Set Description:
Most people complete what they can of the 30 cent variants before moving on to the 35 cent variants. The answer as to why is pretty simple:
I would estimate thathat 35 cent variants exist in numbers one tenth or less what seems to exist for 30 cent variants.
Secondly, mostly a function of the scarcity is that 35 cent variant pricing is significantly higher than with 30 cent variants.
I have crazy stories that can be told about both 30 and 35 cent variants, but I'll lead off with two because it goes straight to the problem of high prices.
WIth respect to my 30 cent collection I probably paid an average of about $10 or less for any issue in the collection. Mostly it was just tons of legwork and a little bit of luck.
I shook all the trees right from the start with the 35 cent collection. After a few months I happened upon a guy named mark from Wyoming. I probably bought a book or 2 off EBay. Turns out he had a stack of about 30-40. I drove up top near Wyoming and met him at a coffee shop with a wad of cash in my pocket. I remember he brought his wife as well...for safety? Anyway I paid him roughly $75 a book for the stack, which seemed quite high to me at the time.
Many months later through some odd ball chat boards I met a guy named Greg from Cape Fear. This happened to be an area of 35 cent variant distribution. Greg eventually came to the CGC boards and posted them all for everybody to see.
After a lot of work and a lot of talk I agreed tp ay $10,000 for about 100 books. I sent 5k and crossed my fingers. Next thing you know they show up at my door and are everything I expected. I sent the next 5k and the next batch showed up.
It was a wild couple of buys and covered about 70% of the books I needed.
But as you can gather, I piad about 10 times for these books than what I had paid for my entire 30 cent collection.
My 35 cent story included many important players. Among those filling in the cracks there was Lighthouse, Fred McSurly and CosmicSpiuderman.
There was also a lot of luck.
I remember buying a lot of about 10 Sgt Fury books from a guy in Detroit Michigan, which included the 2 35 cent variants. These two are among the toughest of the bunch. They show up on my door and BINGO, both of the 35 cent variants. I think I got them for about $10.
With the 30 cent variants I used a 10 point scale based on tradability. With the 35 centers I am going to use just a 5 point scale. That is because even a book with a trade rank of 1 is more difficult to find than almost any 30 cent variant.
A 1 is one of the easier to find. A 2 is standard difficulty. 3 is harder to find and a book that can be traded for just about any book in the series, 4 is either very expensive or very hard to find. 5 is a book that is almost impossible to find. This would include the Westerns and maybe 1just a very few more.
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