Tony S

You do realize the vast, overwhelming hobby is raw, right? Go to any comic book store or comic convention. What's the ratio of raw to graded? 10,000 to 1? There are three comic book stores in my town and one - the largest and oldest - has not one single slabbed comic book for sale. I have customers that go back to the 1980's. Dealers shouldn't be put on any sort of pedestal, but neither should CGC. The relationship between CGC and dealers is and has been mutually beneficial. Emotions can be unproductive, but it FEELS like one side is trying to take advantage of what has been a mutually beneficial relationship.

I don't believe there was any doubt at this point, but I did call CGC and confirm that dealer accounts now have an annual cost of $199 This stands in such contrast to how CGC started. Dealers were actively recruited and treated more like influencers. For instance all of the Overstreet Advisors when CGC opened were given 10 free grading coupons. But first the discount for dealers was reduced to 15% from 20% and now there is a charge for a dealer account. I send in thousands of books every year and have for a lot of years. And I'll just mention that I am sending in books almost entirely for other people. One of the things dealer accounts were likely to be doing/CGC hoped for. A lot of people ask me which grading company they should use. Thus my "influencer" comment.

Yes, I see it now. Thanks for the link. It does rather look like it is going to be a requirement to pay. But I'll still call.

Yes, that is interesting because I'm not seeing a deadline on the screen that pops up for me. Had a dealer friend check and he has no deadline showing either

I was going to call tomorrow before I posted anything about this. I have a dealer account with CGC. The $199 dealer membership that pops up when I log in says it is for CCG and allows submission across all the CCG companies. Coins, sportscards, paper money. Those things have no value to me since I don't collect or serve customers in those fields of collectibles. Perhaps it would have value to some stores and dealers that also cater to sports cards crowd. So MAYBE those of us with CGC (only) dealer accounts will maintain such at no cost. Because the idea is that dealers send in lots and lots of books. But if they are now "selling" dealer accounts at a $199 annual fee, they might end up catching some consequences. They already torqued us a bit with the discount cut. Now a yearly fee? There's a place that used to be across the street that still views dealers as.....influencers.... and worth catering a bit more to.

German Shepherds shed like no other. LA gets an unfair rap. OAKland and Stockton are the crime capitals of California with double the rate of LA. Indianapolis Indiana has more crime per 100,000 people than every city in CA except Stockton. Comic book thieves are universally despised and dealers do not want to buy stolen comics. Others have said it and I'll repeat. The OP needs a list ASAP and the list needs to go to the places the thieves would try to sell the books at as well as the police.

I'm sure they paid more $$$

No matter how one parses it, this is pretty aggressive on the price increase front. The last increase was nine months ago. In the past it has been years - multiple years - between price increases. Price increase last April the online submission portal crashed and burned that last week before the cut over to new prices. .Be interesting to see if we get a repeat of that. Also of interest will be to see what #2 does. They didn't raise prices last time and only recently increased the price on their fast pass add on and 2 day moderns. They remain #2, but I'm certain they gained market share. Now a rising tide can lift all ships and CGC is obviously getting record amounts of submissions. But market share matters too. The cost difference is going to be pretty substantial in a couple of weeks

New glitch. Just did a submission and USPS registered mail was NOT AVAILABLE for selection. Called customer service and they looked at pending submission and could not see any cause for such. A return address that had been used before for return shipping by CGC with USPS Reg mail The work around per customer service is select FedEX ground, then in BIG RED LETTERS wrote on the submission form to change return shipping to USPS Reg Mail and charge the difference in price. Probably customer service rep has notified someone of this glitch. But I thought I would post it here as well.

I do not believe anyone has answered the OP's question. Payment PROCESSORS are going to now be required to issue a 1099 if sales totals $600 or more. The old threshold was 200 transactions AND $20,000. Payment processors include PayPal, credit card processors (say Squareup) and Venmo Local comic shops that take consignments and auction houses that sell comics from consigners are not "payment processors". The new standard does not REQUIRE that they send 1099's. They may or may not. One would have to ask if they send 1099's and if they do if there is a threshold.

If the book is already in the database all is good. If adding a book not in the database, I see no way to select or enter anything other than month and year.

I might not fully understand what you mean when you say "much ado about nothing". I've collected comic books since 1967 and seriously as an adult since the early 1970's. People thought comic book collecting "nothing" during those times. Adults that never grew up. It's not nothing and not silly anymore. And the worlds leading grader of comic books needs to behave as though this is a legitimate art form and serious business. They just graded blank sheets of clear acetate and pretended like they are invisible comic books. Comic books that ranged in grade from 1.8 to 9.8. In grading these sheets of acetate and pretending they are invisible comics, they broke numerous guidelines they normally follow (and subject our submitted real comic books to) . It's one sheet only, folded over. That's the same as a cover. Covers only get a NG (no grade) grade. How did they authenticate they were legitimate? What's the actual difference between the 1.8's and the 9.8's? Barring some convincing explanation otherwise, it seems an ill-advised partnership and an astonishingly irreverent poke at the idea of even having comic books professionally graded and encapsulated. If CGC doesn't take grading and authentication of comic books seriously, who does?

Some really good points here that I had not thought about. How hard would it be to trim a piece of acetate to size, fold it and stick a few staples in? Then submit to CGC for authentication.

My apologies. Has this been posted/commented on before? I searched and did not find anything here on the boards The article itself is dated Dec 27 and the original Bleeding Cool article was just the day before - Dec 26. If it's been discussed I'm fine with mods removing it.

Now publishers print and CGC grades invisible comic books. Seriously, if Reminds me of the children's story/folktale - The Emperor's New Clothes. I'm surprised CGC would go along with such....gimmickry. One would hope the leading comic book grading and certification company took their business seriously. Not throw in with such foolishness. Wouldn't all invisible comics grade a perfect 10? Any defects are....wait for it...INVISIBLE. Link to story. https://bleedingcool.com/comics/bad-idea-comics-offers-collectors-an-invisible-slabbed-comic/

So just did a submission of 136 books. I was rather dreading it but I have to say it was a great deal easier than my first few submissions a week ago. It is much more likely to bring up the book I am looking to submit. Sometimes it was in fact quicker than the old system For books with a lot of potential matches, I still find it easier to input the title and then publication date. Those freaking moderns and all their reboots and variant covers easily overwhelm the "first 50" results displayed. I had my first encounter with needing to input a book not in the database and found a problem. There does not appear to be a way to input a new comic with ONLY a year for publication. The system insists on month/year. The comic book I was adding only listed a year of publication in the indicia (Cannibal Romances #1 - 1986. Last Gasp) A fair number of books have been published that only list a year for the publication date. So unless I was doing something wrong, this should be added to the things needed tweaked.

With prescreens, what was done in the past is you could list different prescreen grades in a 25 or more submission - but at the end of the process it was split into separate submissions for each grade tier. You could do multiple grade prescreens (9.2 plus 9.4 plus 9.6) but you paid separate shipping on each grade back. Maybe you can still do this - by selecting "add another service" near the end as Dena describes in her first posted response?

What Sacko said. Walking Dead 1 has 253 cover variants. Spider-Man 666 has 145. . And while that's the top 2, thousands of other modern comics have been issued - and will continue to be issued - with dozens of variants. Can you imagine scrolling trying to find the right one? Along with any foreign variants? Need to be a way to hone it down some.

Thank you Dena. Appreciate your looking into some issues. My apologies for missing the "add another service". As for what you refer to as the typehead, it's hard for me to grasp the concept that the current inputting of title/issue number will ever be easier to use than the old. Yes, the old required multiple fields to be filled out. But those multiple fields in a logical way honed in on the exact issue being sent in. First enter/select title, then publisher, then issue number, then publication date and a final field to enter things like variant covers, later printings, foreign edition, price variants. Trying to do all that in one space runs into the problem I described (and encountered) with modern books (that is published since 1975) of popular characters. Marvel has done a lot of comic books entitled "Amazing Spider-Man" since 1975. Pretty much all made it to issue 4. Then there are variant covers, foreign publishers, price variants, later printings. The list of comic books title/issue of Amazing Spider-Man 4 is just a L O N G one. Step by step narrowing it down - for me anyway - seems a lot easier. What's likely to happen - in a greater degree - is what was happening with the old system. User's can't find their book so they just create a new listing. What I did find helpful was to enter Amazing Spider-Man and then the publication date. Don't bother with issue number. While there are still a lot more Amazing Spider-Man's published 09/14 than you would think, the list is smaller by many multiples and you can find your book. I have to say I rather dread the idea of doing a submission of 20 foreign editions with this new system. Maybe I'm wrong and it won't be so bad..... As for the different amounts due showing on the payment screen for credit card vs check, maybe some additional information might help you identify the problem. I did three submissions last night, one right after the other. So over a period of an hour or so. The first submission the amount due by check was $630 more than the submission total/amount due by credit card. Now $630 is exactly the amount of an accounting error I had worked on with CGC accounting to fix just two days earlier. So my first thought was I needed to call up and say "you've billed the right person now but it looks like you haven't applied the $630 back where it belongs". But then the next two submissions the amount due by check was exactly $100 more than the submission total/amount due via credit card. So it looked much more random. Again, thank you for your work on this.

Worse. Used it just now for several different submissions. It no longer possible to do multiple tiers in one session. You have to pick the tier you are submitting under. Once selected you can't change. So if you have five moderns, five economy and one Express - you start over 3x. That's 3x entering address, 3x entering payment information. 3x the printing. I'm sure it saves CGC a bit of time. When receiving logs in books they split off different tiers on one order form. Now they don't have to do that. We did it for them. Even worse is I'm not sure what you would do if you make a mistake. Let's say for instance you sort out your submission of 20 books. Ten moderns, 10 economy. So you do the 10 moderns, print everything out and then start a new submission for the economy. And discover you missed a modern published 1/75. I suppose you have to send the modern in as economy - or start over - throwing away the modern submission you did. Or it could be the opposite. You find a book published 12/74 in your "modern" stack. Economy already done. Old system you just typed in the book and the computer moved it into the right tier. The look up function is really horrid for modern books. For instance there has been a jillion Amazing Spider-man titles. So you have to either scroll through a long list trying to find the right issue #4, or you have to type in the date. Sometimes it's 09/14. But a different title published Sept 2014 might not be found unless you type 9/14. And you still have to sort through the various Canadian and Swedish and variant covers to find your book. CGC continues down it's path to kill trees. Remember the day when you could do a submission of 20 books and the submission printed out on sheet of paper? If you printed a copy for yourself it was two pieces of paper. Now a submission of one book is four pages. I also had weirdness where when it was time to enter payment information that if I wanted to pay with a check, CGC wanted more $$ than the total of the order. Credit card was the submission amount. IDK if that means CGC thinks I have some outstanding balance or what. I guess I'll call accounting tomorrow to check on that. I suppose a web designer thinks it looks prettier, but any enhanced functionality is aimed at making CGC's side easier.

As far as I know, MCS has their codeword discounts on their FB page. I was unaware they ever emailed such. And the codewords seem to always be limited to certain categories/genres or titles and of course are never valid on auctions or consignment books, so I've never found them all that useful But here is the FB page - along with a codeword top of the page. https://www.facebook.com/mycomicshop

Those that want to display their comic books need to understand one essential fact. ALL LIGHT IS DAMAGING. Light in UV wavelengths is simply more energetic and therefore does damage faster. Your comic books will be much better off in a dark box in a climate controlled room. The climate part is easy. If you are comfortable, so are your comics. If it feels hot and muggy to you, the storage is not ideal for paper. Color printouts of the FC and a nice frame will look just as good and keeps comics out of harms way. If you feel you must display, follow the guidelines of the Library of Congress and Northeast Document Conservation Center. A windowless room or light blocking curtains on windows. UV lights, set to the lowest level that is safe as far as people not tripping in the dark. Lights only on when people are in the room, when no one is in the room lights off. And then rotate your display items. Don't leave the same items out for months at a time. Change them every week or two with items not on display back in their dark boxes. ComicLink has for sale on the Exchange right now a CGC 9.8 Incredible Hulk 181. Horribly sun faded. Sent in today looking like this probably 6.0-7.0. Link below. Look at the huge difference between the colors of the front cover versus the color of the back cover (no doubt the book was displayed hanging on the wall) The seller of course is listing on the Exchange hoping to still get nearly $70K out of it. The reality is someone just flushed over $60K value down the toilet because "it's my book and I want to display it" https://www.comiclink.com/itemdetail.asp?back=%2Fsearch.asp%3Fwhere%3Dsell%26title%3DIncredible%2BHulk%2B181%26GO2%3DGO%26ItemType%3DCB&id=1534962

It's important to understand how fingerprints come to be. Comic books are printed with oil based inks. People's fingertips have oil on them. Which is why it is important to wash your hands before handling comic books. If a person's fingertips are oily and they handle a book with sufficient pressure (which is very little) , the oil on the fingertips literally melds with the the oil based inks. From the standpoint of cleaning, you can sometimes gently buff off smudges with a soft cloth. But if the FBI could match your fingerprint with what is on the cover, there is no safe way to remove it. It's part of the cover now. Just as if it were printed that way.

It would have been more helpful for the grader to have offered you a quick opinion on the books grade. Not on a grade drop. Two points from what? Where was the starting point? It's actually a mistake t think in terms of "how many points to take off for xxx defect". That's not really how it works. If it did, it would be common for books with a lot defects to grade less than -0-. Instead, many defects should be thought of from the standpoint of "what is the highest grade a book can get with xxx defect?" A NM book with a subscription crease rarely does better than 6.0 and normally is in the 5 something range. Then there is also the idea of the lower the grade, the more defects allowed. If the B&B 34 was otherwise an upper mid grade looking copy, a few fingerprints on the back cover are not going to make much difference. It seems logical to assume CGC views sending graders to shows as an inefficient use of their time. Except perhaps the one or two shows a year where on site grading actually takes place. But I would also point out CGC generally doesn't answer "what if?" grading questions. You won't get answers to such grading questions here on the "ask CGC" sub forum. And I think it wise they don't answer such questions. It will just lead to lawyering and debating at some point. Each book needs to be examined by graders to arrive at a grade. Not some discussion from afar that goes "if a book is xxx grade now and has xxx wrong with it, how much does it affect the grade?". That's just a foolish question that leads to foolish answers. Because the real answer is "it depends. Let me see it"