VintageComics

Is there a reason the news won't post a more balanced report of Coronavirus news? I'd encourage you to read and share this, which I got from someone else, to help balance the panic that the news seems to be instilling in people. Per the link of a weekly CDC report below, “CDC estimates that so far this season there have been at least 32 million flu illnesses, 310,000 hospitalizations and 18,000 deaths from flu.” Yet, no major panic over the data. Another thing, per the same report, in some cases the impact of the H1N1 is the highest it has been, even greater than the 2009 outbreak – still no major stories reported about this, no panic, why? https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/summary.html

It's frustrating to read all these comments on the internet (both here and social media) that think the 9.4 book sold cheap. This 9.4 copy sold for $95,000 more than the last 9.4 sold for. Think about that. The copies of AF #15 that are selling less than the peak of two years ago ARE STILL SELLING FOR MORE THAN THEY WERE 3 YEARS AGO. A LOT MORE. 2017 was an outlier because a few upgradeable copies set records and then some additional copies went for strong numbers based on those outlier numbers. I sold a 7.0 for $35K about 8 years ago. Now, 8 years later weak copies are still fetching $80K? And that's a complaint? People need to stop hyper focusing on what books are selling for month to month, week to week etc. You're losing all perspective, folks.

Did you miss the part in the video where at least twice the grader slowed down as soon as there was a page sticking to address it? I think I'm going to side with the company that has graded 5 Million comic books rather than a bunch of random comments on the internet.

Some of the best times I've ever had at a convention was when we got together and looked at high grade, GA and SA books with our bare hands. It was a room of seasoned collectors and nobody flinched at handling the books. I'd say it's a safe bet that the books in the same condition after our handling them as they were before .

A better way of saying it than 'casual; which makes it sound unprofessional (even though I know that's not what you meant) would be professionalism and being a professional is just a product of lots of experience. That's it.

This is SO true. I used to work for a Mercedes dealership as a technician and I was pretty good at it. One of my favorite jobs was to replace an AC Evaporator core in the 140 model (this was the flagship model sedan, with all the bells and whistles). The job book time said it took around 20 hours to do and it entailed gutting the entire interior of this flagship model car, right down to bare sheet metal on the interior. I'd pull out the front seats, dashboard, climate control, frame brace, carpeting, everything. It took me about 1.5 hours do gut that interior down to bare sheet metal and maybe 10 or 12 to put it back together. When customers saw their car gutted down to bare sheet metal, some would freak out, some would shake their heads in disbelief, many took pictures and all of them were terrified of how large the job was. I didn't care a bit. I'd done it so many times + and could almost do it with my eyes closed. My bosses trusted my ability to do the repair implicitly even if customers couldn't believe their eyes. In fact, most of the other techs didn't want the job so I usually got it because of my experience with it. So what appears intimidating or fearful to the average bystander is literally a non event to a professional. There's a lot of mystique in the way we think things that we don't know much about are done in any field but most of the time it isn't nearly as glamorous as we imagine and often it's NOTHING like we think it is...and yet everything remains fine.

I think most people know what we mean. I was just following the lead of others. Why is it that you are always so negative when I'm posting and yet never offer nothing substantial to a discussion? If you feel something is BS then offer a counter discussion.

Remaining books Amazing Spider-man #119 CGC 9.8 White - Asking $1200 (Spider-man and Hulk battle) Amazing Spider-man #194 CGC 9.8 OWW - Asking $1750 (1st Black Cat) Batman #251 CGC 9.4 OWW - Asking $1700 (Classic Neal Adams Joker cover) Beware #1 CGC 9.8 White - Asking $1100 (Tough book in grade) Eternals #1 CGC 9.8 White - Asking $1100 Incredible Hulk #122 CGC 9.8 OWW - Asking $1100 (Hulk and Thing battle) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2 CGC 9.8 White - Asking $1200 What If? #10 CGC 9.8 White - Asking $650 (1st Jane Foster Thor) X-men #101 CGC 9.8 White - Asking $3500 (1st app Origin Phoenix)

Thank you! Iron Man #50 CGC 9.6 and Invaders #1 CGC 9.8 have both SOLD!

CGC does have it's PR / perception problems and I've said this to them many times that they need someone to oversee their PR before things go public. It seems that they keep making the same mistakes over and over. I agree that slowing it down for the public video would probably have been a better move.

Pregraders count pages but they also grade the book. The entire book is inspected during the page count and a pregrade given so just a mechanical page count would be redundant.

What I find interesting (and what I posted on CGCs social media) is all the stuff that people missed in that video. For one, the grader probably sees more books in a year than everyone else involved in the discussion together sees in a lifetime. They're professionals. Anything a pro does will look dangerous or difficult to understand as a novice. Joe Walsh said it takes 20,000 hours of practice to make someone a pro. Can any novice perform like a pro? No matter what the field is, that answer is a hard no. If you look at the way the pages are dropped into the back half of the book, it's quite gentle, just quick. Comics are quite hardy. They're not meant to be handled on the thighs of virgins and in a sterile environment. Did all of you notice how the grader slowed down several times in the video when pages were stuck together in order to unstick the pages? Everyone seemed to be missing that little detail. That's the sign of a professional - little things that the average Joe doesn't even think about (or catch while watching the video). Gloves? As explained by RMA (and the Library of Congress) you do NOT want to use gloves. Everyone wants the graders to slow down to half speed but do you all want to wait twice as long to have your comics graded? There was no damage done to the book. People just like to complain about things and some don't listen no matter how wrong they are.

Perfect. So the paper shrank from the time the book was printed to the time it reached the newsstands. It likely continues to shrink for some time I would assume, depending on storage conditions. But how do you explain books that have all the edges matching perfectly from the SA and BA - and I know they are not trimmed because you can see the cutter blade score marks match across all the wraps of the book so unless a trimmer took the time to create those score marks (which would be a waste of time on most books) there must be an explanation for why some books have overhang and others don't. Yep. But they also have paper in varying size where on some the cover matches right up and on others the covers are longer than the pages, even though they were trimmed all the same initially. I don't want to flex here but at this point I've probably handled more raw comics and looked at them more closely than you. Yes, I know these things. Wait, you're saying that the paper changes size longitudinally but not laterally? How is that even possible? When wood shrinks or changes size it's affected in all directions, not just one. But you're saying paper only moves in one direction? At this point, we're also are not sure if the covers are changing size, the interior pages are changing size or both. Do you know for certain? I spoke to a paper restoration expert and they were actually going to do a thesis on this because they weren't sure either. This is called confirmation bias. I've watched you sell off your collection over the years and watched the discussions. The biggest one was the Cole Shave collection which became known as the Costanza discussion and you documented how many of your books were showing peeking pages. I also remember other discussions. But all this does is confirm the books were pressed poorly (to which CCS admitted). But there are also literally millions of comics out there that have various 'stigmata of pressing' that were never pressed and I am asking how that can be? I posted a picture of an AF #15 that half the people in this discussion would call pressed because the pages were sticking out and yet it wasn't pressed. So yes, pressing can and does change books and improper pressing can exaggerate 'stigmata of pressing' but that doesn't account for the millions of books that have 'stigmata of pressing' but were never pressed. Do you need me to go to my boxes and start posting pics of books that were never pressed that have stigmata of pressing? Wait, you used one example and extrapolated that I'm horrible at detecting pressing? Is that how scientists come to their conclusions? What is this, grade school? I probably handle 10,000's and possibly 100,000's of raw books every year. You don't think I know what a pressed book looks like? That's almost as ridiculous as saying that paper moves in one direction but not another (something that is physically near impossible) I looked at a small picture of the PC ASM #11 without my glasses and made a quick assumption. I'm sorry. I was wrong. Now lets really talk about it. There are pressers who press books out there who make the books look like they are unpressed. There are pressed books out there that don't look pressed. There are pressed books out there that DO look pressed. There are UNpressed books out there that DO look pressed. I think I can likely tell MOST of them all apart better than you but I can't guarantee I'll get every one right. So I'm not what your point was about this book except that you are trying to discredit me (yet again) rather than stick to the topic at hand. A mature person would have just said "actually, the book hasn't been pressed' and moved on. Oh look, more personal insults and no actual debate. Or, you could just go through random boxes of low grade (nearly guaranteed unpressed) books and find examples with pages in various degrees of shrinkage and admit that maybe you might be wrong. Cool, let's start looking at pictures from 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20 and 10 years ago and see what these books actually looked like rather than go from memory. Because any lawyer or police officer will tell you that your memory is the least reliable form of evidence. People never talk in person like they do on the internet. I wonder how you would feel if someone walked into a place of business of yours and started personally insulting you and trying to discredit you? Oh yeah, you wouldn't appreciate it. But thanks for doing that here.

It's possible but I have had discussions with other West Coast collectors as well and they seemed to feel the same way: That the earliest books off the presses generally ended up out West and had the least amount of defects. Whether it's right or not I don't know for sure but it's an interesting theory that hasn't been disproven yet to my knowledge.

Calling me anything is just immature and evading the actual discussion. And your bias is showing because you always respond in the same way to me. Sticking to the discussion, the facts and going back and forth on the examples each person is providing would be the mature way to do it. Maybe one day you'll be able to do that without shooting the messenger every time you need to type a post.

Gang, take 10% off listed prices.

Bob, you are just unable to have a conversation without personally insulting people. I'll respond tomorrow as it's been a long day travelling from Chicago but I'll just say that you are incapable of having an honest conversation when you're emotionally invested. You accuse me of the same things when I discuss natural / alternative health that you are guilty of in this conversation. Unbelievable.

Wait, so what you're saying is that those comics were 20 years newer back then. An FF #1 was only 38 years old when CGC started. A Hulk #181 was only 25 years old. For one, paper changes in 20 years. 2nd, you don't NOTICE things until you start looking for them. I NEVER cared about miswraps until I joined this chat forum and people were talking about them. I was blind to them as I just assumed it was a normal thing. Then when people started talking about them I started noticing them. I'd need to see pictures of comics from 20-30 and 40 years ago to document whether paper was changing size or not back then. But if paper DIDN'T change size back then, and all comics were trimmed on 3 sides then how did the 'Marvel overhang' ever come into existence? It's been a 'thing' for as long as I can remember. Did Marvel's not have overhang before CGC and pressing became a thing? Marvel Overhang. Mic drop.

Or is it possible that we are now seeing a lot more of these due to the relatively poorer quality of the pressing work now being performed by a certain pressing company in the post-Nelson era that shall remain nameless for obvious reasons? There's an easy way to test this. Just start going through any books that are printed on the type of newsprint that SA/BA/CA Marvels are printed on. Walk a show floor and you'll find 100,000's of books. Only look for low grade beaters that certainly haven't been pressed and you'll see the same phenomenon that you see on higher grade copies: Page sizes vary, whether a book has been pressed or not. It's that simple. You could literally find 1000 copies of the same book and depending on how it was stored the pages will vary in size from copy to copy. Would that be a sample size large enough that you could take as hard fact? Are you saying in a roundabout PC way that some people posting here are lacking integrity?

Revised

I'm not sure what you're asking me but newsprint ABSOLUTELY changes size over time. When comics are published, they are folded, stapled and then trimmed on the 3 open sides. Once trimmed, all wraps are roughly the exact same length on all 3 sides. If you get pages peeking out on the right, an overhang at the top or bottom, etc, it's because the interior pages start changing size at a different rate than the cover stock. This happens to every single book using SA / BA newsprint (roughly from the Atom Age and moving forward through the SA/BA and CA)

X-men #101 CGC 9.8 White (1st app Origin Phoenix) Asking $3500 (shipping included)

What If? #10 CGC 9.8 White (1st Jane Foster Thor) Asking $650

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2 CGC 9.8 White - Can't afford a #1. Get the 2nd best thing! Asking $1200 (shipping included) No scans at this time but it's pretty much a flawless book with no visible defects)

Iron Man #50 CGC 9.6 OWW (tough black picture frame) Asking $150