Sorry for missing last week’s post, I blame Free Comic Book Day! For me these weekly posts are a mix of market research and benchmarking, performance art, marketing and therapy, the sum of these parts often adds up to bits of gibberish but we all hang in there for those rare threads of insight that move us forward in our grand endeavor. Unfortunately we never know when those rare moments will come so we soldier on.
As alluded to above, we hosted our Free Comic Book Day at Big B Comics at our shop in Hamilton this past Saturday and like every year we rented a huge 15′ x 30′ tent for our bargain comic bin sidewalk sale. Even though the weather did not cooperate at all, it was a drizzly 11 degrees (52f), we still had a fantastic day, instore sales were over 10% above last years which is always a good sign for the summer to come. We resurrected our classic Superman/Flash race, it was a close one! Click our Instagram link for the video (there are also some lead up training videos there in case you wanted to check them out). Thanks to the Big B crew for all their hard work and thanks to all who came out to support the event.
Free Comic Book Day comes once a year but the icecollectibles eBay auction runs every week and we have to keep feeding that monster out of the “going to eBay auction” pile. I found my Cover of the Week near the top of the pile, Don McLoughlin’s 1953 cover to Walt Disney’s Vacation Parade #4 called to me with its beautiful summer scene, please come quickly summer.
Our Ad Page of the Week comes from 1948’s Don Winslow of the Navy #57. Yes, 1948, that was a time when men wore fedoras and women wore silk scarfs, that’s why it was easier to tell them apart back then…
My Splash Page of the Week isn’t really a splash page, its a How To page out of the above Summer Special and it shows kids how to make Peter Pan using a few pipe cleaners. This is all fine and dandy until pops needs to fix the clogged drain! Still, it was nice to see Disney helping the kids make their own toys, I’m sure little Billy Mattel was one of the first to try.
On Sunday night our latest icecollectibles weekly eBay auction closed with some great results, I was watching our Amazing Spider-Man #194 CGC 9.8 with some interest as this is such a standard collectible staple, I thought the result could be a good reflection of the current market. Our copy closed at $1906, just below last sale but above the 90 day average of $1873. The book held its ground!
Oh Walt you young and naive guy. Pipe cleaners are not for dad to clean out drains they are for him cleaning out his pipe for smoking .