A little birdy (one I trust completely) dropped this little nugget on me:

The Wizard Universe store had CGC-graded copies of Captain America #25 on sale first thing on Wednesday morning.

Why is that a lil magical? Well…Marvel says they let NO ONE KNOW about what was going to happen with the book before Wednesday, other than the NY Daily News (as their Page 3 coverage was predicated on them having an exclusive, which Marvel couldn’t risk losing).

If that’s the case, then how could Wizard have gotten wind of the full specialness of the issue and have copies CGC-graded in time to post for sale Wednesday morning?

The pricing was lower when the issues first went up for sale, with the resulting demand driving them up to their astronomical levels (that still aren’t quite as astronomical as some eBay auctions won by your less-than-savvy speculators).

But something doesn’t completely jive between Marvel’s statements about how close-to-the-vest they were with information about the issue’s contents and the seemingly-contradictory actions of Wizard.

Hmmm……………

Edit: You know…totally unrelated to potential leak items…I thought I’d point out that the lovely people at Wizard are trying to sell a 9.9 CGC-graded Captain America #25 (Epting cover) with a BUY IT NOW price of $1000. Could it be due to the fact that their sales have continued to go south since the speculators were driven out of the market?

Edit 2: Screenshot proof, just in case something happens to the auction:

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Books, Comics, Culture, Figures and Collectibles, Kevin Huxford. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.