www.parkcirclecomics.com now registered

This one will be short and sweet. Signed up for the domain name, now I have to figure out how to build a website. See everyone in a couple of months....

Whatever happened to the days when every comic was Mint? Part I

When I first started collecting comics back in the late 70's the Comic Buyers Guide was known as just The Buyer's Guide. It was, in a nutshell, an ad rag. Very weak on content and production quality but loaded with ads for every comic imaginable from dealers all across the country. There was also Rocket's Blast Comic Collector which was a little better on content - they always had really cool covers - and also chock full of ads. If you were not near a store or a regular convention (which there were very few), which was pretty much everyone at that point, you had no other way to complete your collection than to purchase through the mail.

These ads were camera ready style. In other words, the seller would send in their ad copy on a piece of paper and the magazine (TBG was actually a tabloid newspaper) would put the ads onto the page as it, sometimes shrinking them to fit as needed. You had everything from well produced ads that someone had professionally laid out and typeset to ads where folks just grabbed a pen and wrote everthing on an an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper and sent it in. The old catalog that is posted on the Mile High Comics website was, if I remember correctly, in an issue of TBG right after they aquired the Edgar Church collection.

At that point grading comics was just starting to get perfected and there were varying definitions of what 'Mint' was. Sure there were plenty of folks advertising Mint comic books but not alot of the folks actually had them, especially by today's standards. There were also newsstand, pristine, super and I think I even remember hyper Mint. I think one of the funniest was dealer mint, whatever that means. But, Mint then was a whole different ball game than it is now.

See, the grading standards back then were just being refined. The Overstreet Price Guide only had Good Fine and Mint, and if I remember right the split was in thirds. So a Golden Age Batman comic that was $60 in Mint was $40 in Fine and $20 in good. There were people who had seen truly high grade comics but most of them were in a few major collections and got gobbled up very quickly. Your typical Near Mint comic back then would today fall into the Very Fine range and most folks did not even notice or care. It was a nice looking copy, probably just about as nice as it was when it came off the spinner rack.

Next I will talk about restoration as it was back then!

A comic for non comic people!

Love and Capes, a great comic for all!

One of the neatest little comics out there today that you can easily get non comic fans to read and enjoy. Zahler does a wonderful job of creating what is essentially a superhero sitcom with funny and well developed characters. I grabbed a copy of the Free Comic Book Day comic this past year and gave it to my wife to read and shortly after that she was reading it online and also picking up the trade paperbacks! This from a woman who has no comprehension of why I like to spend so much time with my stupid little funny books. At least it's not spending hours and hours listening to jambands play the same drug induced psychedelic songs that never end - oops - wait, that is probably for a whole different blog!

Anyhow, check out Love and Capes. Go to their website and read their online strips or go by and see if your local comic shop has any of the issues available. If they don't have any you can order from the Love and Capes website or the trade paperbacks are still available through Diamond's Star system.

Grading comic books

This is the first of what I am sure will be many blogs about grading comic books. The first installment right here is originally from a post on the Comic Collector Live message boards that I fealt would be a good start.

At Park Circle Comics we have been super excited about finishing out the first week of our webstore on Comic Collector Live. We have already met several of you out there and are looking forward to doing business with and meeting even more of you as time goes on!

A couple of quick comments on grading. We are sticklers about it. We hate overgraded comics just as much as anyone else. We realize that most comics that are ordered from other dealers that are listed as NM are usually, at best, VF/NM and more often than not VF. Very Goods are typically Goods. Well, we do our best to make sure that every comic that we send out, from the 49 cent bargain comics to expensive Golden and Silver Age, is graded accurately. We follow the Overstreet grading standards and we never do "through the bag" grading.

We do, however, have a few exceptions where we do not stick with Overstreet standards because to us, quite frankly, they are too lenient. These have been pet peeves for decades and since I don't like them, I hit a comic pretty hard on grading when I see them, and even if we find it acceptable for a grade we still make note of it.

Tape - for us, you will never see any book above a "Good" with tape on it. And, for it to be a 'good' with tape, it has to be very minor and unobtrusive.

Detached cover - Never will be above a "Fair" unless it an exceptionally nice copy and we might assign it a "Fair/Good" but that is rare.

Loose centerfold - no better than a "Good." Loose at one staple we will go up to a "Fine" but it darn well better be pretty nice otherwise.

There are a few others but those are the biggies. As said earlier, all of our comics are graded with extreme care. For less expensive comics for speed we assign a single grade (Fr, G, VG, F, VF, NM) and that is the LOWEST condition you will get. When you order a NM you are getting an exceptional copy. Our Very Fines are going to be what most dealers sell to you as NM or NM-. For more expensive comics we will assign partial or split grades such as VG/F but only when warranted and not to pump up the price.

Cool comic find!

In the nearly 30 years that I have been buying, selling and collecting comic books (holy mackerel that's a long time) I have bought countless collections. Some small, some large, some really large. Everytime I get one I inevitably come across something in there that I either did not realize was in there when I bought it or didn't think much of it. Sometimes it is weird stuff like the early 70s Mr Spock Christmas card or the tons of little notes and other odd pieces of paper people tend to tuck away with their collections. Sometimes it is not good and it is hidden damage on the inside of the comics that I did not see until it was too late (that is another blog entry down the road.) Sometimes it is just an item or two that I did not know was in the collection, which is what happened this month.

I picked up a collection of comics that were primarily from the 80s and up. Nothing spectacular, maybe a few goodies here and there but overall a standard collection of fairly recent comics and graphic novels. Well, as I was going through one of the boxes with some magazines in them I came across a coverless golden age Batman comic. I couldn't tell what issue it was right away because the first two pages (wraps) were also missing. Needless to say that this greatly reduced the value, but it is a golden age Batman so even without a cover or the first two pages it still is worth something. Well, after a little research - and a little help from www.comics.org - I figured out that it was a copy of Batman number 5! An actually copy of the fifth issue of Batman! In my possession, owned by me! I have had countless golden age comics, most of which were from after 1945 with a few from earler but I have never had a Batman this early!

Having an issue of Batman that old, even after doing this for thirty years just gives me a thrill!

Here is a picture of this beauty!