Both thrilled and perplexed.

When I attended the Tampa Bay Comic Con, I chose my books carefully. I started with over 50 possible copies for signatures, but couldn't do so many, so I had to trim it down little by little.

Sometimes the decision was made for me with a cancellation or two. Sometimes it was simply me deciding that a book just wasn't as hugely important to do at the time. But I mainly wanted to take advantage of Marv Wolfman, Keith Pollard and Michael Zeck, all of who I had never met before. The fact that John Beatty was there definitely made my mind up on three particular books.

While I am still waiting on a number of issues to come back, one of my invoices from TBCC is back in my hands! It had 5 books on it, all of which were Universal 9.8s that I cracked for signatures. I did NOT have them pressed. Here are the results:

GI Joe #56 - SS 9.6 WP Zeck

Masters of the Universe #4 - SS 9.8 WP Ron Wilson

Captain America Annual #8 - SS 9.8 WP Beatty and Zeck

Super Heroes Secret Wars #1 - SS 9.8 WP Beatty and Zeck

Super Heroes Secret Wars #8 - SS 9.8 WP Beatty and Zeck (sign and sketch)

All of them retained their grades except for the GI Joe. I'll get to that one in a moment.

The Masters of the Universe is one of the Marvel 25th Anniversary Border covers that I'm slowly trying to put a set together of. I'm ecstatic about it retaining, especially since it is now the ONLY SS 9.8 out there! Very cool!!!

I'm sure it is obvious why I chose the three for Beatty and Zeck that I did. They are all very iconic 80s books. Having these three all retain their grades was a great relief to me. I was almost certain that the Secret Wars #8 was going to drop, but thankfully it didn't. I had decided well beforehand to have Zeck do an awesome head sketch of Venom on it! It was quite the experience watching him ink it out onto the cover. He does a fantastic Venom!! So cool!!!

Now for the GI Joe. This is not any sort of big or key issue. The only reason I took this with me was because it needed a reholder due to a large crack on the back of the casing, so I figured that since Zeck was at the show and I would be standing right in front of him anyway for the other three books, I may as well have him sign it before having it redone. Why not right?

Well for some reason it fell in grade. I have closely eyeballed the book and cannot tell what would have caused the grade drop, so I will probably wait until a future time when I can get Hama or someone else added to it and then have it pressed and regraded to try and bump it back up.

But I noticed a really odd thing about the label on the book. It has something on the label I've never seen before. A set of numbers set off to the right in the notes section. At first I wasn't sure what to make of it, it was such an unusual thing to see. It just didn't make any sense. Knowing how another company does their cert numbers, I wondered if this was some sort of way for CGC to keep track of the items on the invoice throughout the grading process, and somehow they wound up accidentally being put on the label somehow.

But after a little while I realized that there were the same number of digits in it as a certification number, although for some reason it has a hyphen in the middle of the number. It then occurred to me to check my registry for the old cert number that was on the label when the book was Universal.

BINGO!! That's what it is! It's the old, Universal label's cert number! But that's really strange. I've never seen them do this before, and it can't be something new they're doing because if it was, they would have done it on the other books in the invoice as well. Apparently this is just some sort of very weird mistake. The picture below will show you what the label looks like now. Very odd.

It's almost enough to make me leave the thing as it is, due to the (accidental?) uniqueness of the labeling. But I still plan on giving the book a chance to bump back up in grade when the opportunity is there for additional sigs.

Anyway, I'll post the pics of the other books in the replies for everyone to visually peruse through. I eagerly await the next invoice to show up at my door!!!

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