM) #14 which famously features…
Econ 101
I was talking comics with a pal last week and we were both marvelling at what seems to be the endless demand generating record prices for items we both thought were forever doomed because of their bottomless supply. Books like…
The Time is Now
A day late but hey, you can’t rush greatness… This week Chris and Walt let the cat out of the bag and talk DC’s rising stock in the back issue markets. Please let us know what you thought of the…
I’m Missing Page 12
There were some strong responses to last week’s post, I’ve even received a few emails and had guys bring up the subject when chatting with me at the shop. Our eBay auction results this week only reinforce the growing demand…
Am I Missing Something?
Lately, we’ve been selling a lot of raw incomplete comic books through our eBay auctions. Over the past two weeks, we sold copies of Amazing Spider-Man #2 and #3 both missing ad pages and both around the 3.0 Qualified grade.…
Where Do You Fit In?
Fan Expo happened this weekend and I talked to a few guys that went, they all said it was a good show, not too many people but they were there to buy. I was actually thinking about how the hell…
Ups and Downs
I’ve been dealing in a lot of books lately, both CGC and raw copies and so I’ve been jumping onto GPA quite a bit to read the tea leaves. One big trend I have noticed is the lack of a…
Say it ain’t so Joe
In 2019 I was presented with a plaque by the folks that put on Fan Expo, Canada’s biggest comic con. Big B Comics had set up at all 25 Fan Expos, I think we were one of 3 such comic…
Trading Up, Trading Down
I know this guy I deal comics regularly with who is a real whiz at taking a big book I sell him and turning it into several smaller books that add up to way more than the value of the…
Did You Count The Pages?
I was getting some books ready for the showcases in the back of the store and was doing my thing of checking for completeness, assigning a grade and noting any pertinent comments that the prospective buyer should be aware of.…
What’s Next For CGC?
A couple of weeks ago I got this CGC solicitation that had Robert Downey Jr. doing a private mail-in signing for the CGC Signature Series. Proceeds were going to his FootPrint Coalition charity that promotes environmental sustainability. The signing fee…
Will A New Market Evolve
We have so many books down at CGC at the moment, our shipments seem to be queueing up one behind the other with none coming back to us. We have seven monthly shipments down there now and have an eighth…