jaxcomics

So basically "This sounded like a great way to make money for everyone involved, so we made up some somewhat arbitrary rules to apply to this book to validate our grading it with a blue label. These rules may or may not have actually been in effect when we graded the book, but they sound good now and you can't prove otherwise so please move along".

Black Flag's Instagram page is still up for me, at least on desktop. All mention of the UF4 variant however is completely gone.

Those grades are such a slap in the face to all of the collectors and dealers that have submitted for years and know how rare 9.9 and 10s are (supposed to be).

I believe that either CGC is going to die on this hill and remain firm in their position, or they're going to reverse course, refund Black Flag for grading, and remove the books from the census. I would be absolutely floored if there's any kind of agreement in place that would make CGC culpable for "lost potential profits" on the part of Black Flag. This whole thing may be a big deal to Black Flag, but the amount of books graded (and any future business from Black Flag) is a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket compared to CGCs overall volume. That said...I'll concede that no one knows what kind of deal may have been hammered out. But I believe that Black Flag is far, far from the driver's seat in this, no matter what happens.

I doubt it. Let's leave out the fact that CGC has a multi-billion dollar company and its legal team behind it, and let's actually assume that there was some sort of tangible agreement upfront, and let's assume that it could actually be enforced... there's still the fact that any kind of threats or "demand" to CGC to make them whole in the situation would - even if they get paid - likely result in them being banned from using CGCs services at all in the future. Pretty sure that in itself would be a death sentence for Black Flag...if this entire situation doesn't do it for them.

The most disturbing part of this entire thing is that CGC is setting the precedent that you can take a book that has previously capped out at 9.8, modify it by adding a shiny layer, and then get a higher grade. That isn't conservation, that isn't restoration, that's straight-up modification of an original book. To allow that without denoting it in any way as a flaw and most importantly to allow it to improve the grade of the book itself - is mind-blowing. Where does that stop?

Agreed, I spent more time reading this thread today that I have all other threads on the forum in the past month.

Both are books that are obviously in demand; Avengers 8 is particularly hot right now obviously. Anyway if you were in the market for a 9.6 of either right now, you will be buying from a pool of 344 total census books for Hulk 181, or a pool of 15 on the census for the Avengers 8. That's the "supply" side of the equation and is just as important as demand. When either supply (there are very few copies of a 9.6 available) or demand (FOMO leading to people seeking high grade Kang book because of the movies) is way out of whack, you'll see extremes (as you noted) that may defy the rest of the market. You're also comparing 172 sales to 5 sales, so I'm not sure you could get much valid data to use in a comparison anyway.

I love MCS and regularly encourage people to use them, but no service is perfect in avoiding late paying/bad buyers. I'm still waiting on several payments from their Prime Auction. Obviously MCS gives 15 days and that's fine, but after a week I always consider it a toss-up as to whether the buyers will come through or not.

Yep, as the glut of hundreds of thousands of modern books/variants being graded continue to hit the market - along with all of those already out there - combined with a softer market overall due to the economy, speculators of those books are going to get slaughtered. It is what it is at this point, I can't possibly imagine demand even coming close to supply with all of the variant covers and infinite printings out there.

That's because those modern books are easy/fast to grade and are an absolute cash cow, so it's very much in the interest of the grading companies to keep that line moving as quickly as possible. People submitting 25+ copies of every variant cover imaginable on a daily basis are the real "glut", and that's a pyramid that's going to eventually topple over. How many copies of bronze/silver/gold books get encased in plastic doesn't change the overall number of those books; natural attrition (floods/fires/angry ex-wives) lowers that amount every year. The actual amount of people who will continue to collect vintage titles over the coming years and decades is something no one knows for sure - and something that's sure to wax and wane like everything else - but it seems likely that there's going to be about as much demand for 12 different variants of the #1 issue of some current random title as there is for the Adventurers #1 "Skeleton Cover" that American Comics suckered me into paying $50 for back in 1986, shiny plastic casing or no. Maybe even less.

Obviously the pictures are poor and the grading lazy/non-existent (one buyer referenced the grading being off). While they've been selling on Ebay for around 8 years and have positive feedback over that period, I completely agree that it's always odd when any seller suddenly goes from selling $1 books to listing nothing but keys. I suppose that they may very well just be unloading their collection at this point (for whatever reason) and continuing their pattern of being lazy on photos, but I would definitely insist on multiple scans/photos of an individual book from them before I even considered bidding. If it smells rotten, it often is.

I would imagine that they run into inexperienced consignors who think that all of their books are 9.2, when in reality none of them are. Being able to manually look at each submission would help to identify this and avoid potentially upset consignors who realize after their books are graded by MCS that many of the books aren't eligible for consignment in their actual grade. There's also the possibility of individuals wanting to consign huge amounts of a single book - more than MCS would probably want to take on unless it was a valuable key - and a manual review allows them to read any notes included by the potential consignor before finalizing things.

I'm sorry, did he just recommend investing in the Mona Lisa?

Yeah, I've never had to wait long for it to be listed as received, at least not in a couple of years. Hopefully yours just got stuck in a pile or something.