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Subject: Standard Catalog IV NOW AVAILABLE | Author | Messages | 
John Jackson Miller
Posts: 1007
 | Posted: 9/7/2005 5:04:41 PM | The Fourth Edition of the Comics Buyer’s Guide’s Standard Catalog of Comic Books is scheduled to begin shipping from the printer this week -- and we finally have an order page for it on our site. You can also ask your retailer for it: Its Diamond order code is JUL053395.
Closing out at 1,624 pages, the Fourth Edition raises the bar yet again for comics reference works.
For the first time in the series, the Standard Catalog sports an art cover. This edition’s cover is Alex Horley’s Marvel painting, previewed earlier this year for CBG readers in hobby copies #1604. But there are plenty of changes inside, as well.
This is the first edition to fully see the impact of the monthly CBG, for example. With the price-guide team growing, more attention has been paid to more individual titles than ever before. And, while a great deal of content data had already been added since last edition by us and our partners at Human Computing’s ComicBase, we’ve also added all the content info gleaned from the year’s Retroviews and Bottom Lines in CBG.
That magazine/book dynamic, now unique in the comics field, is paying off for customers of both. As the only pricing brand with both a book and a magazine, developments in one help the other. CBG did a feature on DC Whitman variants, and now all those variants are in the Standard Catalog, fully explained.
Meanwhile, the Standard Catalog includes data from all the 1977-79 Marvel Whitman variants — and, yes, that is what we believe they essentially are and will be calling them — so we have a CBG feature based on that research slated for #1609.
This year's edition includes...
• More self-explanatory issue numbers. Where past editions had followed the model of short abbreviations with issue numbers to help identify variants, many such comics now have a more obvious name. A John Cassaday cover variant that might once have been noted as 1/A now appears as 1/Cassaday. A full explanation continues to appear in notes, but now readers can often tell variant listings apart just from the issue number.
• Many new essays. More essays are appearing for the first time in the Standard Catalog than in any edition since the first.
• More story data and creator information. Story titles were added to more than 13,000 issues, a whopping 34% advance over the previous edition. More than 15,000 creator names were added, as well, in the largest expansion since the book’s launch in 2003.
• More issues with CGC population and auction data. Thanks again to the monthly CBG, more external data has been mapped to the proper places in the database. Thus, the vast majority of comics slabbed by CGC and auctions for same are reflected in the issue listings. We resolved a lot of complicated issues, including Classics Illustrated, which had been daunting.
This year’s edition returns to the 2003 edition’s practice of listing auction averages only if three copies or more have been sold in a specific grade, which makes for more reliable averages. That results in a page count similar to the previous year’s edition, despite all the added information. There is no hardcover version scheduled for this edition.
The Standard Catalog of Comic Books Fourth Edition is solicited in the July-for-September edition of Previews from Diamond Comic Distributors. It is also available from KP Books at (800) 258-0929 (order code SCOM4) or at our site.
Retailers interested in carrying KP Books in bulk should contact their distributors or call KP Books at (800) 894-4656.
4th Edition at a glance
• 1,624 pages
• Individual listings for 165,302 comic books
• One third of all comics have story titles listed; 93,656 different stories
• 136,099 creator credits
• 70,819 circulation figures from 1935 to last month
• Populations for 474,456 CGC copies listed
• More than 125,000 auction results; high, low, and average prices reported
Best,
John Jackson Miller
Comics & Fiction at Faraway Press
Comics circulation resarch at The Comics Chronicles
Webcomic: Sword & Sarcasm |
John Jackson Miller
Posts: 1007
| Posted: 9/26/2005 4:18:53 PM | And the volume has arrived -- at least, in our offices. Not only does this volume stand apart from the others, but it literally stands on its own. It's about the size of a box of detergent!
I expect the preorders are beginning to roll about now. For shop orders, it'll depend on how fast Diamond and our bulk sales departments send it through their systems -- but it is printed and on its way.
Best,
John Jackson Miller
Comics & Fiction at Faraway Press
Comics circulation resarch at The Comics Chronicles
Webcomic: Sword & Sarcasm | 
Brent Frankenhoff
Posts: 3930
| Posted: 10/6/2005 9:55:40 AM | And, we just learned that, for a limited time, our book department is offering free shipping on copies of the Standard Catalog ordered from us.
You can order copies here.
| johnmayo
Posts: 6
| Posted: 10/31/2005 4:46:47 PM | Any chance of an electronic PDF version?
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John Jackson Miller
Posts: 1007
| Posted: 10/31/2005 4:52:01 PM | The electronic version of the Standard Catalog is available as Comicbase, which has not just the content from our database but serves as a collection management tool. It's far more nimble than a simple PDF would be -- there's a variety of ways for porting checklists and things to other devices.
The website is here.
Best,
John Jackson Miller
Comics & Fiction at Faraway Press
Comics circulation resarch at The Comics Chronicles
Webcomic: Sword & Sarcasm | 
JCal-Fan
Posts: 25
| Posted: 11/8/2005 9:04:21 PM | Hi JJM,
I love the Standard Catalog. I think it is a boon to our hobby. I know a ton of work goes to each volume. I have the first edition, and only the first edition. I want to get a copy every time it comes out, but it would take forever to make my entries all over again. I am thinking about getting Standard Catalog IV, I just know yet. I know it has a bunch of neat features and updates. But, is there a way that you can publish just the updates separately? It would be like the updates for law books and medical books. You could still publish the large ediitons for first time buyers and the recent updates for owners of the earlier lage editions. Just a thought.
Best/Steve Ogden
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John Jackson Miller
Posts: 1007
| Posted: 11/9/2005 11:11:55 AM | The question's come up before -- but, no, updates wouldn't be technically or financially feasible.
The number of people wanting the update would be a tiny fraction of people preferring a complete book, so it wouldn't be a viable proposition. Sad as it is to admit, but we in the book trade make our money by selling people entire books. (The legal and medical books are an exception, but the main books are often offered at $100 or more, aren't they?)
The trick for us is to always include enough updates to make the purchase worthwhile. I think the third-to-fourth jump is worth a buy, so definitely I would think you'll get a lot more than you have in the first edition. 400 pages more...
And that, in fact, would make the update book unmanageable. All the auction and much of the unslabbed pricing is new, so we'd have to run most of the entries again. And then there's a lot of stuff where a fact here and a fact there has been added -- so the update would be very hard to use. A record like Richie Rich & Casper #16 might have had story titles added in the second edition, page count added for the third, and notes about the Hostess ad added for the fourth. Updates would just look weird, I am afraid.
There is a one-product solution in ComicBase, where you buy the main edition one year and buy the updates each year. Computers are much more suitable to that kind of updating -- what we sell is, in essence, a printout of ComicBase each year.
Best,
John Jackson Miller
Comics & Fiction at Faraway Press
Comics circulation resarch at The Comics Chronicles
Webcomic: Sword & Sarcasm |
JCal-Fan
Posts: 25
| Posted: 11/9/2005 11:41:10 AM | Thank you for your reply, and I understand what you are saying and it makes perfect sense. I just had to ask about a seperate update, not knowing the ends and outs of publishing the idea sounded feasible.
I now plan to pick up this new addition, and thanks again for your reply.
Best/Steve Ogden
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John Jackson Miller
Posts: 1007
| Posted: 11/9/2005 12:37:36 PM | I think part of the thinking here is that if someone just needs pricing updates, there's the magazine. Another thing is that if you have the magazine you have access to many of the updates that will eventually go into the next book, as we use the Retroviews, Bottom Lines and other checklists for that purpose. The five-page section in this year's edition on Treasure Chest began as Brent's research for the Bottom Line feature on it in CBG.
Best,
John Jackson Miller
Comics & Fiction at Faraway Press
Comics circulation resarch at The Comics Chronicles
Webcomic: Sword & Sarcasm | 
David Porta
Posts: 71
| Posted: 11/11/2005 5:16:53 PM | I use this sort of reference resource as an aid in shopping -- for pricing and grading. I love my signed limited hardcover of 2nd edition, but the actual pricing info seems to be the same as in ComicBase. Moreover, I can easily get price info for different grades from ComicBase.
So, when eBay shopping, I use ComicBase, since it tells me what holes I need to fill, and the price info is the same. I supplement this with a Spiral Overstreet, to see what the high prices are that sellers may be basing their pricing on.
When doing in-store shopping (or convention shopping), Overtstreet serves me not only because it makes it easy to gauge different prices for different grades of the same issue, but also because the Spiral edition is physically easy to use -- no spine split, easy to lay flat, malleable.
The advantage of the Catalog is the prices. Being the same prices as ComicBase. The ComicBase prices make me a more wary shopper.
Put out a Spiral Catalog with a Range (GD-VG-FN-VF-NM) of grade-prices, and I will buy it to take along for in-store (and convention) shopping.
This sort of resource book gets a LOT of use from me. I know what I use it for, and if it doesn't serve my needs best, something else will.
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David Porta
Posts: 71
| Posted: 11/11/2005 5:21:29 PM | I would not look into Comics Buyer’s Guide’s Checklist and Price Guide, because it is devoted to comics from 1961 and up, while most of my shopping is Dell Comics of the 1950s and 1940s.
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John Jackson Miller
Posts: 1007
| Posted: 11/11/2005 5:33:24 PM | No way to list individual grades in the Standard Catalog without making the book bigger still, I'm afraid. It's one of the problems with having so much more information than Overstreet on other elements -- it's all got to go somewhere. As a database matter adding them is a simple task; it's just finding the room.
It's almost impossible for a publisher to make its money back on a spiral-bound edition, we have found, without the price being prohibitive. Certainly at the size ours would be today it'd be a near-physical impossibility, as well.
ComicBase's pricing is our CBG/Standard Catalog pricing -- which is to say, they use the updates we send them each month. That is a major development for the Fourth Edition, which is the great variety of titles that have actual CGC auction averages for different grades, thus better illuminating what the likely grading spreads for that title really are. Since neither our rule-of-thumb nor advisors' thumbnail estimates are going to reflect the actual transactions all the time, it's useful to see what spreads are really being paid.
Best,
John Jackson Miller
Comics & Fiction at Faraway Press
Comics circulation resarch at The Comics Chronicles
Webcomic: Sword & Sarcasm |
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