mschmidt

Nothing weird about it - used book stores do this all the time.

The last raw copy that sold on eBay went for $100 With books like this you never really see a huge premium for CGC'ed copies, because the people who collect stuff like this aren't that interested in condition; they just want a copy they can read. I find it very unlikely you'll get anywhere near the $1,500 you have it listed for on eBay.

My main eBay account was created in 1998, so I guess I'll see next year.

Why would anyone forge Mark Bagley's signature?

That Hobbit book is fantastic

It's been a while since I've posted ... good year so far for celebrity SS!

You offered way too much. The seller is for not jumping on that $300 CAD.

Even with insurance, I still don't see how you can get to $249 for a single book unless it's being mailed overnight within the US or mailed Express internationally. USPS insurance maxes out at $25k - and CGC's USPS registered & insured shipping option is no more than $67 for a single $25k book shipped that way.

The 4 weeks is for people mailing in their own re-holders - turnaround is about a week if CGC is doing a re-holder because of a CGC mistake (wrong label, slab damaged during shipping, etc).

CGC does reholders in about a week.

What I've seen CGC do at shows is try to combine shipping across multiple tiers for international shipments if the tiers will be done fairly close to each other - eg. a Modern and a Economy tier submission, for instance. Once you start doing Express or Walk-through books, CGC wants them out of the building as soon as they're done, though.

+1 on this. It's common sense to require https.

In that case, it's exactly what Adam said - the book is a 7.0 with the signature being ignored for grading purposes.

JSC's people include a COA with every JSC-signed book - it has nothing to do with CGC nor with the book getting a yellow label.

So ... patiently explaining why pretty much all your underlying assumptions are incorrect - based on actual facts & experience working with the system for a number of years - is now "obfuscating the original topic"? I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that one as well

I don't know where your assumptions about the signed comic market are coming from, but as someone who's actively been involved with the Signature Series program for the last 8 years, I can tell you that they're very far off base. People are not paying a premium to avoid lines & end up with an "authenticated-after-the-fact"-book because there's no reason to do so - if you can't be bothered to wait in line for a creator, 3rd party facilitators will get the book signed for you and and it will still qualify for a SS label. What people - the few of them that can be bothered - are actually using the Voldy authentication service for are books carrying signatures of A-list creators that either haven't done any public signings since the formation of CGC (eg. Jack Kirby), have passed (eg. Michael Turner) or are named Stan Lee. It makes no sense whatsoever to go to a show, get a book signed by a creator (without a witness) and then submit said book to be authenticated-after-the-fact - not only would you be paying more money, you'd also end up with an inferior product with less value in the marketplace.

If that's truly the case, why does Voldy's "authentication" service cost a lot more than their Signature Series program? The reason a SS program is cheap is that the labor it requires doesn't need specialized skills, and that everything can be done fast & in bulk - it's much, much faster to simply witness Stan Lee signing 200 books than to authenticate the same 200 books after the fact (even with a computer helping you). The shipping insurance thing is negligible in the extreme - I'm sure CGC's general insurance policy automatically covers books being sent back & forth, at a pr. book cost that's numbered in the single cents. Even the actual postage cost of shipping books back from a show doesn't add up to more than $0.25/book or so.

I mean no disrespect, but it honestly doesn't seem like you know how the SS program actually operates. There's no additional insurance cost for SS books. SS witnesses are paid to work shows. And CGC more than covers the operational cost of this program through the mountains of books submitted at each major show for SS that they otherwise wouldn't get and the $10 extra they charge to slab a signed book. Not to mention the cracks & re-grades SS collectors do when they add more signatures at a later date. Compared to running an in-house authentication service, the SS program is cheap. What Voldy's foray into this business showed is that there's no pent-up, huge demand for an after-the-fact authentication service - the vast majority of collectors who own raw, signed books don't care & can't be bothered to pay to get them "authenticated". And the people who do collect signed books want the guarantee the CGC SS label offers.

The SS program is one of the primary reason people started slabbing modern books - so, considering that modern books are now the bulk of CGC's earnings, calling it an "odd business decision" seems, well, a bit odd. You may personally dislike the witnessing, but the main reason the SS program became hugely popular to begin with is because of the black & white nature of the guarantee - when I buy a yellow label book, I can be confident that the book was signed by the person listed on the label. There's no "authentication after the fact"-program out there that offers the same guarantee. (It's also far cheaper to run the SS program than it is to run a signature authentication service)

It's obviously a QC mistake. CGC has stated numerous times they're not going to get in the business of authenticating signatures after the fact. Which is great for the people who actually care about the authenticity of their signatures.

It's one of the differences between the old slab & the new - on the new slabs, the sides are sonically sealed so they're very tight. In order to crack the new slabs, you start at the top. On the old slabs, the top & bottom are sealed tight and you crack them from the sides.

I twist as well - makes it easier to actually get the case apart.

Let me guess - the people spreading that rumor are the ones trying to sell copies of this book, right? It's simple logic - the Sandman #8 editorial variant was a legit "stop the press, we screwed up" sort of book. Which is why the confirmed print run is so tiny. That book was never supposed to exist at all. But to think that DC or Marvel in the mid-90s would print only 600 copies of any top tier book on purpose - 1st or 2nd print, it doesn't matter - is crazy. Sandman #75 was the last issue of DC/Vertigo's flagship title, which, at the height of its popularity, outsold all other DC books. If orders were strong enough to warrant DC actually putting out a 2nd print, you can be 110% sure that DC printed up a ton of these to satisfy the demand. It just wouldn't have been economical for them otherwise. The most likely explanation for you not being able to find the 2nd print by itself in Comichron's numbers is that the 1st & 2nd print preorders are bundled together in there. It's pretty common when you start going that far back in their system.

Aren't you and I the only ones that actively collect these?