Set Description:
I really love these books, at least the Fantastic Four issues, but collecting them is a frustrating exercise, as many are nearly impossible to find in high grades. And when you do find them, the prices can get crazy. It is further complicated by the extremely high prices for Issue #110, which seems hard to justify paying if you are buying the books for the FF. As a result, this is one our most incomplete sets. My advice to anyone interested in these books is to lower your standards for collecting or be prepared for the set to take many years to complete. We at one time probably owned all the FF books, but sold our lower grade copies with the aim of constructing a set of books with a minimum 9.4 grade. Unfortunately, with some of these books, we have seen a 9.4 or higher maybe once and they were far more expensive than other Marvels of the same age. Without a doubt, these are the hardest SA Marvels to collect, it requires lots of both money and patience to construct a set. My complements to those collectors topping the registry on this one.
2023 Update: Well, we finally decided to acquire a few of the post FF issues, although we still have not finished the FF portion of this one. So, I guess at some stage we will have to change the name of this set, which is not currently a priority because we have so far to go and the books are both hard to find and can be expensive. But, nevertheless, we do still try to add books when the opportunity arises and the price is right, if we do finish some sets that are currently higher priorities, perhaps we will direct more time and resources to this one.
2024 Update: OK, we have finally started buying more post-FF books in this title, as a number have come on the market in high grades of late. The prices of these books seem to be all over the place, so it’s a title where I recommend collectors be patient-hey, we have only been working on our set for 20 years LOL. The star of our set is undoubtedly our Issue #135 9.8 WP SS copy, which we acquired in a recent Heritage Auction. It is the only Stan Lee signed 9.8 copy of that issue in existence and, as such, the most valuable from a registry standpoint, barring the emergence of a 9.9. We also were fortunate to fill several holes in a private deal with another collector this year. That being said, we still are not exactly sure where to end this one and we certainly have a long ways to go just to complete the FF portion of the set. And then there’s that very expensive Issue #110 we still lack….
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