lou_fine

Lou_fine, you are a bad man +1 Unfortunately, I would have to most definitely agree with you here. Just put yourself in the shoes of a businessman who already has partial ownership in a company that not only grades collectibles in various fields, but also has partial ownership in the major auction house that auctions off these various collectibles. Now, if you was planning to establish a grading company for comic books, which of the following 2 approaches would you take: 1) Have full written disclosure in terms of your grading standards so that it's a simple one-step, one-time process to grade your books and it's relatively easier to determine if it was graded accurately or not; or 2) Have a proprietary grading system with vague and generic descriptions which facilitates the exact same book undergoing multiple associated services on multiple occasions, with the customers beating down your doors to get these services done. Bottom-line: As a businessman, why would you want to generate money from a book only one time, when you can generate it multiple times on an almost endless basis through such initiatives as loose grading, tight grading, pre-screens, restoration, restoration removal, maximization of potential, resubs, reholders, etc. and repeat it all over again by introducing Conservation category, new labels, new slabs, etc. for all those OCD collectors who just need to have everything exactly the same in their collection.

One of my favorite Boardies. Yes indeed, who could forget the all-time classic, but highly controversial Manufactured Gold thread that was started up by Masterchief himself. This one should really be pinned to the top of the boards here since it basically presented a deep dive analysis of what was really going on behind the scenes when virtually all of us here were still lost in our sweet and innocent dreams of wine and roses when it came to our graded books. Totally understandable that it is not though since it definitely did not shine the best light on our hosts here and it is their boards after all. And actually, kudos to CGC here who was surprisingly gracious enough to let the thread run for as long as it did (and it was for a long time for almost countless pages) before they finally decided to shut it down. Masterchief was shall we say, a master at presenting side by side detailed graphic analysis of books being maximized to their full potential such as CGC 6.5 graded copies being turned into CGC 9.0 graded copies, CGC 8.5 copies being turned into CGC 9.4 graded copies, etc. Definitely a shocker to virtually all of us here at the time which resulted in a lot of controversial and heated discussion on the boards here with members taking opposing sides rather quickly. Sad to see a few leave the hobby or drastically curtail their collecting as a result of this whole issue, while a huge majority saw this for the massive opportunity that was presented to them and acted accordingly which was to be expected. Fast forward to today and how many of us would actually even consider sending a book in strictly for grading only and absolutely nothing else?

Nobody has a gun to your head and is forcing you to type. Yes, I really must try to get better control of my loosey goosey fingers as they seem to have a mind of their own sometimes. If you are planning to get some books graded though, it's always advisable to peek behind the kimono to try to figure out how the game is really being played. After all, you wouldn't want to have your books end up being the casualty of some punishment grading. Especially when others in the know can play the game according to the unwritten rules and be the beneficiary of having their grades maximized to their full potential.

So, you are basically saying that CGC has successfully managed to achieve their goal with respect to intentionally developing an imperfect grading system that is just detailed enough to meet their shifting business agenda over time, satisfy their ownership at the same time, and yet somehow been accepted by the collecting base whereby nobody would ever think of trying to sell a vintage collectible comic book without having it graded first. Bingo, sounds like a winning combination from a pure business point of view.

LOL... I own this book. And I submitted it to CCS for review this past fall. They recommended regrading to get a Conserved label. Which I did, and it’s now a 9.4 Conserved. Ironic. Was this a "wet cleaning" job like one of those that Mark Wilson did on virtually all of his books since he did not considered that type of work to be restoration? I thought "wet cleaning" was still considered to fall under the restoration umbrella under CGC's new Restoration Grading System. Of course, I haven't really followed all of the changes made there, but if this type of work is now considered as falling under the Conservation umbrella, that is certainly good to know.

Although they give you the old song and dance about proprietary knowledge and all that hog wash, don't believe it for a second. The real reason is to protect their own legal backside over and above the stated qualifier that they already have in place that their grade is only an "opinion" and nothing more and nothing less than that. This lack of full disclosure also allows them to freely swing between strict grading and loose grading as they are prone to do at times, which in turn encourages resubs that helps both their top and bottom line. You certainly can't blame them since this is a business after all.

Did you pick up these mid-60's #1 Curators from Hauser back around 10 years ago or thereabouts? Or maybe it was further back than that. I remember he had a slew of these mid-60's #1 Curators up for sale back then and they were listed only for around top of guide or a tad over. I ended up picking up several of these from him including a copy of Total War #1 since I wanted to complete a uber HG run of this short-lived title. Although it was certainly up there in grade, it just didn't seem to have quite the same zing and sharpness as the File Copy run that I already had for M.A.R.S. Patrol #4 - #10, as those copies looked like they had just come off the printing press.

Well, although it's a BA book, the one that I heard that has been getting a lot of chatter recently is Special Marvel Edition 15 with the first appearance of Shang-Chi MOKF. Especially after Marvel announced that it was working on developing a Shang-Chi movie for Phase 4 of their MCU movie lineup. No doubt to follow up and cash in on the success of the racially diversified Black Panther movie last year and the fact that China is fast becoming the dominant player in the movie biz. Just take a look at where the big box office money for a third tier character like Aquaman is coming from as it's now approaching $1B on a global basis. So, just imagine if they have an Asian racially diversified movie with an Asian lead actor and actress, along with an Asian director to boot.

Now, that's definitely a name from way back in the day and one that I haven't heard in a long time. I remember calling him once through all of those Private Collector ads he used to run in Overstreet during the early 90's asking for GA #1 keys and Marvel SA keys. Guess he gave up after a few years of running them since he told me that he was never ever really able to acquire a single book from those ads. Any idea if he is still collecting or is he most likely gone like most of the other collectors back in the day?

Cap 1 is actually a 9.8 Allentown (formerly a 9.6) Yes, I guess Veryzl wouldn't have been interested in the Church copy since it had a tiny bit of restoration work done to it. I remember the only time I was up in Fisher's office back in the mid-90's and he asked me to take a look at the Church Cap 1 to see if I could spot where the resto work was. Any idea if the Allentown copy was upgraded due to a straight resub where CGC simply graded it different on the second go round or did the book get a little bit of intervening help to push it up a notch?

Definitely nowhere near to the demand they use to have when Overstreet first started publication as some of these early comics and newspaper reprints used to be right up there near the top of the charts in terms of valuations. Sadly, not the case anymore or even anywhere close to it nowadays.

With common and readily available books like these, that is clearly the most important thing.

I didn't miss them. But I didn't/don't have a horse in the race, so after a few pages I stopped following. I have never had a book pressed or submitted to CGC, although i will be doing both in the near future. That's good to know. With what is happening, it's definitely hard to do the latter without doing the former, although you could always go for a pre-screen. Either way, best of luck to you with respect to your grading results.

Seriously, are the two of you trying to get me booted off these boards here with your postings?

I believe you might have missed a couple of rather controversial and censured threads on the boards here that were talking about "good" pressing and "bad" pressing and how books were being graded at the time. I believe it was back in 2016 around the time that key personnel changes were made at CCS.

This is true? Of course it was. Weren't you around for that wild and raucous, but fun times (well, probably not for the CGC boys ) back around 2005 or thereabouts when the whole pressing fiasco first came to light on these boards here. Let's see, if you joined in October of 2005, you might have just missed all of the fun as there were multiple threads that covered this, with some for well over a hundred pages on this controversy before the Mods were able to "macro trim" them back. Definitely a game changer with the big boys at Metro apparently not even aware of this undisclosed practice in the beginning. Even Overstreet had to go back into his Glossary and revise his definition for "restoration" to take into account what CGC had been uncommunicatively doing from the get go. A real eye opener to the collecting base as board members here were finally able to figure out that pressing no longer fell under the long held historical umbrella definition of restoration, but was now being spun by Borock and CGC as something called "maximization of potential". Even before that controversy died out came the Church copy of Boy Comics #17 a few weeks later. Courtesy of before and after scans provided by board members like Masterchief, Danny boy (i.e. Comic-Keys), Red Hook, etc. we saw how a CGC 4.0 graded book could turn into a CGC 7.5 graded copy and then finally into a CGC 9.0 graded copy, all while residing in an unrestored blue label slab. After several controversial and heated days of angst on the boards here, word or spin finally came back down from the mountaintop that "disassembly and reassembly of a comic book in and of itself does not constitute restoration". Courtesy of Masterchief and a few others who are probably no longer welcome here, we soon discovered with many more before and after scans of the exact same books that what we were seeing was really nothing more than just the tip of a huge iceberg. Needless to say, the barn doors were opened wide after that with an explosion of pressing ads as everybody was scrambling to squish squash their books into oblivion like there was no tomorrow. This whole pressing issue would not have erupted into such a big controversy if CGC had been upfront about the whole thing and proactively informed the collecting base about these significant changes to the definition of restoration before they first opened their doors. Being the smart businessmen they are and with prior experience in other collecting fields, no doubt the owners at CCG knew that the collecting base would never had accepted changes of this magnitude in the first place. The smart play was to quietly and secretly sneak it in through the back door while nobody was looking, get the party going and then turn on the money machine once everybody found out because nobody would want to leave the party after that.

I’m talking to CIS, and yeah, I tried that. They have none available in a size big enough to hold a slab. And that’s BofA. I would definitely never put a slabbed book into a safety deposit box as it just takes up way too much room. I've seen some safety deposit boxes that can hold over 125 mylared GA books, but probably only a small fraction of that if they were slabbed.

Although the cost of insurance might possibly be reasonable in your particular case here, I highly doubt that the cost of safety deposit box(es) large enough to hold comic books are.

Stand alone pressing in and of itself prior to CGC was most certainly not as rampant as it is nowadays since it was considered to be restoration back then. Pressing in those wild wild west days was usually done as the final step in association with other restoration work being done on a book. Unfortunately for the collecting hobby place (but fortunately for the speculative marketplace ), CCG made a business decision to shift pressing along with a few other former generally acknowledged restorative activities over to the additional revenue generating umbrella of unrestored activities. Nothing really wrong with that, except for the fact that they forgot to proactively mention this critical game changer to the collecting base until they were caught with their pants down around their ankles and had to react after the fact. Definitely left the impression, whether rightly or wrongly, of an uneven playing field where there were a few in the know raking in the money big time while everybody else was left to play on the losing side of the game. And yes, trimming of any kind is indeed quite different from pressing. But then again, barely perceptible but properly executed microscopic trimming is also quite different from the old hack eye trimming jobs done back in the day.

Given my lack of expertise along with CGC's possible margin of error when it comes to grading, I would tend to follow a simple rule to decide if a book is worth grading or not. The rule of thumb that I would go with is that if it's guiding for less than $300 in the condition guide value you think the book is in, then it's probably not worth grading. Especially with all of the ancillary charges that you would have to absorb along with the tedious time and hassle involved with getting a book graded. As a result, it would never ever cross my mind to get a book like ASM 361 or virtually any other MA book slabbed. Or at least, not quite yet. Of course, that's just me as it's really to each their own.

+1 Would definitely agree with you here as the lower graded copy definitely presents a lot nicer from a front cover visual point of view. So, unless there is some other obvious defect that we are not seeing either on the back cover or interior pages, I would definitely go with the lower grade copy here. Especially since those little color breaking creases on the corners don't tend to bother me as much as they obviously bother Matt Nelson who seemingly hates all types of creases (since that's his forte) and will apply the sledge hammer to those books over any other defect when it comes to grading. Either way, any potential bidders for either of these 2 books should really be paying for the grading notes, for what ever they are worth.

Then again, does it really matter if nobody (including CGC themselves) can truly tell with any reasonable degree of certainty if the book has been micro-trimmed or not? Especially if the work had been done properly, it's supposedly virtually impossible to tell unless you have before and after scans of the book magnified to the nth degree.

Well, Steranko must have seen the writing on the wall early as he pretty much left the industry after doing only around 20 books or thereabouts. Or was it due to the fact that he was such a perfectionist by the end that it took him something like well over 6 months to complete that 7-page story, At The Stroke of Midnight, in the first issue of Tower of Shadows? At the page rates they were paying in those days, he must have been eating out of a soup can by the time that story was done.

The one I simply can't understand is Eerie Magazine #1 by Warren Publishing??? All of the other issues show up in their population census report. Yet nothing at all for the first issue or was it something to do with the high possibility of counterfeit copies. If this is the case, then shouldn't this also apply to other books like Cerebus #1 which is also prone to having counterfeit copies out there.

They must have printed off an unlimited quantity of this first issue as I remember getting my copy when they were handing them out for free at the SD Con. I also still remember Jon Warren at the Overstreet booth commenting and laughing that these new guys were a joke and would never ever last. Especially ironic since he eventually became their Price Guide Editor. In the end though, I guess Jon was right as Wizard certainly did fizzled out after being on top of the market for a short time, while Overstreet is still going strong and heading towards its 50th year of publication with no signs of folding up anytime soon.