The first operation was a sixth-grade backpack, picked because it held two full stacks of comics side by side. I bought and sold out of it until the middle school opened a school store and put me in charge instead. After college, comics pulled me back in — multi-copy Midtown subscriptions, stacking NM copies, often duplicates, of books from a run of years that's been getting hot ever since.

Since then it's been the comics circuit — NYCC and Baltimore down through Charlotte and Heroes Con to the Florida shows — buying in hand, building the relationships that get a dealer real books on real terms. Somewhere along the way, high-end dealers started asking my opinion on what a raw book would grade, what it could press out to, and what CGC would put on the label after. The grading here is strict for one reason: you should open the box to a better book than promised, never a worse one.

Home base is a small brick-and-mortar shop in London, Kentucky — comics and cards, more office and shipping room than showroom. Hot books, accurately graded, priced fairly. That's the whole pitch.