DougC

That is heart breaking and a huge loss of value. You can sell it as is to try and recoup some funds. send it to the "other" company for Beckett certification and encapsulation. keep it and let it be someone else's problem eventually. There will always be interest in this book as long as you keep it in the inner well with the CGC tag due to Stan's signature.

You have already been given some good advice and I would like to add to that. 30 books is a huge investment for a first time submission, especially if you do not have prior grading experience with how CGC grades. Being that this is your personal, childhood collection I am going to greatly assume none of them will be 9.8s (even if you were sure that you only read it once and didn't damage it). You have a lot of books that would sell in the $100-$150 range if they were 9.8, but barely worth grading fees at 9.6 or under. This also doesn't take into account shipping, selling fees when you do sell them, and just how long it is going to take CGC to return your books (likely 10+ months). A $100 book quickly becomes only a $15 net profit when you could have sold the book raw for slightly more. My advice is to start very small, select five books, inspect them, denote any flaws, and then assign a grade. Send these five books to CGC and when you see the grades (and hopefully notes) compare them to what you saw and expected. Then decide if it is worth the investment to send everything else you wanted to originally send. My assumption is your going to receive a lot of 8.0, 8.5, 9.0's and considerable heartbreak with some remorse for wasting money with the occasional choice word for CGC.

I was actually tepidly excited when the x-men #4 came up on my alerts, for hot second I thought that the boomer mentality at CGC had finally come to terms that a pedigree encompasses all the books within the collection and not only those CGC specifically deems as "old enough" because... "back in my day silver age was modern...". Which was obviously dashed as soon as I saw the Pennsylvania label and not Savannah. For the record I reached out to the seller and received the following response: "I purchased these off a customer and I'm going by cgc label." These books are going to be sold to someone who trusts CGC's quality control and get burned for it. Good job

I think almost everyone that has used CCS has a similar story. I am sure at one point they were a respected company that provided a value added service but once they were purchased and folded into CGC that stopped. CGC has a quality problem and so does any company they umbrella, at this point it is a management issue from the top down based on what they believe the market will bear while maximizing revenue. Be careful with whom you trust your books to and do not reward those who are careless because they can get away with it.

Has anyone told Chuck about this new development?

I tried this with a number of my golden age rags books that I had as place holders until upgrading. Using a similar method to another boardie (a year later 2014ish), CGC at the time changed their stance on adding an additional (blank) cover to what was already manufactured and refused to grade/encapsulate them. Given what happened a month ago and how they completely reversed stance the money must of been much better.. lol.

Well that's just like your opinion.. man. Obviously CGC has a far superior opinion of what the collecting community wants.

Also, if a company wants to be safe (and petty). Once a customer informs them that they will be retaining council it is in CGC's best interest to no longer reply to that customer and simply state they will await word from their lawyer. In simpler terms "threatening" to sue is no longer a threat or treated as such due to the amount of people that not only say it but cannot follow through with it.

You are not going to get your book back anytime soon, there is fine print you didn't read about turn-around-times. Everyone on the forums have Stockholm and will tell you that it is ok for CGC to do this, either you are going to accept it and join in or they will eventually ban you for being "disruptive" and not reply to your emails. Good luck in your future endeavors

Wife/Manager/Secretarial signatures are very prevalent in other industries throughout history and today. Comics is one of the few places where your more likely to find a real signature on a raw book than a fake one (especially if it is on the first page). Not a quarter goes by in the retail book industry where an autographed exclusive isn't found out to be an autopen (Barnes & Noble are the worst for these). In the sports industry many players have their managers or wives sign cards/sticker sheets, it isn't even a secret any more. Even presidents/first ladies like the Obama's autopenned their books, Trump is prolific in using autopen and has a database of templates. Obviously big names are going to be forged but when comics gets to the point that Fingeroth, Shooter, Mhan, or Totleben have previously created autopen templates we have to data base and compare, then we have really made it to the big time.

I wonder if the same is going to apply to glue? why not, really. I have 20+ golden age books with the "small amount of dried glue on cover" notation... maybe I should just reholder them and put them on ebay, after all it is the customers fault they didn't check the graders notes, per CGC... right

This is a non-representational quote by CGC in order to shift blame onto the customer. When companies et al, issue statements like this they do so using the broadest definition of both "prominent members" and "collecting community". It is highly likely and more often the case this came down from C.C.G. and will (if not already) more align description designation for their industry in order to try and create a standard (for good or bad) moving forward. In short no one in comics asked for this but they plan to blame you for it anyway.

So to improve quality control they will now be hiding defects behind a paywall

So I am not going to advise you to ever sell this without full disclosure, but (and this is likely not going to be popular) I would also advise that you do not reholder it and let CGC off the hook. Right now they really want that book back so they can fix their mistake at your cost to prevent future entanglements due to their incompetence. They are not offering you anything and pretending that they are doing you a favor with a "complementary reholder service" while very purposefully talking around the actual problem with the book without taking any real responsibility. In short a special edition in 9.6 is probably in the range of KB reprint so maybe only worth a little more than shipping and grading fees for a modern which is quite short of what a first print 9.6 goes for. CGC isn't going to buy this book back from you but I would ask for a system credit of your choosing and get it in writing before returning the book to them, if they will not do that then I would keep the book in my collection and drag out it every so often to be petty.

As you can clearly see from the quoted post (effaces mine) CGC does not actually care that you were duped into purchasing a book because you trusted their company and business, what they care about is leaving you holding the bag after they "correct" the label. Return this book immediately! and in the future do not trust the CGC label and buy the book after looking over it carefully.

Do not ever take this advice. You are paying for a guaranteed quality service that failed on multiple levels and the fix isn't compensation to you, but to just mail the book back so they can correct it. You have every right to be angry since you will now be without your book for how ever long they prioritize fixing the label. But, hey it's alright, at least they are not forcing you to pay shipping... right.

That Millie and Tessie #1.. Those were great prices! Any chance you have a Showgirls in low grade your about to drop in the thread...

If you bring Steranko with you as back up, you will be fine.. he has a mean person_without_enough_empathy slap.

I have complained about CGC's QC many times and as someone in the Safety Systems industry my philosophy has changed over the years... While QC is a problem, it is not... the problem, it is a symptom of the problem. You do not have the same QC issues for years unless they are approved and accepted on the C-suite level or it is a management quality implementation problem in the people. You cannot have quality without accountability and you cannot have accountability without a written and taught standard to follow. Someone looked at the books in the video and approved them to be sent out, will they get some type of corrective action? maybe, does CGC even have a traceability system to know which QA did the final sign off or which QC originally passed it? Do they actually check all the books since the product they are selling is unique or do they have a lazy industry standard first/middle/last with additional spot checks when the heat is turned up? CGC does have competitors but not to the point that they have to actually preemptively correct their mistakes, this is a dangerous place to be in unless it is recognized. Video's like the above are usually excused under "everyone makes mistakes, were human not robots" but their job is to make sure those mistakes do not happen. If an employee isn't doing their job and that isn't being corrected until it gets to a breaking point it isn't really the faceless employee that this hurts, it is the company. No one knows that these books were passed by Stan the QC guy who had a late night, they will only know that CGC has yet again messed something up. The customer has waited multiples of months to receive their books back and now they will have to send them back to get fixed. Sure CGC will correct the labels, but it should not have happened in the first place. As a manager I can teach you Six Sigma, Red X, Scrum/Agile, TQM, TPS, Lean, or even Kaizen principles (or any other project management/quality systems in fashion) but the company has to actually use those standards and that costs time and money. Which is usually the break point for any production... do you focus on quality which is customer oriented or do you focus on profits which is production oriented, you cannot do both without making someone unhappy.

Here are some contrasting thoughts as I am a comic fan but the partner isn't (and never watched wandavision). As already stated by everyone this is a very Sam Rami movie and I absolutely enjoyed it, I am concerned a larger audience wont though. He has a style and this felt very much like an evil dead 2/Darkman movie from both a visual and tone aspect. Unfortunately the movie itself suffered slightly from pacing which ramps up, then comes to a stop during the fan service Illuminati scene, and again before the fight with the last Strange. I think the entire Illuminati scene was a test run to see what sticks and what will be accepted on the live action side of things in the future and just how "interchangeable" they can be with characters (which was broached with Cpt. America) when more of the Avengers era actors become to expensive for full movies. My partner on the other hand whom has seen all the movies but not the TV shows... had no idea why Wanda was the bad guy and didn't really care about what was going on due to it. It was a fun ride but it wasn't for someone who didn't already know what was going on.

Overall autographs from the table top industry are generally sold unauthenticated due to the volume and general value. For any "high dollar" items I have seen PSA used when their is contention, but it is pretty rare. Now that GenCon is back to in person there are always a couple at the show and in the charity auction. A couple years ago they would have been around $250, so an average AD&D manual I would assume be in the $350-400 range now. I don't believe the ones posted for 3k on ebay will ever sell for close to that amount. The example auction above (letter to ward) is more intimate and historically valuable and it only sold for $600. With that said, let me recommend an alternative! Find a copy of a one or two of your favorite books from any edition and pick the one with a white interior and artists that are still available (this will take awhile). Think of it like a project and when you have those nailed down get a personal commission done. Game art is so much cheaper than comic art you have the ability to splurge if you want, or keep it simple. Here is an example of one of mine, A full Pencil from Tommy Castillo and a quick sketch from David "Esbri" Molinas.

This was almost a decade ago now, so it isn't such a huge loss anymore and luckily commission prices were a lot more reasonable back then. I was very angry given the cost but the colorist did go out of his way to try and make things right, he is a real champ and I have commissioned him many times and would recommend him today. All in all this was just a flakey artist that took a commission and had didn't value the transaction, keep in mind blank covers were still relatively new. A lot of artists got away with what they couldn't today. I have a large number of sketch of covers and am happy with 90% of them, every artist has an off day, starts drawing before they are warmed up, or just doesn't have "it" that day. The good ones will take the extra time to get things right and the bad ones just dump what they have at the foot of the customer if its passable. Obviously most of the bad ones either change or slowly start to loose business when enough word gets out (social media really put a stop to a lot of this).

Gather around my children and let me take you back to a more simple time of 2014! Comic blanks were hitting shelves in full force and the Grimm Fairy Tales (Zenescope) cheese cake art was at its peak. Over the course of a couple conventions with the help of CGC I put together an artist, inker, and colorist for what was supposed to be an awesome jam book of the zenescope version of Robyn Hood. Most of the prep work was completed before sending my book off (including payments to all three) everyone had already received my layout rough and description, they had all worked together prior and seemed pretty enthusiastic. It could not have gone worse.... Ideally the artist would complete the pencils hand the book off to CGC at convention X, the inker would pick the book up and complete the inks then return the book to CGC at convention Y, the colorist would pick the book up and complete the project. I would then pick the book up in St. Louis with a witness (among other books) and send it for grading. obviously he artist immediately flaked out for a couple months and it took the inker to get things moving along as they were at the same convention. When I picked the book up in StL the colorist apologized profusely and took a good ten minutes for actually handing over the book... I paid for a 3/4 character with background and from examples and expectations provided I was expecting this: The complete monstrosity of garbage that I received was this: When I asked WTF happened, the colorist explained there wasn't much he could do with it and offered to refund his portion of the project (I instead had him color another piece) both the penciler (who is at tons of conventions) and inker ghosted me and would not return any messages. I did eventually "try" and speak to the penciler who claimed to have no memory of who I was, the project, or anything really and threatened to call security if I didn't leave his booth. Obviously I never commissioned him or participated in any sketch ops again, due to this. It was really kind of the wild west of sketch art back then and there were some other far more notable events (many done on the forums) that had longer reaching consequences; some lasting years. I still have this book and one day i'll set it on fire, but not today.

Doing some maintenance on my X-Men V2 Variant sets and noticed the following was input incorrectly X-Men #1-#275 (1991) Including Variants Cert: 1961251037 This Registry set has the "True Believers: X-Men #1 Blue" entered twice, the second time with a (2016) annotation. This book was issued on 6/17 and was not (re)printed before original distribution. I believe the book should have been added to the: X-Men (1991) Jim Lee which also includes all variants and reprints when it was request in July of last year. I have removed the duplicate entry from X-Men #1-275 (1991) set. I also added it to the X-Men (1991) Jim Lee set. Thank you

After not being able to hit any conventions last year due to work travel my collection didn't grow at all last year so my goals this year are pretty mundane. I would like to add 25 books to my X-Men V2 collection. I really need to sell off a short box of CGC golden age under copies that have been collecting dust. There are some various Defiant, Malibu, and Ultraverse variant books i've been looking to pick up. I'm sure this year i'll also add to my sketch and comic art collection but do not have anything anything attainable on the radar yet.