George Pantela is the owner of GP Investment Collectables, he established the on-line CGC comic book trading database GPAnalysis. In recent years GPAnalysis has become the on-line source for anyone that buys or sells CGC graded comic books.
I recently did an interview with George about his company and where he thinks the market is heading in the future. We at Stl Comics would like to thank him for taking the time to give us some very insightful answers to our questions.

Erik Garmany: Tell us the main reason you started GPAnalysis.

George Pantela: GPAnalysis began as an in-house project in 2001/2002, with the objective to improve the science in estimating the potential market values (pricing) of CGC books for our collectibles business, GP Investment Collectables. After approximately 3 months of development, some testing and "real-world" application, I decided that GPA had the potential to be of use to comic book collectors in general, specifically those buying and selling CGC-graded books.

Further application development, building a number of industry level relationships and redesigning our product so that it could be incorporated into a subscription based service, we released GPAnalysis for CGC Comics in 2003.

EG: When I polled forum members for questions to ask you this was #1 on the list by far and it is a very important one: As CGG/PGA becomes more accepted in the industry are there or will there be any plans to add CGG/PGA books to the analysis? They have graded over 10,000 Comic books now and their auctions are becoming more frequent on eBay. There are well over 200 CGG/PGA auctions on eBay at this very moment.

GP: A service such as ours lives and dies by the accuracy of the reporting it provides daily. It is therefore paramount that data we gather is comparing apples for apples and I have some real concerns about this being the case were we to include PGA sales. When CGG first appeared on the market, we tried to contact the owners to ask for more information. Unfortunately there was no response. In my opinion, only CGC currently offers a complete grading, restoration check, archival quality encapsulation and grading information service.

EG: I've noticed that you don't include comic-link.com auctions in your listings, is there a particular reason for this?

GP: These things can come about when there is a solid relationship in place. We’ve met with Josh and tried to obtain his participation, but to date have been unsuccessful. When Josh chooses to report his sales information to GPA, we will gladly include his sales data.

EG: Where do you see the Professionally graded comic book market in 10 years?

GP: Wow, a difficult question, especially when you consider this market is at the early product cycle stage. Some general predictions:
1. CGC will remain the main (only?) professional certification service for comic books; although people point to coins and other collectibles, where a number of certification companies co-exist, I do not believe the overall market size for comics is conducive to further CGC-like services appearing. CGC also have a huge first-mover advantage and have established them squarely in the market place.
2. Certified Book Price guides and price reporting services will merge; eventually one product will be available that will report on pricing and trends to collectors. This product may be incorporated into selling portals in the future, reporting on up to the minute trades.
3. Auction houses, large e-commerce web sites and information web sites will possibly merge further, offering trading/information hubs to collectors as a "one-stop-shop".
4. As more and more books are graded, census information will plateau at the high-grades, pushing prices further in this range as "rarerity" of grade is established. It is possible such books will break US centric investment activity.

EG: It seems like no sooner is a sale over that the results are posted in your database. What are some of your data collection methods?

GP: We pray daily to the Mighty God of Auctions and sacrifice at least one virgin a month to keep him happy... ok, not quite. A sister company of GPA specializes in high level IT development and over the years we have fine-tuned GPA into a very sophisticated and efficient application. We are proud to be the only service that can offer such regularity of reporting to collectors.

EG: How many GPA members do you have worldwide now?

GP: At last count, 1684 members subscribe to GPAnalysis.

EG: How do you feel about the fact the GPAnalysis is quickly becoming the standard by which Professionally Graded comics are bought and sold for, almost like a price guide of sorts?

GP: Obviously I'm delighted. What is really exciting for us is the constant feedback and input we get from our subscribers and other passionate comic collectors, and through online forums, including the CGC forum. We're constantly looking at ways to better serve our subscribers. We get emails on a weekly basis of how our subscribers are using our service: to determine market value for the purpose of grading raw books, or insuring certified books; as a buy/sell report; to determine best time buy/sell; to identify market trends.

EG: In addition to the page quality stats being added in soon, what other great changes do we have to look forward to at GPAnalysis?

GP: Page quality is a hotly debated topic on the forums and at conventions. We have information that can help us identify page quality for each sale in our database. Early in 2005 we'll run a report to test the possible correlation between page quality and price realized on highly traded books.

We are working on many new additions to GPAnalysis. In particular we are:

• Talking to the publishers at Slings & Arrows to incorporate into GPA their spectacular critique of 5000+ titles;
• Tighter integration into the CGC census;
• The possibility of reporting all CGC label information against each sale;
• CGC barcode lookup (zap the barcode and return sales and census information as a one step process);
• Investment performance of comic book "bundles" showing the extent of investment return on a collection of books (for example, if I had purchased high-grade Bronze Age ASMs in early 2003 and sold in 2004, what would my return be) and much more.

GP: Yes we do, and we are constantly looking to expand our ability to analyze such auctions. At this stage our system automatically flags results where the price is significantly higher/lower than a running (most recent) average - human scrutiny is then carried out. Revised auctions are also flagged; some user IDs that have been identified in the past are also flagged. We also rely on reports from collectors.

Further industry changes in buying and selling of comic books will need to occur for even more accurate reporting.

EG: What comics are you currently reading?

GP: I often visit our local book shop, buy a heap of comics and read them month's later. I'm currently going through:

• Catwoman (recent series)
• Wolverine (current ongoing)
• Punisher (current ongoing)
• Y: The Last Man (I love this series!)
• Daredevil (second series)
• Rereading Miller run Daredevil
• Rereading Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (just superb art/writing!)

GP: There are nowhere near as many comic stores down under as there are in the US, Canada or the UK, and older back issues are very hard to come by. A lot of Aussies now purchase much of their back issues via online auctions and through comic book web sites.

EG: Tell us a little about the rest of the team over at GPAnalysis.

GP: GPAnalysis comprises of two main teams: the technical team is made up of software/web developers from our mother company, Dynasource Pty Ltd. It is headed up by Dr Simon Cuce, one of the leading .Net architects in the world. Our creative/categorization team is made up of individuals from our collectibles business, GP Investment Collectables. Marketing/Promotion is headed by Di Blanton and Carolyn Betts, our categorization staff comprising Andrew van Embden and Rich Somerset, looking at more auctions per day than they can poke a stick at! There is also a management team and the usual accounts/business units. I tend to float between these teams, offering general direction.

EG: Now we have some questions from our forum members:


fantasyfootballbono asks:

1.Could you ever foresee GPA reporting sales between collectors, where the sale can be verified with documentation between two trusted sellers who are not officially "approved" GPA advisor dealers?

GP: Yes, possibly. Again there would need to be a change in the way books are traded, possibly through a central buying/selling hub with auditing in place to ensure and verify sales, etc. All very possible in the future.

2. Also, is it true that the water in your toilet bowl swirls counterclockwise because you're in the southern hemisphere?

GP: Yes, our toilet bowl swirls counterclockwise. We also ride kangaroos to work/school, have killer koalas roaming the streets at night and eat the animals depicted on our country's coat of arms (at least two of the above statements are true).


A.S. asks:

1. Why have trend data on books with virtually no sales as it is misleading in how the market may actually be?

GP: Chart trends are purely there to help collectors determine the direction of sales for specific books. Obviously the more a specific book is traded the more accurate the "trend". It may be beneficial to remove these trend lines for books where say only 2-3 sales have occurred. At the end of the day, it's up to individual collectors to use the information presented in GPA as they wish. Some will use trends across the board; others will ignore them even for highly traded books.

2. Do you think services like CGC and GPA fuel the ever so damaging speculator market?

GP: Pointing to GPA as the cause of speculation is like blaming the stock market price feeds as the cause of stock speculation. Speculation will always exist in markets where products have intrinsic value without boundaries. We do not "guide", "predict" or "advise". We simply report on the market.


Brockley asks: What, in your opinion, would be the best thing that could increase the market value for graded books and what could cause the market to bottom out?

GP: Increase? A higher percentage of books being graded, I believe at the moment it sits at around 10%, thus giving a better indication of a book's census data. True high-grades and rarerity will be established, creating greater demand for certain books/grades.

Decrease? Like with any market, factors outside of the comic industry's control; e.g. economic indicators, recession, popularity of specific collectible, drop in disposable incomes. When collecting anything, look at both short and long term factors.