I Forgot I Even Started a Blog!

Well, maybe not completely but it has been quite a few crazy years since I have been able to spend any time on this. I am not so sure how consistent I will be but I do plan on posting a little more often than every five years...

Since my last post I have managed to do a few things. I have amassed an inventory far bigger than I have ever had before. Made some fantastic connections with other dealers in the south east and the rest of the country. I have built networks that allow me to acquire pretty much anything that I feel like carrying. It is no longer a problem to find that rare comic or to replace large quantities of bargain inventory when I am running low.

I have also managed to organize a dozen Taking Flight Comic Book Shows at The Sparrow and one Tin City show at the Tin Roof over roughly a two and a half year stretch. Besides selling tons (literally, tons) of great (and some not so great) comics, graphic novels and magazines I have had the pleasure of working with some absolutely fantastic people to help me put on these events. Besides the obvious folks like Cami and the rest of the staff of The Sparrow, all of the awesome help I have gotten from Ryan, Mike, Paul and so many more who have helped by volunteering, well, with a (very) little pay from me, to help move the massive amount of stuff that we bring there are all of the other folks who make these successful.

The three dozen or so artists, the folks from the local press, folks from local social media and the local businesses that always support us. One of the most rewarding things I have had the pleasure to enjoy putting on these shows is to help and develop some of the awesome artists we have in the area. Nothing makes me happier than to see someone who wasn't sure anyone would like there stuff now have the confidence it takes to actually start making a few bucks at their craft. Then there are also my friends Alan, Mandi, Alex, Albert and anyone else who still manage to knock out posters, press releases, signage and whatever else no matter how last minute my request is.

Chris and Holy City Brewing have been kind enough to donate a keg of beer to EVERY show we have done, all of which the bar has sold and donated the full amount to the charity that we are supporting for that event. And when it comes to charities, we have been super happy to help out a bunch of great ones. Communities in Schools, Alzheimer's Foundation, Fresh Future Farm, Chicora Community Garden, Engaging Creative Minds, Ronald McDonald House, Toys for Tots, Wings for Kids and I think that is all of them. Through everyone's generosity we have been able to donate close to $8,000 to these local organizations that do tremendous work in our community.

Besides five Taking Flight shows (February 6 and April 30 so far) and at least one more Tin City show (March 19) already planned for 2016, we are working on a larger event for comic fans in Charleston. This would involve bringing in some nationally known artists, getting great dealers from all around the south east and beyond and just having a good time enjoying the comic scene. Charleston is the number one travel destination in the world, time to get a destination comic book show going on here!

There are several other things that we have in the works. We are shopping for a brick and mortar location. And yes, we are taking our sweet time. The reason is that we want to have a location that fits our business model for years to come that allows us the flexibility to grow and also does not overburden our resources. We are also adding product lines. We have dramatically increased the amount of collector supplies we carry, including carrying supplies for original art and prints. We have started to slowly build up a stock of vintage toys. We have been buying a case of every Magic the Gathering booster set that has come out for the last three years. We even will start selling art supplies at the beginning of next year.

So, like I said in the beginning of this rambling post, I do plan to post a little more often than before. If you have a topic you want to talk about, let me know, I am sure I can say something about it. Thanks again for all of the support, this is just the beginning of what I hope will continue to be a fantastic ride!

Comic Book Restoration, why?!? Why?!? WHY?!?

Back when I first started collecting and dealing comics restoration was not nearly as frowned upon as it is today. As a matter of fact, it was pretty rampant and many dealers would perform restoration work in front of customers right there at their convention tables! Now, there were some dealers who were very good at it and they would typically do relatively minor things like pressing and cleaning. Others, on the other hand would take it to the extreme and marry pages into a book, color touch, restaple, seal tears (glue or tape) and other things that I don't even remember.

I remember watching one dealer at a show in Long Island in the mid eighties take a Very Good copy of Hawkman 1 and turn it into a Very Fine appearing copy. First thing he did was pull the bottom staple that had cut through the cover (very common in 60s DCs) and put a tiny sliver of archival tape on the cut and replace the staple. Next he cleaned the front and back covers with Wonder Bread. Last he took a couple of different magic markers and did about a dozen very tiny color touches along the spine. From a $10 copy to a $30 copy.

In another instance at a show I personally sold a copy of Jimmy Olsen 2 that was missing the centerfold to a dealer in South Carolina. He knew what he was getting and I had discounted the book deeply because of the missing centerfold. He snapped it up and took it back to his table where he promptly pulled the centerfold out of a Fox and Crow or Flippity Flippity Flop or whatever it was from the same month and year and put it in as the centerfold. Ten minutes later he turned a $25 comic into a $150 comic.

Another time at a small show in NJ, again in the mid 80s, I watched as a dealer took a copy of Amazing Fantasy 15 that was pretty heavily soiled and cleaned it with an art eraser. Funny thing about this one is the customer had already purchased the comic and asked him to do it for him!

There are many other instances that I have seen over the years where a dealer took a bad looking copy and made it more attractive with some type of restoration work. I have done it myself in the past by taking a copy of something that was in bad shape with something like a tear or spine split an putting tape on it. Did it raise the price like the first two examples I gave above? Nope. But it sure did make that Fair condition copy of Uncle Scrooge Four Color 386 that I taped the split spine on 20 years ago look a heckuva lot better and easier to sell. As were countless low grade 50s and 60s comics in 50 cent and dollar boxes that I sold at shows in the 80s and early 90s.

My point is that back in earlier days of collecting many comics were restored not out of malice but out of the realities of the market. Most customers, especially of lower grade material, really did not care about restoration one way or the other. There was a pretty large contingent that looked at it as a way to get a better looking copy for a lower price. Now the flip side is that there were also unscrupulous dealers out there who would do this kind of work, not tell anyone about it and charge full price to unknowledgeable collectors. Through CGC, experience and education these comics are being found and fortunately there is a strong belief that restoration of any kind should be disclosed, which is as it should be.

And as a side note, all three of the dealers that I mentioned above are still in business today. And, no, don't ask me to name them as what they were doing at the time was accepted and they were not ones to hide the fact that they did work to their books. But, I will say this, be aware of what you are buying. Learn how to spot a color touch. Learn how to spot tear seals. Learn how to protect yourself from bad investments. Having a copy of Fantastic Four 1 that is restored to a VG is not a bad thing at all. It is a classic comic that anyone would want to own. But having the same copy and not knowing what work has been done to it is bad!

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!