If you collected comics in July of 1994, you remember exactly where you were when "Splatt Mania" took over the industry.
Following the jaw-dropping $137,000 sale of a Stephen Platt Prophet promotional image at Heritage Auctions, I wanted to take a nostalgic trip down the "Road to Insanity." In this video, we dig into the full glory of Wizard Magazine #35 and the infamous "Extreme Wizard Prophet Contest"—where fans were tasked with trying to count every single flying shell casing exploding out of Platt's hyper-detailed, maximalist splash pages.
0:00 1994 Comic Hysteria & The Rise of Stephen Platt
0:34 Moon Knight #55: The Birth of "Splatt Mania"
1:06 Rob Liefeld, Image Comics, and Prophet
1:23 Wizard #35: "The Road to Insanity" Contest
1:53 The $137,000 Heritage Auction Connection
2:10 Can You Actually Count the Shell Casings?
2:38 The 2013 Cover Sale vs. Modern Market Insanity
We are doing a deep-dive CGC Census audit into millions in stolen pedigree comics. Following the recent alerts from Metropolis/ComicConnect regarding a massive cache of stolen high-grade pedigree books, I noticed something interesting. Some of these books were previously unknown and not all of them were from single book CGC Submissions… What else is out there?
This Wednesday, I am going live to kick off a collaborative, data-driven research project. Using a custom clickable tracking list I built we are going to look directly at the CGC Census data and verification strings in real time to see what we can find.
I am officially back in the box-diving game. I spent the weekend at Wicked Comic Con here in Boston, and while I didn't walk in with a rigid want list, I walked out with a stellar mix of raw grails, rare 1970s price variants, and pristine newsstand keys.
In this video, I'm sharing my final con haul and breaking down the market logic behind what I picked up—and the one major Golden Age Schomburg key (Exciting Comics #59) I almost brought home to test out a grand conservation experiment.
Before we kick off our first official research stream next Wednesday, I wanted to do a raw, unedited technical dry run in Riverside to test the layout. What better way to do it than by reacting to a guide on "Collecting Superhero Comic Books" that I wrote all the way back in 2008? Let's take a time machine back to a pre-MCU, pre-bubble market and see how much the hobby—and my own commentary—has shifted over the last 18 years.
The results of the Heritage May 2026 Signature Comics Auction are in, and the figures are absolutely staggering. From a conserved Action Comics #1 that blew past boundaries to historical shifts on classic horror covers and a head-to-head grading war between CGC and PSA, this auction provided key data points for the future of the hobby.