GoCollect asked you what you wanted.   The readers responded.  One sector wanted more golden age comics articles.  Another group wanted more insight into how to use GoCollect data.  This article combines the two requests from our readers to produce one blog. These are some tricks I use on GoCollect for Golden Age comics.

The Golden Age does not have hot comics!!!

Issue:

GoCollect produces some of the most useful data as it relates to the comic book marketplace.  I am not being paid to say this as an employee, because I am not an employee.  This is a statement of fact from someone who is like you, the reader.  I get no peek at the data before you see it.  As a result, I must interpret the data as you do.

The weekly and monthly hottest comics lists that you can review usually involve some rumor or confirmed news that is driving those books to be popular. The MCU, TV, current comic book stories, and other factors drive what collectors and investors chase.  This does not apply to Golden Age books.  The Golden Age is different because these books have beenaround from at least the mid-1950s.  As a result,  it is very hard for a book that old to suddenly be "hot".

Advice:

GoCollect has a hottest comics tab.  If you select that and then go to Golden Age Comics, look for trends.  Patterns will emerge in the market.  Walt Disney Comics and Stories #131 and  Walt Disney Comics and Stories #137 are in the top 50 at the time of this writing. Let us review the facts on these issues.

These books have a few sales in the past so a proper FMV can not be calculated.  In addition, these issues are not of particular importance to be called keys by collectors.  Finally, these issues are close in the sequence of the run and are numbers 43 and 44 in the "hottest" Golden Age books at the time this article was written.

What that reveals to me is that a Golden Age Disney collector may have started to liquidate his collection. If I am a Golden Age collector I may want to look more closely to see if any more of these books then could be still on the market.

This trick applies to all genres where you see books listed in the hottest comics list that may not qualify as true keys.  I have used this trick before and actually located some books I wanted in a very large collection. If I did not use this trick I would have never found those books.

GoCollect is not Overstreet

Issue:

I love the data collected by GoCollect.  There is so much there to dissect. The problem is that people view GoCollect as an online Overstreet price guide clone.  If you are a person that does that, please stop it!!!  There is so much more information at your fingertips.  Nowhere is this more important than for the Golden Age hobbyists. It is not difficult to find an Ultimate Fallout #4 or Incredible Hulk #181.  I can even find a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #1 for sale if I wanted.  In contrast, finding Golden Age books is entirely different. You need all the intel you can find on these elusive books.

Advice:

Readers should review all the information on a GoCollect comic issue's page to see the advantages of GoCollect. I saw these advantages when studying books like Wonder Comics #17.  GoCollect gives you an advantage over other price guides.  A simple hobbyist would see an FMV of $2,400 for a 9.0 graded issue at the time this article was written and be done.

I want to teach you to see some additional information that is there for the reader to discover.  A quick review tells you that a total of 7 issues exist in the CGC census.  That population is rare.  Where the reader can really gather information is to review the total number of sales.  This issue in that grade has been sold a total of 9 times with the last sale coming out in Nov 2020.  This tells the reader that some of these sales must have involved the same book!  It is almost like a crime scene investigator finding a fingerprint and being able to track the sales of one actual book. That data is more than one can obtain from a simple price guide.

Bringing this lesson home

This article shows you all the information you can get from just the free version of GoCollect!!! The more you use GoCollect and the more data you can obtain, the greater your advantages over others. I did not have that advantage when I started to dabble in Golden Age books.  Even with my Photo Journal Guide to Comics I did not have a fraction of the information I can obtain from a simple page on GoCollect.  I made mistakes and missed plenty of great Golden Age books I should have purchased when I had the chance. Now, you do not have to make those same mistakes.

I plan to draft additional tricks and tools that can provide you information to make you a formidable collector of Golden Age books.  I have only one request from you, the readers.  You must all promise that if you ever buy a book using my tricks to your advantage against the collector who founded GoCollect that you never tell him I was the one who taught you these lessons.  You instead have my permission to blame Harry Stone III. Let him deal with it.

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