Should you ever give Whitman's a look? Well, if you are flipping through a quarter bin, yes. Every publisher has a few nuggets in a few series. This is the final issue in a short-lived Whitman title. Sure the best artists were at Marvel and DC, but this isn't that bad of a cover, or a concept. Final issues are often scarcer, since in many cases, being the final issue was a decision by management based on declining sales. In this case, there is more to the story for why this book is scarce in any grade. This book was originally released in sealed multi-packs only. The decision to buy a multi-pack inherently meant fewer sales. First, you had to kinda mangle the pack to be able to see what was even in the pack other than the book on top! Second, if I have no interest in the other two books, I'm probably going to pass. I'd have to really want that 3rd book. Anyway, these are little details few people know, and you might only learn by reading NostoNews.

Ok I'll keep this theme going for one more item. This time, the publisher is the often overlooked Gold Key. Granted, Twilight Zone was a pretty damn cool series, probably a flagship title for them. This was near the end of a pretty long run, so people were not really paying attention. Even so, how would anyone know the first professional work by newcomer Frank Miller would ever be a big deal? Again, you could easily find one of these in a junk pile, and as we saw here, even a crummy 5.0 is a $100+ comic book.

Longtimers know I love the occasional efforts by publishers to mash up genres. Space Western Comics, by Charlton Publishing, is one of my favorites. I mean, come on, it's American old west cowboys, in space! It makes perfect sense. Surprise surprise, this is the final issue of a very cool and very short-lived series (six issues), and it sold for way over current value. That is a damn good price, IMO. But if you dig a little deeper, there is a reason for that, as well. Even though there are as of now 26 copies on the CGC Census, a 7.0 ties for Finest Known. Not many of these escaped in high grade, it appears. And a skull on the cover never hurts!

Promos! You just never know with these. I think, for a long time, many collectors could not decide if these were cool or not. Personally, it took me quite a while to decide "Yeah, these are all actually pretty cool in their own way". Many were marketing efforts for businesses, that were pretty much shoving cubes in round holes to try and get kids to read about how rubber was made, or how we make and sell salt. As always, occasionally there is a great artist, a first appearance, or something controversial, so don't gloss over these either.

I'm happy to see Annuals (across the board) starting to get some love of late. I'm not sure why interest seems cyclical to me, but it always does, and seems to be on an upswing. I think the E.C. Annuals were historically a bit frowned on since, it was my understanding, they were just old unsold copies with the covers ripped off, bound into 128-Pagers. In other words, to many they were essentially just reprints, no new stories. I just think anything E.C. did was super cool, so I was happy to see this sale.

In an effort to... drum up even more business and further complicate silver dollar variants?, PCGS is now flagging die marriage combinations for Liberty Seated Silver Dollars, and we have begun tracking these. I really shouldn't say that, more information is always a good thing. I'm still not sure what the "OC" acronym stands for here, and why they didn't just use "DM". The tricky part is these new PCGS numbers will not appear on holders of most examples in the wild unless they are resubmitted. Take the sale example here. In the image, you see the original PCGS ID number of 6932. Unless you have a knowledgeable seller, like Heritage in this case, few would know this coin is actually PCGS ID number 922914. If I owned this coin, I'd be hesitant to resubmit and lose that cool "legacy" holder.

We are starting to see more CACG coins in the wild now. Founded by John Albanese, who has a long history of helping start first PCGS, then NGC, is now at it again with this new company. It's likely Nostomania will start supporting this new certification agency, once I have a firm understanding of the details. For now I mainly wanted to show you what a holder looks like, and how Heritage presents the data. Heritage has been noting "CAC" stickers for quite a while now, but John's prior affiliation with that feels confusing for me here. The holder label says "CAC G6", but also has what appears to be the old CAC green sticker printed right on the label.

It's not very often a Modern Age magazine will bring close to $10,000.00, but here is one of those cases. This is a new entry to the Nostomania database, no excuse, it clearly should have been there previously, since this single sale will drop the magazine onto our Top 100 Magazines list. This sale price is actually down significantly, shortly after the markets peaked a CGC copy in the same grade sold for $16,800.00!