according this 3rd party info site I found (which seems legit, there are screen shots) $22 for 'modern' (post 1975) books and $33 for older.. and that takes 106 - 133 days, which is oddly specific, but only for books valued up to $400.     You can give them more money to speed it up in various ways.. express is  $120 for 5-7 days and a max value of 3k.

Past that it seems to be 3% of the expected value.. not clear whose.  

Checking the CGC site it seems the prices have gone up slightly, most notably high value comics are now 4% of 'fair market value' 

That doesn't seem to include shipping. 

My shop uses CBCS, which I've never seen on ebay or anywhere but my local shop.  Apparently they verify signatures somehow, and use very similar standards.  The prices seem similar. 

Then there's PGX, which people seem to hate.

George Lucas was a comic fan and owned a comic shop before he hit it big. 

According to the items I read, he was filming a documentary about comic creators and ended up being part owner of Supersnipe, which was a comic shop in NY. I consider him “ hitting it big” to be his Star Wars movies.

Roy Thomas filled in the history of Lucas's involvement with the Supersnipe Comic Art Emporium, bringing to light the fact Lucas was only a silent partner in the gallery. Thomas also added that it was Summer who wanted to film a documentary on comic creators, with Barks, Kirby and a handful of other creators as the first subjects he had in mind, and eventually did shoot interviews with animators, et al.

Darth Vader's armor came about because the early drafts of Star Wars swiped a segment of the EE Smith novel, The Galactic Patrol, one of the Lensman Saga volumes. The Lensmen were one of the inspirations for the Jedi, as their lens gave them heightened physical abilities and mental powers. In the novel, galactic shipping is preyed upon by the Boskone pirates, with their advanced ships. Newly graduated Patrol member Kim Kinnison is assigned to a ship, which comes under attack by the pirates. There is a big battle as the pirates, in space armor, cut through the hull of the ship and board it, while the Patrol fights them, in their own space armor. They manage to scan the Boskone ship and get the details of it and make a wire recording. Kinnison ejects from the ship, in a lifeboat, and lands on a nearby planet, where he hides from the Boskone and meets up with another Lensman. They get the plans back to the Galactic Patrol, who then launch an attack on the Boskone's moveable fortress.

Originally, in the early draft, the Knights of the Sith, under the command of Prince Valorum, capture Deak Starkiller and take him to a floating prison, above the Imperial capital city on Coruscant. General Luke Skywalker, a Jedi Knight, goes to see his old comrade, Kane Starkiller, to recruit him to help stop the Empire and the Sith. Kane is part cyborg, due to numerous injuries, as a Jedi Knight. He acts to rescue his son, while his sons and others launch an attack on the Imperial battle station, from a forest planet. There is an arrogant and sadistic Imperial general, Darth Vader, who angers Prince Valorum, with his deceit and sadism, offending his sense of honor.

The Knights of the Sith were an elite unit, in black space armor and when they board Deak's ship, he faces off, in his space gear, with Prince Valorum, in his armor, with lazer swords, a common weapon. Valorum defeats Deak and he is taken prisoner.

As Lucas redrafted things, Valorum was shifted to Darth Vader and Vader's role as an Imperial representative morphed into Tarkin. Deak was turned into Princess Leia (Leia was the name of one of Starkiller's children, in one draft), Luke Skywealker became Obi Wan Kenobi, while his name was given to the young hero, who had elements of Deak and elements of Mace Windu (from another draft) and elements of other Stakiller children. The idea of a cyborg was passed on to Vader, though Father Skywalker was written as a totally separate person, who was slain by Darth Vader, as stated in the finished film.

Valorum's space armor became that of Darth Vader. Originally, the scri[t caleld for the Sith to cross the void of space and cut into the Rebel ship. This was changed by the final script to them cutting in from a docking pod or similar channel. The stormtrooper armor was originally intended to be a pressure suit for survival in space, rather than pure battle armor.

As far as swiping the look from Dr Doom, the Ralp McQuarrie illustrations are more samurai, who did wear facemasks with their armor and helmets, on some occasions. Vader's helmet is modeled after a samurai kabuto, which consisted of a skull piece, with segmented flaps that protected the neck and sides. They were usually worn with a mask or face piece, to help protect the jaw and face. The silhouette is similar to the "coal skuttle" shape of the German stahl helms of WW1 and 2.

This is an early concept sketch of Prince Valorum/Dart Vader....



This was a concept painting of Deak Starkiller facing Prince Valorum.....



Note the breathing gear, for Deak.

Dr Doom really isn't that similar to what they were doing and the script had Valorum out of his armor; so he didn't need it in an atmosphere environment, like Vader did, in the finished film.

Also, the New Gods doesn't really parallel Star Wars. In all drafts of Star Wars, the young hero and the villain have no conenction. The hero is the child of The Starkiller, a legendary Jedi Knight. In the final draft, that is the Father Skywalker, as it explicitly states that Darth Vader murdered Luke's father. Darth is a name, not a title, as Obi Wan calles Vader "Darth," during their fight. When Lucas started work on a sequel, with Leigh Brackett, he had no actual story. despite his claims in the media after Star Wars, he did not have a saga planned out. In Brackett's script, Father Skywalker appears to Luke, on Dagobah. Vader is still a separate character. Brackett was dying of cancer and went into advanced stages and was unable to do a second draft. Lucas wanted changes, as he wasn't happy with the script and got Lawrence Kasdan involved. In trying to work out the problems, they hit upon the solution of combining Father Skywalker and Darth Vader, thereby switching the focus to Luke's journey to becoming a Jedi and the Emperor's desire to bring Vader's son to their side. Prior to that, they had issues with bringing Luke into the Han and Leia story and making it all come together. Fathwer Skywalker's diakogue was shifted to ghost Obi Wan and Vader becomes Luke's father and reveals it, during their fight.

As you can see, you do not have a parallel between Orion and Darkseid and Luke and Vader until after the second draft of Empire, where Father Skywalker is merged with Vader. Now, it is possible that Lucas saw the New Gods and brought that up, when they hit upon the idea, but it doesn't really gel that neatly. Too many people are looking for parallels to what emerged after the redrafting of Empire than from the script development of Star Wars and want to retroactively apply ideas. The idea of the son challenging a villainous father is common in literature and myth, such as the stories of Oedipus, who unknowingly slays his father and marries his mother, to Perseus, who kills his grandfather Acrisius, the King of Argos. Kirby drew from myth just as Lucas had and it is a bit of a stretch to completely parallel New Gods and Star Wars. People point to Apokolips as inspiration for the Death Star; but, the Boskone mobile fortress was part of The Galactic Patrol, which was written in the early 1940s. Apokolips is meant to be a planet manifestation of Hell, while New Genesis, with its floating city of angels, is Heaven. It's a case of people looking for parallels, because someone suggests it, rather than a blatant copy. Lucas did blatantly copy the spaceship battle of the Galactic Patrol and has admitted that the Lensmen were an inspiration for the military aspects of the Jedi, as were the samurai films of Kurasawa. Carlos Casteneda's writings influence the concept of the Force. Some have even suggested Howard Chaykin's Cody Starbuck as an inspiration for Han Solo; but the timing doesn't really work out. As it is, Han was mostly derived from CL Moore's Northwest Smith character, mixed with the personality of Francis Ford Coppola, under whom Lucas worked, at American Zoetrope. His descriptions of Han burning though money were based on Coppola's spending, as Lucas was handling the business side of things and was being diven nuts by Coppola's extravagant spending, without money coming in or focusing on projects to earn money.

If I say to you that Daredevil (Matt Murdock) is a rip-off of Dr Mid-Nite, and you feel I have a certain credibility, you go looking for similarities: both are blind, except Mid-Nite can see in darkness and daredevil can "see" with his radar sense. Both become masked heroes and fight crime. Daredevil must be a ripoff of Dr Mid-nite. However, if you were to look at the characters without that prompting, you can see those couple of similarities and a lot of differences. If I suggest the connection, you focus on the similarities and ignore the differences, unless you are skeptical enough to look beyond the similarities and weigh them against the differences. It's like when people suggest that there is a face structure on Mars, based on a fuzzy probe photo. There is a vaguely face shadow on a formation, in a photo. The human mind tends to look for familiar shapes as part of our development to identify our parents. Thus, wee see faces in anything that has two small objects side by side and a long object below them, forming eyes and a mouth. We see it in electrical sockets, on trees, wood grain, clouds, etc. The suggestion of the meaning of the shape is what influences the mind when people say there is a face on Mars. It is a massive leap to go from saying a shadow and rock formation look like a face to it being evidence of alien intelligence on Mars, which is where conspiracy theorists go. That same leap in logic is too often applied to Star Wars, especially in hindsight.

ps edited the above to correct the error in authorship of The Making of Star Wars.

Damn aging memory!