Not as many books this year, but more fun than last year!!

I fell asleep around 6:30pm on Wednesday evening. When I awoke, it was 10:30pm and I decided that time was a wastin' and I needed to get on my way to Baltimore. I live in Tallahassee so driving to Baltimore takes 14 hours!

The trip up was uneventful. No bad weather, no bad accidents, and I shave my head, so there was no bad hair either. Haha

I got to Baltimore, got everything into the hotel room and waited for my big brother to show up, which he did around an hour later. One of the things we had already planned on for this trip was attending the Orioles baseball game that evening at 7:00, so when the gates opened at 5:00, we went in and ate dinner at a restaurant right there in the stadium and then went on to enjoy a very exciting game. The orioles went up 6-0 in the first inning and then let the Reds slowly come back and tie it up in the seventh, followed by an exciting last inning and a half where the O's scored 2 runs and fended off any last second comeback. Orioles won 9-7!

The next morning, we were up at 8am, since the show didn't open until 1pm. This is the very first time Baltimore was doing three days instead of two, so I was optimistic about being able to get what I wanted done onsite and still having time to really browse the dealers with my brother, especially since I wasn't doing near the number of books as I did the year before. But the first day or so was strictly for getting signatures done through CGC.

As far as what I got done onsite.... well, here's the list:

Infinity Gauntlet #1 (Perez,Starlin and Rubinstein)

Howard the Duck #12 (Leialoha)

Howard the Duck #13 (Leialoha and Palmer)

Marvel Fanfare #3 (McLeod and Milgrom)

New Mutants #55 (L. Simonson)

New Mutants #64 (L. Simonson)

New Mutants #84 (L. Simonson and Milgrom)

New Mutants #96 (L. Simonson and Rubinstein )

New Mutants #97 (L. Simonson and Rubinstein )

New Mutants Annual #1 (Bob McLeod and Palmer)

New Mutants Annual #4 (McLeod and L. Simonson)

My brother went to stand in line for Jim Starlin who didn't wind up showing until two hours later. He had a book for both me and himself for Jim to sign. While he waited there, I proceeded to get my other books done one at a time. Everybody I needed but George Perez and Laura Martin were there for the first day. Tom Palmer was not supposed to be there for the first day either, but he showed up around 4:30 and I was able to go ahead and get him done.

Joe and Bob, witnesses for CGC, both helped me during this first day of mayhem. Our friend James was also at the show getting far more books done than my brother and I could dream of doing. Last year, we wound up forming what James called "pods", where whole groups of us would follow a witness around to creator after creator and get the majority of our books all done in one fell swoop. This year didn't work out that way. Having the show be onsite was partly to blame for this, but it was also just a whole lot busier than last year. I found out later from Molly that they did SDCC type numbers for this show, which is astonishing!

One by one, I managed to acquire my signatures, a bunch of them while my brother was waiting on Starlin. I tried a few times to get Alan Davis on my Uncanny X-Men #213, but he always had a very long line, and I kept hearing stories from others about the very long wait to get him. I decided to take advantage of CGC offering to get his signature for $10 in order to avoid the excess wait time to acquire him. When it was all over for the day, the only things I had left to do for CGC as far as signatures went was to get George Perez and Laura Martin, which I did first thing the next day.

As for the onsite grading, CGC had to shut it down only two hours into the first day! This threw a big, honking monkey wrench into my plans for getting some books done by the end of the show. They were absolutely swamped right out of the gate with onsite submissions. We were later informed by them that they graded 2000 books on just the first day!

They said they would try to see if they could accept any more for a little bit on Saturday morning, but they weren't hopeful. In the end, I only got my onsite books done thanks to Bob putting in a word for me with Shaun. So how did my onsite books turn out? Unfortunately, three of them fell from 9.8 to 9.6, which was very disappointing, but I didn't press them, so I will CPR two of them at a later time to try and get them back up.

Infinity Gauntlet #1 - SS 9.6 WP

Howard the Duck #12 - SS 9.6 WP

New Mutants #97 - SS 9.6 WP

The rest - SS 9.8 WP!!!

I was especially happy about the NM Annual #1 retaining. Tnerb and I have been trying to get our copies done as SS 9.8 and neither of us have had success with retainment until now. This is now the first SS 9.8 copy, with none graded higher, so for now, it is an OAK! Unfortunately, my attempt at getting a SS 9.8 copy of NM annual #4 fell just short at SS 9.6. But I also submitted two raw copies that James provided to us for Universal grading, so we'll see how those turn out later on. Thank you, James!

Besides onsite, I also submitted some books for regular processing. I was originally planning on submitting these for onsite as well, but since these needed pressing, I didn't feel like "pressing" my luck with onsite CCS, since they had technically shut down onsite already. These books were:

Marvel Fanfare #27 (Milgrom and Hempel)

Booster Gold #22 (Jurgens)

Ragnarok #1 (Simonso and Martin)

Ragnarok #1 Subscription Variant (Simonson and Martin)

Life with Archie #36 Francavilla Variant (Francavilla)

100th Anniversay: GOTG #1 (Marz)

I also received my coupon for the four free Standard submissions from my first free year of premium membership from my registry awards. I decided to do some Silver Age issues:

Daredevil #8, #9 and #10

Strange Tales #155

The Strange Tales should be 9.2 but the Daredevils, which are OCC, will be in the 6.0 to 7.5 range. In total, I submitted 26 books, including four books I found right there at the show, two of which my brother found for me while I was standing in line waiting for a signature. These four books were:

Marvel Graphic Novel #30: A Sailor's Story (no sig)

Star Wars #81 news-stand (Palmer)

Fallen Angels #3 (Palmer)

Fallen Angels #4 (Palmer)

The two Fallen Angels issues will complete my full set in 9.8 if they reach it, plus they will be signed! Star Wars #81 is an issue I have always wanted a 9.8 copy of, but to be able to find a news-stand copy at a show and get it signed and reach 9.8 would be fantastic! The MGN #30 is simply a really tough issue to find in high grade and will add to that set for me. I also found a copy of the MGN She Hulk book, which has an all black cover and is also VERY tough to find in 9.8.

So now the wait begins for the rest of these books that I didn't do onsite. It will be some time before I know how everything turned out, but I look forward to it. I also got Dan Jurgens to sign a couple of hardback TPBs of Booster Gold, and also Laura Martin to sign all six of my hardback TPBs of Stephen King's "The Stand", which I already had signed by Mike Perkins at Me

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