namisgr

More comics I bought off the rack.  You may be wondering why #1 received the grade that it did - so did I when I got it back in 2007:

On 1/23/2024 at 10:56 PM, comic_memories said:

 

This book is so tough to find in nice shape.  Yours is in very nice shape, indeed!

On 1/22/2024 at 4:26 PM, ADAMANTIUM said:

It is odd that Marvel Feature #1 &# 2 are 25 cents but not #3

The first two issues are squarebound giants.

The biggest variable in weight would probably be the inner wells themselves.  From one to another I'd expect there to be quite a bit of variation in the weight owing to variations in manufacturing.  The inner wells aren't exactly precision manufactured items, after all.  The comics themselves also have wobble in their dimensions, and so in their weights, too.

Embedding an RFID microchip in the inner well, on the other hand, might be a very good way of assigning a unique identifier to each book via the sealed inner well.  They have been designed quite thin, for instance fitting inside the cards of a deck.

On 1/17/2024 at 7:16 PM, Sam T said:

Except this isn't the issue. The real issue isn't about CGC employees detecting resealed slabs. The real issue is that if folks can get them buy CGC employees then they can definitely get them by most collectors.

While that maybe so, it's based on the assumption that during the reholdering process these tampered slabs were carefully and thoroughly examined.

On 1/17/2024 at 6:32 PM, Sam T said:

Saying that collectors should be able to spot fakes while CGC's own employees couldn't do it is just not plausible. 

First off, the chemist posting on YouTube as Immaculate Comics who demonstrated the opening of outer cases using a heat gun and then resealing the posts and the open edge with a thin stream of xylenes stated that the method he used left behind traces that were subtle but still detectable.  While he speculated that modification of his techniques could make the process undetectable, he has not yet shown that it is.

Secondly, the current scandal involves CGC staff engaged in reholdering.  It's entirely possible that the outer casing only received a cursory check for tampering, or perhaps no check at all saving for the confirmation that all the posts were still closed and there was no major damage to the cases.  Once again, now that the company has been alerted to possible tampering of two of the corners, and those of us in the collecting community aware of the scandal have as well, it would be premature to rule out that meticulous inspection of the slab corners can detect the tampering now that the process is well known and at least partially understood.

I'll believe the sky is falling when I see it falling.  But it isn't quite yet from my perspective.

On 1/17/2024 at 6:32 PM, Sam T said:

The only new piece of information that Matt Nelson shared in that interview was confirmation that it was not an inside job and that no CGC employees were implicated. He confirmed that the real issue was the security of the slabs and that someone was able to get swapped books by CGC's own employees...that's the ball game folks 🤣🤣🤣

Saying that collectors should be able to spot fakes while CGC's own employees couldn't do it is just not plausible. 

That was the same circumstance initially when the Ewert microtrimming scandal broke.  Previously, trimmed comics were getting by CGC's restoration check and given inappropriate blue labels.  But the company became knowledgeable about detecting the trimming from the experience.  There's neither reason nor information at the present time to rule out that CGC going forward will be able to detect damage to the outer cases that are opened for swapping inner wells and then the posts resealed.

On 1/15/2024 at 9:04 PM, WestcoastDAVEngers said:

Hey all, so I needed to keep this under wraps until it happened, but this interview took place today, hopefully it helps answer some of the questions we've all had. Matt did a good job answering what he could

 

 

Thanks for getting the CGC President to answer questions and posting your interview.  Did Matt ever address whether CGC can detect cases that have been opened (so that inner wells may be switched in and out) and resealed?  If so, did CGC agree to share their detection method with the collecting and dealer communities, so that tampered comics that were not reholdered can be identified?  And if not, then how can CGC or anyone else, for that matter, be confident that the fraud is confined just to the fewer than 350 suspects on CGCs current list?

On 1/16/2024 at 11:33 AM, Sam T said:

I'm sorry but this a pretty unreasonable thing to say. The folks at CGC doing reholdering crack more slabs than anyone else in the world and they were fooled. It's just not reasonable to pretend that a comic buyer could spot something that CGC's own professionals could not spot. And the idea that we still don't know what happened is just not true. There were basically two possible problems we could be seeing:

Now that Matt Nelson has been interviewed on the detection of tampered cases, perhaps this is not so unreasonable after all.

On 1/16/2024 at 12:17 PM, Dr. Balls said:

Me either, it must not have been down very long.

When I first tried to log on this morning and finally got the home forum page to load, the newest post in the listed threads was 6 hours old.  It was a few more hours after that before I could sign in.