Sauce Dog

The biggest surprise from that trailer is the restraint they showed by NOT putting some sort of reference to Tobey Maguire in it (if the rumours are true) in order to try and get that Spider-Man cash money (though I fully understand that they might have not been allowed to market the movie with him in such an explicit way). otherwise...

I like to transfer my books straight from the press into a thermo pizza delivery bag. I mail that bag straight to CGC so all my books still arrive piping hot into the graders hands.

Yup, all this. The tight tape wound during manufacturing has to be played or else will stress. With other collectibles there are at least SOME conservation/preservation benefits that come with grading (even if it's a simple thing like including micro chamber paper in with a comic, or doing pre-grading work such as de-acification)...but nothing can be done for a sealed tape other than *gasp* maybe removing a price tag from the plastic wrap, oh my! Literal time bombs.

Polar bear attacks. American's have to hire a security detail to protect their packages coming into the country, but for us sending stuff out we just throw it downhill on the ice and it slides right out of the country cheap.

when you say 'international' I take it you mean overseas? Because a book going from Buffalo to Niagara Falls is certainly not in the same league (literally a 10 minute drive and you can see each city from the other on even a foggy day) and should not cost triple the cost of shipping the same item via UPS/USPS/FedEx (that includes tracked protections and insurance). It might be a good deal for such shipments to Europe and beyond, but for most Canadians it is an absolute rip off (and I'm certain sellers see less possible sales come from it, not more)

Easy; The Ebay global shipping program. So many sellers will just sign up for that since it's all the same to them (and not really look into it), except now that single raw comic that would otherwise cost $15-$25usd to ship to me in Canada now costs $100usd (or more). So I avoid all sellers who use that feature (as do many other Canadians)

Yikes, looks to me wrinkles from using too much heat.

I really hope this isn't a mistake as I'm about to send a few old slabs in for reholdering and will totally add another half dozen books to the pile if I can spruce em up with my favourite label.

You might also be interested in the post I made on instagram about an early practice project, which involved repairing a split cover: https://www.instagram.com/p/CZpkuN_uAuH/

The Sekishu (used for the spine hinge) I was able to source from a local art store, however it can just as easily be found at http://talasonline.com which is where I source my other mending tissue (as they carry a wide range of weights and colouring)

Once the adhesive was done drying (48 hours) I have nothing left to do but show off the final product. It is certainly still low grade, but a vast improvement that can now be handled without risk of further damage. The book was originally a grade condition of POOR / INCOMPLETE (0.5) but now is complete and easily looks like it would fall in the GOOD condition range (1.8 - 2.5). As a final test I am going to submit the book to CGC and see how they grade & label the work done on the book. Note that I did not try to hide any of the conservation work done on the book, this was all about bettering the structural integrity of it - as such you can see the tear seals to the inside front cover. The spine hinges are only visible if you fold open the covers fully, but even then they are easy to miss if you are flipping through the book. The main obvious tell of there being repair work (other than the tear seals on the inside front cover) is the spine itself, as since the donor back cover came from a different Canadian annual I had to cut away that comics title from it (but I opted to leave the word ANNUAL on it). When compared side by side to an original Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 you would notice that the world 'Annual' should be slightly lower down - aligned with Mysterio's arm rather than above it. A minor difference, but one that I feel works still for such a low grade book as leaving the donor spine mostly intact maximizes the strength of the repair (yes, I could have cut away the word annual and removed the entire middle of the spine wrap to make it seem like it originally was the correct spine, but I'm not trying to hide anything at this point and feel this looks better). This will most certainly result in the book being flagged by CGC as 'Back cover married'. I'm pleased with how the repairs turned out, specifically the strength of the mending (I can hold the book up by a cover and let it dangle without anything giving out), especially considering that this was my first attempt at such a big repair on an actual key book - up until this point most books were only a few dollars at most in value. I am looking forward to seeing how it grades.

The final, and biggest, step for this entire project was the repair and reattaching of the cover wrap to the interior spine. The book as it was no longer had any of the original wrap that covered the spine (as such it was missing the 25 cent price, title, and Marvel Comics Group label that ran down the spine) and even had some spine damage to it, so care had to be made to ensure the interior spine was strong enough to ensure it could hold the new wrap. This requires creating a support that will attach to the interior spine that includes two extensions/hinges - on which the front and back covers can be attached to (rather than mending the entire wrap together and then attaching the wrap directly to the interior spine. This method allows for the covers to be more securely attached). This is a traditional book repair technique you would find used to repair paperback novels, but as we can see is also applicable to square bound comics. I have already cleaned the old glue & paper off the spine (see my previous journal entry), so to begin I cut out a rough cut of repair tissue (Japanese natural Sekishu). This rough cut of paper for the text-spine liner is placed over the spine and allows to me see how much of an overhang I need on the front and back (which will act as a support hinge that I can attach the covers to). Typically, a rough cut means the material is cut a bit larger than I need and will trim it after it is attached, but in this case I opted to cut it down before attaching since I didn't want this hinge to span the entire length of the book from top to bottom. I clamped the book upright (between two glass sheets) and applied paste to the interior spine. I then placed the repair tissue on and let it dry. I then removed it from the clamp and attached the donor back cover (as well as the spine fold) by placing waste paper under the extension / hinge on the back (to prevent me from getting adhesive on the interior page) and applied paste. I remove the waste paper, and then immediately replace it with a strip of waxed paper below it before lining up the back cover using my fingers at the corners. Once aligned I simply pressed down so the cover adhere to the hinge. I will then open the back cover to see how the hinge looks and smooth out any wrinkles with my bone folder (as well as dabbing away any excess paste that might have squeezed out along the edge). Once it looks good I close the book, leaving the waxed paper strip in for now while it dries. Once the back cover is dried partially I apply paste along the spine tissue and fold over the spine wrap. Let dry completely. Once the back cover was secured I would repeat the base steps to attach the front cover to its hinge (place paper under hinge, apply paste, replace paper with wax paper, align and press on cover, let dry). Once all repairs were in place I would let it dry for a full 48 hours while under a light cold press (sandwiched between two glass sheets with a weight on top)

I do think this is cool, but it annoys me that they will go out of their way to change the label to designate this a PAY COPY but won't do the same to designate a CHECKING COPY (which they just label as being a FILE COPY, even though it says checking copy on the cover and clearly is marked on all the pages as such and had a totally different use than typical file copies).

0 rated buyer in Canada? There's only like...maybe...three of those...in all of Canada! We don't take kind to those who ain't kind, so let us know if he flakes on you, I'll walk down the street and give him a good punch in the moosh.

yeah, not much meat there other than "NOSTALGIA"! The red flag of any new trend is when people are talking about it being an 'alternative investment' well before it's actually been a graded collectible before the 'spike'. While VHS, like comics, have always been traded and collected they never had the grading (or any real interest it seemed from collectors for that to exist) but now with all these INVESTMENT opportunities it feels these new VHS graders are trying to create a market & demand instantly that took decades with comic grading to happen organically. Until I see a large amount of graded VHS selling naturally on common venues like Ebay for a variety of prices (not just a single Mario VHS for record prices, with no other sales or availability) I can't take it as anything other than at best a cash grab (and a scam at worst. Red flag when the new grading company is called INVESTMENT Grading Services, feels like internet meme stock all over again)

Yeah the look of them is nice, especially some of the special sets that slab an entire trilogy side by side, but that price - I honestly don't see it being an organic sale if it ever does sell (have seen a few of the same people buying them from each other, me thinks to leave a trail of 'sold' records) however if display is what people are after you can literally have a custom acrylic case made just like these for fairly cheap (for example near me we have Canadian Acrylic Display who I reached out to awhile ago about custom cases for some other collectibles and it seemed very easy - they even said they can adjust any of their cases to my spec if I wanted to work with an existing case: https://www.canadianacrylicdisplay.com/en/product/display-case-cassette-vhs-movie - I love these guys as you can just buy the cases so you can open them up again yourself, or you can get them to grade whatever it is as well. For VHS you can buy the case for $34 Canadian, or have them grade and seal it for $73 Canadian which is a quarter of the price the other VHS grading company charges)

While it does look good, they are going to have to work ten times as hard to top the best movie Elvis.

At least $198 USD...cause that's how much it costs to have a single VHS graded.

One of the things that helped fuel laserdisc collecting is those were often the versions that contain 'lost' footage or alternate endings that could not fit on the standard VHS releases at the time (or even on some DVDs of the era, which were more interested in having crazy flashing animated menus rather than offering a trove of extras besides trailers and commentary), or were not hacked to death via pan-and-scan editing. Prices for those I see being very stable and organic over the last few decades, whereas VHS is something that is only spiking due to a renaissance of 80s/90s nostalgia and makes it hard to gauge legit interest in who wants to pay these big prices; the only VHS I honestly see as being desirable are those for movies whose rights became muddled and fractured (perhaps from a defunct studio) resulting in them only ever getting a VHS release (no DVD or even streams available), heck there are some Muppet films that were only ever released this way.

Takashi Yamazaki directing, hell yeah I can see this. He is by no means Hideaki Anno (both in style and name recognition) but has shown he can work well with very small budgets and whatever -script he is given (regardless of how nonsensical it is). First movie I saw of his was his very early work Returner (2002), which was super low budget but managed to come off like a decent mid-90s feeling Terminator action movie (no real original ideas though, but that wasn't his doing - he at least made seeing large Transformers on screen look cool and knew how to do a gunfight even though he was very much new to it all).

Of all the graded collectibles out there, graded VHS is the one that makes my eyes roll. Demand seems 100% artificial, and nothing but a pump and dump scheme through and through based on the people I've seen involved in it (and who is selling to who). Especially odd once you realize that there is no way to confirm a tape hasn't been demagnetized, suffering rot (a big issue with some game collecting, since you cannot tell unless you crack it open, more of a problem on older VHS due to the materials used), or what level of damage the tape is in (tapes can suffer damage if not played due to how tightly they were wound during manufacturing). I can find nothing about grading tapes that offer them any sort of preservation (unlike paper collectibles or most toys), and only see the value of them making for a nice display piece (as I do like the 'Oscar-like' display stands they use)

Yup this is what I mean, I just add items to my cart but do not complete the checkout (I also keep a screen shot each month of the cart just to notice if anything dropped out and I need to find a new copy). Since most of the smaller stuff I'm adding are low grade books to use as reader copies they don't often get bought and removed from the cart - I only pull the trigger once I have a big book I REALLY want and makes the shipping process worthwhile.

The moment I saw this come up for sale I pounced (I often take months to slowly add single issues to my cart on mycomicshop, and only finally checking out once a decent graded book to comes up in order to make shipping it all together worthwhile for me here in Canada). I sold most of my GA good girl covers (with only a single Planet Comics remaining in my collection now) so felt I needed to fill the gap in my PC with an epic classic cover. Very happy to have this cover without tears or other defects that blemish the art.

As long as Matt Baker is on that mountain I'm fine with whoever else you want to add to fill it up.

I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this but...ah...Prowl has been pretty much an evil d-bag for decades now. Pretty much the go-to when anyone wants an example of a fascist bot. At this point Barricade is a truer to canon Prowl than the G1 version is and I might question a "good" Prowl