By now most of you are well aware of the big news. On August 24, 2014 we had a new record sale price for a single comic book. It was a CGC VF/NM 9.0 copy of Action Comics 1, auctioned on eBay. The final price of $3,207,852.00 was not all that far from double the current Nostomania CGC VF/NM 9.0 value of $1,740,000.00.

To cover the news, MSN.com did a nice story on the most valuable comics, using Nostomania pricing data for their rankings. They got a key point correct - to compare apples to apples, you need to pick a specific grade and certification company. I can't emphasize enough how important this is to correctly rank the comics. Yes, we realize and clearly state CGC NM 9.4 copies of many of these books probably do not exist, making these theoretical values. We get a fair amount of criticism for publishing such numbers when we all know there is a snowball's chance in hell of a CGC NM 9.4 Detective Comics 1 ever being discovered. Local dealer Bruce Ayers scoffs when asked about Nostomania, saying "we don't deal in theoreticals here". I suspect if somebody walked in his store with a Detective Comics 1 that appeared 9ish, he would start dealing in theoreticals in a big hurry.

So what is our new CGC NM 9.4 value for Action Comics 1? Before the auction. we had it at $2,970,000.00. MSN assigned the $3.2 million sale price as the new CGC 9.4 value. People are asking, "What is the new value"? For the answer, tune in next month when we release 4th Quarter pricing data. Remember, we don't just arbitrarily assign values - we run elaborate pricing algorithms. We throw lots of sales data in a funnel and out come the new price estimates. If you think about it a little, the CGC 9.4 value should be a lot higher than $3.2 million dollars. The auctioned book was 9.0. There is a huge difference in value between the 9.0 and 9.4 grades for a book like this. Beyond 9.4 it's almost exponential.