The Kitchen

Here’s the kitchenette at the new warehouse. I’m hoping soon to stock it with stuff like bread, cheese, jams and peanut butter. For now, all that booze will have to carry us through. I’ll probably have to hide those bottles in the cabinets: I wouldn’t want to give guests coming in to talk to Jay and I the wrong impression.

I’m trying to pick up this copy of Detective Comics #58; negotiations are hot and heavy right now so we’ll see. This cover never did that much for me but of course Tec #58 features the first appearance of the Penguin making this a book to try and get. This book with its contents being more important than its cover brings up a good thought exercise of actually the reverse scenario. So, let’s take Detective Comics #30 and #31 and compare what a copy would go for and any grade, say a 4.0 for this example. The Tec #31 will probably sell for over ten times the amount that the #30 sells for. Now let’s say a CGC graded copy of each goes to auction, and both are coverless. By rights the #30 should get more than the #31 since it is the fourth Batman appearance versus #31’s fifth appearance. But would the market behave like that? We’re conditioned to think of #31 as this huge monster, would that carry over into the bidding?

Well, this was awkward. For a moment I thought I was going through one of Chris Owen’s Eros Comics piles, not our “going to eBay auction” piles, but then I read on and saw this ad was for recruiting private investigators. This ad comes from Witches Tales #28 from 1954, the heyday of Noir, tough guy gumshoes and all that jazz. And just so you know, I bought my Ford F-150 because I needed it for work.

It’s been a while since I showed one of those minimalist Steve Ditko splash pages. Cripes, I hope I haven’t used this one before? This great splash page comes from Tales to Astonish #19, you know the one with that great ROMMBU cover by Kirby. It has taken me years to get over my negative Ditko bias; when I was young, I wrongly judged him based on me liking Romita’s Spidey more. I’ve come to really appreciate his talents and these beautiful sparse splash pages played a bit part in me rediscovering Steve.

Another of our icecollectibles weekly eBay auctions ended last night and there were some substantial sales. I was pleased with the performance of our CGC 6.5 Amazing Spider-Man #50, our copy had White pages and it bucked what was a gradual downward trend, again, it earned $1,426 USD. Can we look at this result as a good stabilizing sign?

Walter Durajlija
Walter Durajlija

Walter Durajlija is an Overstreet Advisor and Shuster Award winner. He owns Big B Comics in Hamilton Ontario.

Articles: 1826

4 Comments

  1. phew! that was a rough start there Walt…nothing like a picture of a prepack kitchenette to cull the audience down to the bare minimum!

    But then you bounced back, like the champ you are, with a left jab of Ditko, a quick straight of early Bat Man and then a knock out blow with the Iconic ASM!

  2. I hate to see you hanging here Spider for 5 days with nothing caught in your webbed comment.
    Are the boys still celebrating my birthday on the 1st , without us?
    You are right about the kitchenette. No wonder he’s never offered a bottle of water when I’ve visited before. He doesn’t have any 🙂
    I’m going to assume he is still researching the collection in Ottawa.
    Two weeks into my three weeks off and crickets… Is it times for a “Jim”-iny Crickets column?
    Is it too early to say Merry Christmas to all?

    *back to my scanning and indexing of Canadian comics*

  3. We do have water Jim, we use it to clean the glasses.

    I did leave the spider hanging didn’t I, apologies. As Jim noted I was caught up trying to get my Canadian Whites report ready for submission. Jim, your data on past sales is proving super useful, I think I’ll go buy a case of water for your next visit.

  4. I spent most of my 3 weeks off catching up with scraping Canadian Sales data, which I was behind on and added everything I could find for the last month or so. I even missed some I had bought in the last few months because I was so behind on unpacking packages that arrived and doing complete book scans.
    This year there seems to have been an increasing interest in CDN reprints , regardless their lack of the actual US page count (52vs36) or even interior.
    If there is a never seen splash page replacing the cover that’s good enough if the character on the cover they like.
    Its a great time to have a Canadian comic Price Guide on a website with which we could show this unique trait of Canadian books and it would probably drive sales too.

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