Sauce Dog

For those needing a summery of this thread over the last few pages without having to read any of the above posts:

This would make an ideal candidate for Conservation, as that route can reattach the cover to avoid the qualified married label (while also not having a purple restored label). An otherwise 1.0 - 1.8 book like this (once it has an interior) can easily be brought up to 3.5+ range with minor conservation.

So I guess this "leak" from before was bang on

I am....whelmed? Some neat visual stuff going on, but otherwise not much grabbing me at this moment (I think it's now the fact things being so connected to everything else MCU is feeling like negative to me) but I'm sure that can change as more info trickles out.

Today featured fairly small, but important, prepping work on the donor back cover. Before any mending and reattaching of the cover wrap can be done I needed to clean away any old dried glue and paper that have become attached to the inside spine of the donor back cover. I was able to keep the spine attached to this donor cover, which will make attaching it later easier and more secure. Using my X-Acto knife I carefully scraped away any crusty glue (and foreign paper), taking care to only scrape or lift away such build up and never slicing (as that could risk cutting the cover wrap I will be using). Scraping down the spine like this will help with attaching it the interior pages later, as it will allow the adhesive to bond directly with the wraps paper fibres and not just on some old glue (which might later crumble and compromise the repair). I will repeat this scraping process later on the interior of book as well (as there are some parts of the original wraps spine still attached).

JSA looking good. Though gonna give a big SIGH at the color grading trope. Yellow filter working overtime here - standard Hollywood short hand for "look, we're in a non-white country"

On the one hand, I cannot wait for them to reveal some amazing Dr.Fate photos/footage - DC pulling in it's GA heroes is something I am most excited for (and hopefully them recognizing how untapped that well of content is for them, especially with the JSA)... ...on the other hand, I am still missing two Dr.Fate covers from his original More Fun Comics run before I complete my goal - and I don't want to even guess how much I'll have to start paying/offering for those books once the hype train gets going (on the bright side, with prices going up on books it will shake a few loose from personal collections as the owners try to cash out. Might mean seeing more than 0-1 copies come to market each year)

It got 9.8 the same way this one did...through chaos, encapsulation damage, or shaken comic book syndrome after the fact.

Not the first time these 'original owner books' have come back with something odd. I have a golden age book that came back Qualified (Married Cover) after it was graded (by the person who bought the collection off the guy who bought em all off the racks originally, I bought it after that from him). Only appeal process is cracking it, double checking, and submitting for re-grading (after offering a sacrifice to the encapsulation gods, of course)

For anyone interested in learning a little more on the how-and-why's of the Rancor figure failing as hard as it did, there are some videos that cover it by Scott "Toy Guru" Neitlich (who did work on the Star Wars toy line, and many others). If you search his channel videos there are about three videos cover the issues behind the Rancor (during the funding and after the hard deadline passed) One of the (many) reasons fans were not into it from the onset was that it's a Black series scale 'vehicle', which have been some of the most unpopular things in recent history due to collectors wanting to stick to a certain scale (especially those have the best range of figures to collect)

Ended like the rest of the series felt; disjointed and with no real emotion. A solid single episode of Mandalorian could be cut from all this footage, with the rest discarded. The dialogue between Fett and Bane showed that there could have been potential, if only they introduced Bane earlier in the show to setup a proper antagonist (who would have perhaps served as a better point for Fett's flashbacks since they spoke of knowing each other to build up the tension between the two so we care about what happens, showing how their paths diverted and led Fett to trying to go straight - since everything else with his flashbacks didn't amount to much - would have been so nice to have the Tuskin's still alive and support Fett, making sense on how he can control an entire region now). I almost thought Bane was going to be in the backta tank at the end as a twist.

Of course it was a joke I'm surprised the studio didn't think twice about when deciding the release date - they walked right into this punchline! but seriously, I don't see anything coming out of this movie that looks even remotely encouraging as an exciting film experience (not just a new super hero movie) - most of these Sony properties feel like the potential MCU connections and cameos are doing all the heavy lifting in getting fans onboard with em.

I will also take this time to remind everyone of how little regard the creators of the trailers/film might for the audience at this point: Remember when they changed "echolocation" in the early footage to be "bat-radar" because the audience are clearly dummies

Which sounds like all your hopes and interest in this as a movie are all hinged on it being a Marvel comic book character and getting more Marvel cameos. At this point it feels that mediocre and outright bad movies are getting much more leeway from comic fans who will continue to support whatever movie gets released regardless of quality. Yes, we can be surprised that some things end up being good (Tom Hardy), but doesn't that speak to how low our expectations are for these films at this point Be honest, if this wasn't a comic book character and you only saw the trailer as just some new random vampire movie, would you find it compelling and have hope for it?

Release date of April 1st? Morbius, and this entire movie, is a joke CONFIRMED!

First notable work done on the book would be to address the old tape that was used to attach the loose front cover to the interior. It was clear this book spent a long time taped up, as evident by the yellow staining on the edge of the cover, however only one of the two pieces of tape looked to be from this original repair. The tape at the top front cover shows the typical characteristics of having been applied many, many years ago. The carrier has become hard and brittle, curled, with yellow discolouration, while the adhesive on the end holding it to the book had dried away, so I could simply pull it off the interior with no damage. The glue that covered the front art however was still firmly attached. The piece of tape near the bottom of the front cover looked relatively new by comparison. It was still fairly supple and malleable, and had no discolouration. The adhesive on this piece was much more active, but could still be peeled away from the interior with ease. To remove the tape from the actual cover without damaging the underlying art I applied Bestine, a commercially available solvent, using a cotton swab around the tape as well as on the inside front cover just below where the tape attached - allowing it to soak through the paper and work on the adhesive. I would then use a spatula to begin slowly lifting the tape away from the cover. When it comes to tools for doing restoration, I recommend opting for those that are plastic rather than metal as the latter can much more easily cause damage to the book when scraping (this also applies to when working with staples, as metal-on-metal will cause visible abrasions on the staple surface. Markings such as this can act as a clue when CGC is trying to determine if a book has been disassembled). This specific spatula was part of a basic clay sculpting set you can find at any hobby store. There are times you might have to use a metal spatula though, specifically when needing to remove difficult tape with a heated spatula (a heated metal tip helps reactivate the adhesive). While the solvent I used will 100% evaporate not long after application, I figured it better to err on the side of caution - so I opted to place some book deodorizing granules in with the cover to ensure even the slightest odor from the process be removed.

The first thing I did was begin with dry cleaning the donor back cover. While sourcing a donor comic took patience and time, the cleaning of it was one of the quickest and easiest jobs I've done to date. Since the Canadian editions lack any printed ads on the cover wrap we are left with a solid blank white page to work with. Yellow discolouration from age and foxing is present, but I will not be attempting to correct such defects (as they would require a wet bath to properly remove), I simply gave it a basic dry cleaning: First wiping it down with standard makeup cotton rounds, then since I would not have to worry about damaging ink I used a few large pieces of soft magic eraser (Mr Clean Magic Erasers are excellent. Make sure it has no scent and is fragrance-free) which works wonders on white areas of a book (these can still be used on color ink areas but require a much lighter and limited touch that I could utilize on these blank covers). Much of the dirt was accumulated around raised creases which I shall press out at a later date (and following the press I will do another round of dry cleaning to see if I can get some of the dirt that was inside some of these creases and could now be better cleaned with everything being flattened out). While this isn't the most exciting or dramatic before/after example, the large amount of removed dirt left behind on my supplies made it clear it was very beneficial.

Won't load for me as well on Safari, but works in Chrome, meaning this is an issue with SSL and the page loading mixed content.

For sure, that is all obvious and expected, but doesn't mean it has to be as bland as it was. It didn't feel like Luke was offering his own take on it, just aping on stuff we as an audience have heard a millions times before in the same way (and with no real depth or mystery since it was all basically "just use the force"). Grogu will clearly make his own path - as Disney would never risk having their merchandising cash cow stick around to be murdered by Kylo Ren later on after all of Luke's teaching goes south

So good - This new Mandalorian season is picking up You-know-who was basically the most perfect introduction to a 'new' character ever and finally makes it feel like the has some sort of antagonist. Visuals of this one seemed much more refined (comparing the outside desert shots in this ep with previous ones made me feel the lighting / atmosphere was much better done this time around) On the other side, anyone else think Luke is a poor boring teacher and perhaps the weakest part of the -script? Sure it's nice to see the character at that age doing anything, but I found it lacked any charm. One of the most fun things about the OT was hearing people shed new light on the force as they explain it to Luke, in little new interesting ways. Be it Obi Wan being very cryptic at first or Yoda with his riddle like pondering - but at a certain point all the dialog about just became 'use the force' (which was basically all of Lukes insights...just use it...no, use the force...just use the force...fooorrrrcccee) as well as 'balance'. I know the lore behind the force is now essentially common knowledge to all fans, but my body is yearning for some new take/perspective on it that gives us some new quotable insights.

Lol I came into this thread looking for a copy for myself...only to find, I already could have owned this book if I just bought it from myself I'm going to have to give my friend a right thrashing for missing that obvious restoration (who I was selling this book for. I was just posting his images and descriptions since he isn't an online guy and is across the country - so I didn't have it in hand and was trusting him to catch this sort of thing).

The only two golden age pulps I own, and hope to maybe one day complete the entire run from that year. His work has been getting noticed by many of the 20-somethings I know who are becoming interested in the pinups he did.