lou_fine

Nothing to see here as this is clearly the reason why this book was downgraded from a CGC 10.0 copy down to only a mere CGC 9.8. Seriously though, as everybody knows grading is not an exact science and really nothing more than a subjective opinion (albeit a so-called "expert" one) at a particular time when a book crosses a grader's table. As such, there should always be an acceptable grading margin of error which collectors should be willing to accept when it comes to CGC's grading of a particular book, such as this one here: Slabbed as a CGC 9.0 graded copy with the Grader's Notes listing the "File Copy" designation written on the front cover and the dust shadow on the back cover as the defects taking the book down to 9.0, similar to how I imagine the "Promise code" designation written on the front cover and the dust shadow on the top back cover defects took this Promise Collection copy of Suspense Comics 11 down to a grade of CGC 9.8. Of course, the other caveat to remember is that CCG is a business, and as such, bidders should also understand that CGC will grade according to their current business agenda of the day, and hence bidders should take this fully into account when placing their bids.

CGC, CGC..............are you NOT paying attention to my written notes of advice to you here? No decimals or fractions or what have you, didn't you learn in school about rounding up as this is supposed to be a 7 due to all that wear running down the spine.

The family is simply trying to help CGC with their horrid TAT's by providing their own preliminary grades to the book in order to help them to clear up their massive backlog.

But in Heritage's eyes, not as good as that big beautiful 9.8 number on the top left of the slab for Suspense Comics 11 as they have this book right at the top of their preview charts, followed by the equally big beautiful numbered 9.8 slabbed copy of Human Torch 23 with the classic Schomburg robot cover. Ok, you've convinced me here..............I'll take all 3 of them at not only full cover price, but rather even at full top of guide valuation.

Well, it means that either higher graded PLOD's tends to have a heavier percentage hit on them as opposed to the lower graded PLOD's, or it might also mean that Bats is in more demand than Supes, even when Restored and especially when it's starting from a lower pricing baseline, or some combination of both.

Look, I don't get it either buuuut... in regards to your bolded sentence above, the same thing can be said of Silver Surfer #4 (there's the cover and "supposed" rarity if that farce of it being limited in distribution is still being perpetrated) and we know what SS 4s are selling for in 9.8 these days. Based upon your comment about the supposed rarity of Silver Surfer 4, I went back and checked my Overstreet and you are exactly right as it does indeed have a notation of "Lower distribution" for SS 4. Never knew this as I thought the only Marvel book to have this kind of notation was Conan 3 and like the fool that I was back in the day, actually took Overstreet at his word and believed it. To the point that when I attended my first comic book convention way back in the day and was trying to decide between a HG copy of FF 11 or a minty fresh copy of Conan 3, I made the big boo boo of choosing the supposedly scarcer Conan 3. Since they were both going for pretty much the same price back then, I figured that if I didn't take the Conan that I might have a hard time finishing off my BWS run of Conan. As for the FF 11, the thought that ran through my mind at the time was who really cares about the Impossible Man and who needs to read a story about Willie Lumpkin, the mailman. Boy, did I ever make the wrong choice there. As for the Silver Surfer 4, I went back and took a look at my copy and maybe it's really more a case of "late" distribution to some areas, as opposed to lower distribution. I took a look at my copy of SS 4 and it had a code of "14" on it which meant the store received it during the fourth week of January which is abnormally late late late for a February cover issue. Especially when I noticed that the code on all of my other 25 cents Silver Surfer issues were all coded 2 full months prior to their cover dates. So, my guess here is that for some odd reason, Silver Surfer 4 might have had either a production/print or distribution/shipping problem or both, and arrive just prior to the time when the stores were supposed to be taking them off the shelves. As a result, some of the stores (at least the one in the boonies out here in Canada) might not even had bothered to put them on the shelf in the first place, or if they did, took it off as soon as Silver Surfer 5 got shipped to the stores which would not have been too long afterwards.

With respect to these 3 Moderately Restored DC GA keys here, it's certainly interesting to see how they all finished up relative to their condition guide valuations. I guess it's really no surprise that the MP Restored copy of All-Star 3 as graded by the other guys finished up at just a tad over 10% of condition guide value, while the MP Restored copy of Action 1 finished up at over 14% of its condition guide valuation. Looks like the real Restored winner here was the Moderate (A-3) Restored copy of Batman 1 which finished up at a rather astonishing shade over 50% of condition guide valuation: https://comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/batman-1-dc-1940-cgc-apparent-vg-fn-50-moderate-a-3-cream-to-off-white-pages/a/7244-94019.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515 I guess the old adage still continues to hold that restoration seems to have a much greater detrimental impact on the higher condition books like the Action 1 and the All-Star 3 which both were graded as Restored 9.0 copies, while the Bat 1 was graded as a Restored 5.0 copy, although I must admit that copy certainly does present very nicely relative to its assigned CGC grade.

Yeah, $42K is certainly nothing to sniff at, especially if he had brought the book for much cheaper last year, or for mere peanuts way back in the day.

Well, I guess the giddy and bubbly Heritage auction fever must have petered out by the weekend and was all gone by Monday since this copy on CL managed to fetched only $42K in their auction last night: https://www.comiclink.com/auctions/item.asp?back=%2FAUCTIONS%2FPREVIEW.ASP%3Fcode%3D2021june%26session%3D0%23Item_1490264&id=1490264&itemType=0#detail I imagine the consignor of this so-called #2 Registry Set (whatever that is ) must not have been too overly excited with this result, especially since the last few sales over the past 2 months or so have all been in the $60K+ price range.

Then again, we could just be in a giddy bubble that's possibly about to pop. Case in point, with the CGC 9.8 graded copy of GSXM 1 selling for a crazed false FOMO price of $72K at Heritage last week, while the CL copy managed to hit only $42K last night. Unlike the Silver Surfer 4 though, this might also be due to the fact that CGC 9.8 graded copies of this GSXM 1 seems to grow on trees as they tend to show up in every single auction.

Well, if the big Jon Berk collection is any indication which was consigned through CC instead of Heritage, I don't seem to remember many (if even any in fact) posts about overgraded books. What I do remember though is that many of the books were being flipped back out encased in slabs with higher grades by some dealers and sellers within mere weeks of the completion of the CC Event Auction. Of course, this was rationalized away by some boardies here as making perfect business sense since the objective of CCG as a business owner is to make money by maximizing both their top and bottom lines. As such, it was stated that CGC had a massive interest in undergrading books, particularly those with "improvable" defects. Any bets that we will not be seeing this same scenario played out when it comes to the Promise Collection of books as they clearly did not follow the same grading playbook which makes me wonder if the choice of the submittor/consignor auction venue had anything at all to do with this. All I know is that as a bidder for some of these books, whether they be the Jon Berk books or the Promise Collection books, and with CGC supposedly being an independent 3rd party certification service, I wish they would just grade the darned books on as accurate and consistent basis as possible, as opposed to seemingly grading the books to their current business agenda of the day.

Oh I hope that was an outlier. I'm sure it was, at least as sure as one can be in this current marketplace. How can you be so sure that this particular Silver Surfer 4 sale was an outlier in today's rather crazed FOMO driven marketplace? Especially when you have other more recent high profile books with far higher census counts such as TMNT 1 in CGC 9.6, XM 94, and GSXM 1 moving from the teens where they were less than 2 years ago and now hitting $88K, $63K, and $72K respectively. Especially in terms of GSXM 1 with something like 200 copies already slabbed in CGC 9.8 and over 10,000 slabbed in total and with no doubt, more to come as it was supposedly part of a big warehouse find back in the day. Sure, the demand for the Surfer 4 might not be as high as the demand for those much later BA and CA keys, but the supply is also certainly a lot lower on what is probably one of the best and most memorable covers to have come out from the Marvel SA time period.

Hey Clark; We are just playing and having a happy time here, as we always love to make fun of the lawyers, doctors, and THE DENTIST on these boards here.

Not too tight! Actually, as TIGHT as possible because you want to squish squash the living daylights out of the book in order to maximize its potential.

Yes, unfortuantely I am not aware of any lawyer who's willing to work for free yet:

Ahhhh.................the unveiling of the Impossible Collection at the historic St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London, England a few years ago.

Yeah but come on now, that SS4 cover is truly a thing of beauty . No comparison to the ASM 667 cover. Well, not for me at least lol. I get the logic though. The key thing to note here is whether that SS 4 auction result for 90K was an outlier, as one sale does not a marketplace make. The other thing is whether this pricing action or even anything resembling it will also filter down to the slightly lower grades or only in CGC 9.8? And come on now, you definitely can't compare SS4 to an ASM 667 variant because one book is over 50 years old and came into a marketplace where books were meant to be read with only the nerdy few collecting them, whereas the other is almost akin to a manufactured collectible right from the get go. If I had a choice between these 2 books and money was not an object, I certainly know which one of these I would take in a heartbeat.

That's the exact same feeling that I get with ALL of the variants, no matter what kind of variant they are. Even with the so-called price variants like the 35 cents Star Wars 1, which like you said, the book is STILL really nothing more than Star Wars 1.

This was part of a collection unearthed by CC and dubbed by them as the Phantom Lady Collection since it did not receive official CGC pedigree status,much like their Atlantic City Collection back in 2011 which yield the highest graded copies of both Action 10 and Action 13 at the time which both sold for stunning 6-figure prices, along with a slew of other books which I have now forgotten: https://scoop.previewsworld.com/Home/4/1/73/1014?articleID=233399 https://www.comicconnect.com/item/839537

Besides the obvious and fugly miscut and obtrusive scuff mark, the top and bottom corners are also not knife-like sharp with what we see on the 9.4 graded copy. On the other hand, the colors would appear to be slightly stronger with the 9.6 copy, but then again, you definitely can't go with that based upon Heritage's notorious reputation for amping up the brightness of their scans. Although I am quite sure that the 9.4 owner of the former highest graded PL 17 is quite happy with his theoretical "paper gain" as a result of the stunning Promise Collection copy auction result, the REAL winner here is still the family of the Promise Collection consignors as they got themselves not only a steal of a grade on this partiuclar book here, but on many of the books within this collection. All I know is that if I was lucky enough to have found that CGC 9.6 copy of PL 17 in the wild and had turned it raw into CGC for grading as a non-pedigree standalone book on its own, I very much highly doubt that CGC would be giving a free pass to some of these defects and my bet is that very noticeable scuff mark alone would be enough for the graders to justify taking it down 2 grading decrements and I would be lucky to get even a 9.2 on the book.

You are being kind...the selection is abysmal Well, they do have the odd super nice book in there that should go for big money, but of course nothing at all like the just completed HA offerings. As I had alluded to in another thread here quite early on, imagine what would have happened if the family had watch the news and seen one of the CC/Metro's many multi-million dollar sales go down, instead of seeing Heritage's Batman 1 sale for $2.22M dollars at the start of this year, and contacted them as a result. Any bets that we would not be seeing these same out of this universe dollar results due not only to the different auction venue, but also due in large part to the grades being different as the books in the collection would have been graded much more tightly (i.e. much more accurately with less obvious overgrading).

Gawd, I hope that's not true. Sounds as though you might have missed this YouTube video that was posted right here on this thread about a month ago: I believe Brain W. from Heritage comments about the family's impression of the collection's condition starting at the 3:20 mark or thereabouts.

Don't think the owner is happy about having the 2nd Highest Graded Copy now if they are a driven label collector. The one consolation for them though is that with the outrageous price acheived by the now highest graded Promise Copy, his own PL 17 boat might just have risen a lot, as opposed to being sunk by the Promise copy. As for your friend's raw Church copy of 'Tec 140, they are now actually in the very enviable position of possibly having the best of both worlds here, in terms of both status and value. Especially if his still raw Church copy grades out higher (or possibly even equivalent to) than the Promise copy, this could actually catapult the value of his copy up above the $456K mark which it most probably would not have acheived if there was no Promise Collection to set the new baseline for him. My thinking is that the longer term GA collectors out there who are holding raw brand name pedigree books that might possibly grade out higher than their Promise Collection counterparts are probably seeing this as a big positive in terms of increasing the value of their own possibly higher graded pedigree books in their personal collection.

I hope they understood going in the kind of negotiating power they had. From one of the videos posted, it would appear that the extent of the knowledge they had was that the collection was pretty much in the G/VG condition grade range.

Well, the current census indicates 2 copies in CGC 9.8 and 4 in CGC 9.6 (some dups here maybe???), with the first 9.8 being Brulato/Via's Curator copy graded back when CGC first opened their doors and the second would be Schmell's (don't think he owns it anymore) former Pacific Coast 9.6 copy that took several runs before CGC finally decided he had paid his dues for the upgrade. It would definitely be interesting to have a grading competition between these 3 books today given how much CGC's undisclosed grading standards have changed from the time the two CGC 9.8 copies were graded and also what we now know about Brulato's former partner in Via. In terms of changes to grading standards over time, I had about a dozen or more books graded back then as a test of this new grading system and also in time for the big Greg Manning Auction and every single one of them came back between CGC 9.2 to CGC 9.6 (save for 1 equally nice one that came back as a PLOD 8.5), which I strongly believe would not happen today unless they were *ahem*..........."given a helping hand." With respect to these 3 books here, I found a post which I had made about a week ago on this issue here: