Happy Noodle Boy

There are, for me at least, extenuating circumstances here. Even for CGC graded books, no two books in the same condition are alike. And if I'm looking for one of my "grail" books, I'm very particular about its condition. For instance, ASM #39, first John Romita Spidey issue. I'm in the market for something in the VF range. But I hate miswraps. That eliminates a lot of the existing copies out there. I also hate extensive corner damage, such as corner abrasions, where the corners have been dinged so often they look like grated cheese. That eliminates a ton more. I also don't want any stains on the cover. That eliminates even more. I don't want date stamps, or any kind of writing on the cover. By this point I may have eliminated three-quarters of the available VF-range copies. So if I'm at a convention and I find a copy that meets all my criteria, I'll be willing to pay extra for it.

Hey, thanks for your ideas, especially not using tape. I have a feeling it will make things a lot easier for me going forward. Just FYI, when I said "mylars" I meant mylites. I have all my books in mylite 2's and full backs. My current plan is to have a couple of separate collections: key issues and books I'm interested in because they have great covers will go in mylites and boards, while books I'm interested in for reading only will be stored separately without plastics. This frees me up to relax about condition on some books, building that collection of readers I want, while still having a high-grade collection of key books and books with pretty covers.

I think I'm leaning toward your approach. Pretty 9.0+ books with great covers in mylites, mid-grade readers unbagged in a pile. Thank you.

Is it true that those bags were made from sawdust and radioactive meteor shards and came off the assembly line already yellow? It's just something I heard from some guy. (I also heard that they leave an oily residue on your fingers even when you don't touch them, emit toxic fumes, and that they will completely melt a comic book left inside them for more than 48 hours.) Thank god for mylar! It only costs ten times as much, and without it, I truly believe my entire comic book collection would burst into flames immediately.

I agree with the sentiment that books that can be read without worrying about them are awesome and perhaps even preferable to my current 9.0+ collection. But for myself I would prefer midgrade books--say, 5.5 - 6.5 as MCS grades--to low grade books. Also, certain defects would still be a problem for me. I don't want a book with pieces missing, or large stains, or tears, or a significant miswrap. But creases and spine ticks galore are fine. They give a book character I was also considering selling off my more expensive books and rebuying them in mid-grade to save some money, but with current prices I would probably only break even. So I'll keep them. Right now I'm wondering if I dare take my Werewolf By Night #32 out of its mylar bag and just store it naked upright in a box with the rest of my proposed new collection. But I honestly think I would get more enjoyment out of it that way. Right now, in its mylar bag with a backing board, I have the satisfaction of knowing I own it. But, stored without the mylar bag, I would have the satisfaction of actually pulling it out of the box and looking at it regularly. That's the thing: for some reason, and maybe I'm unique in this but I don't think so, once a book is in its plastic bag taped shut and stored away, the idea of reading it becomes a bit of a chore. I know opening the bag and removing the tape and taking the book out only takes about ten seconds. But still. There's some kind of psychological barrier there.

Thanks all for your insightful comments. I'm still dealing with this reassessment of what I collect and why, and, to put it in perspective and perhaps to offer insights some of you may find interesting, I'm going to share with you my history with comics, the ways in which my collecting has evolved, and how I came to this strange impasse, in which I know I love something, but am trying to figure out how best to do it. (Warning: this might be a little long.) Like, I suspect, all of you, I started off buying individual issues of comics, in my case at neighborhood variety stores and newsstands off of spinner racks. I was probably about six or seven. It was the 1970's, the Spider-Man cartoon was on my television every afternoon, and like all children I lived for Spider-Man. (It's the costume. It has some mysterious visceral appeal to children.) My comics buying started as a way for me to have more Spider-Man, and was of course strictly regulated by the generosity of my parents on any given day. ("You want a quarter for a funny book?") A couple years later I had discovered the paperback reprints Marvel was releasing through Pocket Books. These paperbacks reprinted six issues each of characters like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange, and the Hulk, starting from the beginning of their runs, and I bought them all. I started with Spider-Man (three volumes were released) and expanded from there to the Fantastic Four (I had encountered them in the first issue of Spider-Man) and the rest. I can't overemphasize how foundational these paperback books were for my comic collecting. They were like going to Marvel School. And I noticed that the stories were better than the ones coming out every week on the spinner racks. I still remember reading the fourth issue of Fantastic Four for the first time and being absolutely enthralled by the Sub-Mariner and the gigantic walking whale he unleashes on New York City, and only poor Ben (at that time looking very monstrous and not at all the "bashful blue-eyed Benjamin" he would later become as his look was refined and some of his rough edges smoothed over) could stop the creature, by wearing a bomb strapped to his back and walking into its mouth! I now understood that Marvel had a vast, mysterious and utterly fascinating history. I had to know more. I was officially a Marvel Maniac. At this time my comics and my pocket paperbacks were in piles on the small bookshelf in my room, stored flat. No plastics, no backing boards, no comic boxes. I hadn't heard of them yet. "Condition" literally did not enter my mind. You bought the comic off the rack and you read it and threw it on the pile. All the pages were there; that's all that mattered. If I went back in time and tried to explain to my nine-year-old self about condition he would literally not understand. You can still read the book, right? By age eleven I had discovered a little hole in the wall coin / comic shop called Giarla's Rare Coin Studio. This was in my home town of East Boston, Mass. I discovered it when an acquaintance of mine said that they had Superman #1 for sale. By this point I had greatly expanded my comics buying and was familiar, generally, with all the major Marvel and DC characters. The DC characters I discovered through the Super-Friends cartoon. But although I liked the DC characters on TV, I found their comics lacking. I had also read with interest the occasional newspaper article devoted to how comics were collectible and that some of them, especially the first appearance of Superman, were worth a lot of money. I promptly walked into Giarla’s, which was exactly large enough for a total of two customers to shop at the same time, and said, "Do you have Superman number one?" To which Mister Giarla replied, "Do you have three-thousand dollars?" He then pointed up at the Superman Famous First Edition treasury on the wall, and said, "But I have a reprint of it for two dollars." He took the treasury down off the wall and let me look at it. I had never seen a treasury before. It was a cool new way to read comics. I bought that treasury (it was okay, nothing special, nowhere near as good as Spider-Man), and lots of other ones too, and filled in the blanks of my comics knowledge with the history of the previously unknown DC Golden Age. And I kept coming back to Giarla's after that, week after week, every Saturday morning (he was open on Wednesdays and Saturdays.) I was usually the only customer, and he and his partner (a man about his age--his brother maybe? I never did find out) were very generous with their time, chatting with an 11-year-old kid about comics history, the importance of first issues, the proper way to pronounce "Sub-Mariner", and protecting comics in plastic bags. He had a couple of quarter bins full of comics that weren't in plastics and, behind the counter, a box of more expensive back issues that were in plastics. I would save my allowance money to buy $5 books from that box, including the first appearance of the Inferior Five and Binky #1. These were collectible, you see. You kept them in plastic bags, no matter how goofy you thought they were after you read them. He also introduced me to the Overstreet Price Guide, and sold me one (he ordered it for me.) Here's where I began to understand about "collecting" comics, and that condition mattered. Everything changed. After this I put all my comics in plastics, stored upright in a long box. (At some point I started using backing boards; I forget exactly when.) Every week I was on the hunt for new first issues. Man-Thing #1 (second series.) Shogun Warriors #1. Moon Knight #1. These were prized objects and they made me giddy with excitement. But it took longer to buy comics now. Instead of just pulling an issue off the rack, I had to inspect them to get the best copy. Comics weren't just stories. They were collectible objects. They went in plastic bags in a box. My collection expanded as Marvel got better and better in the early 80's under Jim Shooter. I had two full long boxes by the time I was fifteen, and I had even gone to the Million Year Picnic with my mother, who bought me Daredevil #7 for $7.50. I was a collector now. Then I started dating. By the time I was 19, the collection went away. All those books in plastic bags stored upright in boxes were a pain to hold onto and they just didn't entice me anymore. In their plastic bags, alphabetized, they had become more collectible objects than stories. The boxes were heavy. The books were always sliding around inside the boxes. It was a hassle. I got back into comics a few years later, as I had heard about the DC Archives: having the opportunity to read all the golden age Batman stories, in order, was too enticing to pass up. (They mostly hold up, but Batman was better before Robin.) They were printed in a hardcover book. It was the 1990s, and trade paperbacks were becoming a thing. Trade paperbacks didn't need plastic bags or long boxes. They were far less hassle to deal with and a better deal for the money. I got back into comics--but I only bought collected editions. As the years went by and Marvel and DC and Dark Horse reprinted essentially everything, it was a viable way to collect. I was reading stories for grown-ups now, in book format. Preacher and Madman and Sin City. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The Marvel Masterworks. Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. (I had owned the floppies a decade before; now I bought the trade paperbacks.) It was all very...grown-up. But some essential magic was missing. I enjoyed not having to bother with plastic bags and boards and long boxes, but these weren't exactly comics. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something was missing. I got back out of comics again in the early 2000s--sort of. I got rid of my trade paperback collection and switched to digital instead. Much more convenient. After moving a few times over the years I was thoroughly sick of hauling trade paperbacks around. Unfortunately, I never did find a comfortable way to read digital comics. My computer screen was too large and not shaped correctly. Tablets are too small and their weight eventually becomes a noticeable distraction if you're reading for a while. And holding them one-handed, as intended, is an awkward way to read something that's supposed to open out like a book. To this day I haven't found a way to read a digital comic comfortably. I can read digital books just fine on my Kindle Fire; books look great on it. But comics? No. I got out of comics again around 2012, knowing that Comixology had my purchases saved if I ever wanted to read them in some uncomfortable fashion again. That brings me to the present. I got back into comics again in 2021 (perfect timing!) This time I was all in on the collectible aspect rather than reading. I wanted a collection of cool golden, silver and bronze age books with cool covers, and I could afford some, within reason. Although I don't like slabbing, Comixology's influence on the hobby, along with ebay shopping, nevertheless changed the way I collect: covers are much more important to me now. Which means, of course, that a book's condition has to be important too, for those covers to look as good as they can. And I haven't read most of the books I've purchased for this new collection. Because I haven't been collecting books I would necessarily want to read, but instead I've been collecting books with great covers from my favorite artists. One focus of my new collecting though, has been to explore titles I never gave a second, or even first, glance to as a kid. Archie books, and bronze horror. And I do intend to read those. But when “condition” means so much, reading a comic is a little bit nerve-wracking. I miss the books just sitting on a pile on a shelf. So after that long-winded preamble, I guess I can sum up my situation thusly: I’m trying to figure out how to interact with comics, and what they mean to me. I can never go back to the childhood days of comics being only for reading, because as an adult the collectability of them isn’t lost on me, and they can be truly beautiful objects. But they are still created to be read. They aren’t art prints. An analogy I keep coming back to would be: if you were a rich man who collects classic cars, would you ever buy one that you had no intention of ever driving? Would you buy a 1957 Chevy Bel Air only to look at it, parked in your garage? Sure, the thing’s beautiful. It would in fact be extremely fun to look at. But to never drive it, ever? And I’ve read a lot of comics over the years, and a lot of them were great. But the idea of collecting all those runs of books all over again, and then to have to put them all in bags and boards and boxes again, and watch as they eat up all my space…it doesn’t sound like fun. I don’t need to own every comic I ever enjoyed as a kid. I don’t need to own some random issue of Roger Stern’s Spider-Man or Simonson’s Thor. I don’t need 100-issue complete runs. Maybe I’m all superhero-ed out. Maybe that’s a big part of it: I’ve done the whole Marvel Universe continuity thing. As fun as it was, I really don’t feel like reading all those books yet again. I feel like there has to be some perfect balance I can strike, some way of enjoying comics as reading and as collectibles, in a comfortable format, that won’t take over my entire house and be a pain to deal with. Some series seem like they work better as trade paperbacks (Preacher comes to mind.) I’m considering a part trade paperback – part floppy comics collection that still involves collecting great covers by great artists. But there is a purist part of me that just wants to buy floppies only, not put them in bags, and just store them upright in a box. Like Gaines file copies. Gaines didn’t use bags or boards and look how good those books look. The bottom line is the more hassle they are to deal with, the less fun comics are to collect. And I want to collect comics. Right now I’m leaning toward a collection of mid-grade floppies without bags and boards, all standing upright in short boxes. For some reason those damned bags and boards really are a psychological barrier to reading. It’s a small thing, but having to take each book out of its individual bag and then seal it back up again when I’m done is just…annoying. Looking at a short box full of books in bags and boards doesn’t make me want to read. But looking at a short box full of comics? Yeah. Those, I want to read. Thanks for listening.

I started a thread a couple of months back asking if anyone actually preferred low-grade comics to high grade comics, not just because they were cheaper, but because they actually prefer the aesthetic of low grade books. (Not surprisingly, no one, including me, was willing to make that leap.) I was asking because my preoccupation with condition has resulted in me feeling more and more alienated from collecting. And I'm not a 9.8 guy either, or a slabber. I just like my stuff in near mint with nice corners and well-centered wraps, that's all. Nevertheless, it's somehow sucking the fun out of things for me.I remember when I was a kid first getting into back issue collecting, I hardly even looked at the condition of a book beyond "Does it have its cover? Are all the pages there?" I want to get back to that kid. Anyway, Le Chat Noir mentioned something about "lowball" collecting being a thing in coin collecting, but I never followed up on it and forgot about it until today, when I did some googling. AND WOW. That is exactly what I was referring to. These lowball coin collectors like the low grade coins for what they are, not just as placeholders until something graded higher comes along. I was intrigued by one of the coin collectors who mentioned that a low grade coin has a hidden history to it that makes it so appealing--who knows how many hands it went through, who knows what it purchased? Maybe FDR had it in his pocket. Maybe someone flipped a beat-up old quarter and made a major life decision because it came up tails? That history is everything. It isn't just some perfect specimen struck at the mint and sold immediately to a collector, never to be touched again. The flaws give the coin character. And comics are even better for lowball collecting than coins, because there are so many potential kinds of damage to a comic that signify specific things. Date stamps. Date stamps from stores. Kids writing their names on the cover, or filling in an order form on the back cover. Coupons cut out. A subscription crease. Maybe some kid filled out a crossword puzzle or solved a maze, or filled in the cover logo with magic markers. Maybe they drew a viking beard on Captain America. And then there are the spine ticks. Every tick means a person handled that book. The more spine ticks, the more often a book has been enjoyed. This is one of those dangerous moments when I think to myself: sell it all and start over. Collect in a different way. Stop obsessing over corner damage and miswraps and enjoy your comics. Sell the mylars and the backing boards too. Buy books in VG, don't bother with plastics or backing boards, and just put them in a box. But before you do, READ THEM, and think about who read them before. It’s tempting.

I may be completely wrong about this. But... After looking through an endless number of copies of GI Combat #168 for sale on ebay, and rejecting VF copy after VF copy because of corner damage (my least favorite kind of damage), I took a break and looked at some comic channels on Youtube. I like The Comics Den because they are a very polite married couple who have lots of videos showing them going through back issue bins in stores and at conventions, and no videos with titles like "The FOMO is REAL on (insert character here) because Marvel just announced (whatever)--is NOW the time to BUY???" So I'm watching them going through the back issue bins pulling out books that all looked very nice and it occurred to me that the view they're getting of the books--in hand, held up about a foot away from their eyes--is the natural way of looking at a comic and assessing its condition, and they seemed to be having quite a fun time pulling all those VF-NM range books, whereas I am constantly on ebay or MCS looking at high-res scans that are the equivalent of looking at a book through a magnifying glass, rejecting book after book because of some defect, and it can be frustrating. Now of course I'm not saying that MCS, or ebay sellers, are doing anything wrong by offering high-res scans of books. But sometimes it seems to me that the insane level of detail in those scans can give a false impression of a book's condition, by magnifying the tiniest of defects, whereas, in hand, some of those defects might seem like not such a big deal at all, or might even completely escape my notice. (If you can't see a defect, does the defect actually exist?) I'm not a 9.8 guy, but I like books that are well centered, and have nice corners. Spine ticks don't bother me much. I have books in the VF-minus range that I am very happy with. But looking at scans of books online, it's starting to seem like every comic book ever created in the Bronze Age has catastrophic corner damage. I think I need to get out to a comic shop soon.

I do hope PSA introduces sub-grades for presentation. Miswraps can really make a book look awful and they should affect the grade in some way, even if they don't affect the main grade.

I've never understood why one label is considered inferior to another in this hobby. I think the PSA label looks fine, but I don't have a horse in this race. I will say that light blue isn't a very "professional looking" color in my opinion, but the slabbers seem to like it. If I was designing a case the label would be on the back side of the case, and the front of the case would show off the cover of the book and nothing else. I would hate to have my favorite books in slabs, and every time I looked at them the big obnoxious grade number would be the first thing my eye was drawn to. It isn't Moon Knight fighting a werewolf, it's Moon Knight fighting a werewolf with a big obnoxious 9.0 or whatever squatting above him. (And no, 9.8 wouldn't look any better to me!)

There is something inherently cool about coverless books. They're inherently FOR READING. They aren't trophies, they're comics. The splash pages make pretty great covers in and of themselves, and you can afford to buy keys that were way out of your price range before. Best of all, no more obsessing over spine ticks and creases. Condition is no longer a factor (as long as the book is otherwise complete.) Congratulations on your new area of interest. I think you're going to have a ton of fun with it.

I have OCD. Real OCD, not the kind that people joke about when they wish they weren't so indecisive. I deal with intrusive thoughts daily. They are not fun. I also go back and forth on comic collecting--I started a thread here awhile back asking if anyone actually preferred lower grade books for aesthetic reasons rather than just because they're cheaper to acquire, because my OCD around condition was really aggravating me. Eventually I sorted that out and decided what I want. So my advice, first, is, to decide exactly what you want out of your comics. What, specifically, makes you happy? Do you like collecting runs? Do you like collecting keys? In a perfect world, what would your collection consist of? Silver? Bronze? Marvel? DC? What grades? High grade only? How high? Decide exactly what you want. Find a collecting focus. Then look at your collection with that in mind. Any book that doesn't make you happy, for any reason, get rid of it. Ruthlessly whittle your collection down to only those books that truly make you happy. Whatever your condition threshold is, any book that doesn't meet it has to go. Maybe that means getting rid of nearly everything. That's fine. Don't worry about if you'll ever be able to find a certain issue within your budget again. If the copy you own doesn't make you happy, get rid of it. The purpose of your comic collection is to make you happy. Any book that doesn't fulfill that purpose has to go. To do this, like I said, you will have to decide exactly what you want. Condition sounds like your problem, as it was mine. I decided that every book I own has to "look good" to me and I would not ever compromise that for a "low grade is better than no grade" mentality. For me, no grade is preferable to low grade. Because there a million books out there to collect, and if a certain book isn't available in the condition I want, I'll just look for a different book. I collect bronze age, so that usually means 8.5 - 9.6 (9.8 isn't a real grade, don't buy them.) But I have some books that fall below that grade range due to availability--Archies for example, just aren't easy to find in higher grades. But I still only buy Archies that look good to me. That's the rule. For me that means for starters, no corner damage, no stains, no tanning, and no miswraps. I miss out on a ton of books I want this way. I have been looking for Archie Giants 13 and 23 forever but the copies on ebay just aren't good-looking enough. And that's a shame. But every book in my collection makes me happy. Remember, with comics, no two books in the same grade are alike. A 9.6 can have a miswrap that makes it look like lousy, while an 8.0 of that same book can look beautiful. So yes, condition definitely matters, but judge every book individually, don't just lump them together by numerical grade. I have a bronze age House of Secrets that MCS graded at a 7.0 that looks great to me, and I'm happy to have it in my collection. Always remember: The purpose of your comic collection is to make you happy. Hope this helps.

New grading scale: Minty fresh Cool I Like it, I Just Wish it Didn't Have That Crease Right There Whatevs Pass Get That Away From Me Crapmobile (Any book with a miswrap can't grade above I Like it, I Just Wish it Didn't Have That Crease Right There. Any book with writing on the cover can't grade above Whatevs.)

Regarding the miswrap debate I started by saying they shouldn't grade above an 8.0--I still believe that, but an "adjective system" of grading makes it feel more appropriate. "No book with a noticeable miswrap should be allowed to grade higher than a Very Fine" sounds just right to me. But when you get into the forensics of numerical grading, especially with the prevalence of 9.6 and 9.8 comics in the hobby due to CGC's influence, I admit it seems like a huge reduction. I guess my heart lies with the old Overstreet system, where "near mint" was the top grade you saw out there. How many comic shop dealers back then would have tried to sell you a "mint" back issue? In all my years of back issue hunting (in the pre-CGC days) I never encountered a back issue marked as "Mint". But now "Near Mint Plus" (9.6) and "Near Mint/Mint" (9.8) are grades that are bought and sold routinely. Because CGC is around to call them that. Before CGC I assume anyone trying to sell a 9.6 or 9.8 book would have described it as "the nicest copy you've ever seen, I think it's closer to mint than near mint", and then, maybe, they would have been able to get an extra 20% over the Near Mint price. That was a saner world.

They're far from fair if you're using the current comic grading definition of "fair". What I'm saying is that the word fair as defined in the dictionary (i.e, decent, okay, reasonably good) is a far better descriptor of a book in "very good" condition than "very good" is.