I've been beefing up my "Jim Shooter and earlier" comics collection with an eye towards covering as many gaps as possible in my timeline project (and/or avoiding getting to the DeFalco era and the 90s). Since a lot of older stuff is expensive, i've been softening my stance on Essentials and Masterworks. Essentials suck because they are black and white, but i have absolutely no moral concern about chopping them up so they can be placed where they need to be.

The Masterworks, on the other hand, are in color, "nicer", but are more expensive and physically more difficult to chop up (i haven't tried yet). So i've been saving those for cases where a run is less likely to be interrupted (e.g. the Inhumans).

Anyway, long story short, i've had a few Masterworks sitting in my "Save for Later" cart at Amazon, waiting to make sure that the Masterworks decision actually works for me, and waiting for the price to go down. And, well... seems i waited too long.

I'm sure i'll find them somewhere else at some point if necessary. Just think it's funny what some people think they can get for this stuff. Reminds me of the "I have this. Mint condition. What is it worth?" questions i occasionally get on my comics blog.

A thousand dollars? It's got to be a typo, right? Nobody could possibly think they could get that much money for a book that sold for less than a tenth of that.

Here's the link. Scroll to the bottom of the list to see the ironically named "Cheap Graphic Novels".

Maybe they were going for $99.99?

Or they're just insane. Scroll down to the bottom of this list

I have seen people selling these Masterworks for $200-300. Check out
these prices.

But "Cheap Graphic Novels" seems to be in a category all its own.

Now i'm worried that i've stumbled into a money laundering scheme.

Some of the Amazon second hand marketplace stuff is automated. There have been cases where two bots got into a reverse bidding war, one would raise the price by a penny, the other would see that, raise it's price a penny more, the first one would see that... and suddenly a $2 used book is listed for $23 million.

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

No idea if that's what's going on here though, I just think it's interesting and felt like sharing!