paqart

If open corners aren't normal, that is a different story. It sounded to me like you and others were saying they were normal. This is because (I guess) I was conflating people saying that warped labels, etc were normal for "everything you found is normal." No one seemed surprised by the open corner, possibly because it is hard to see, though I thought the slip of paper under the corner illustrated the issue well (and now know better). That helped create the illusion that the comments were all-inclusive. I'm still going to be wary of these online, but if I see them in person and can handle them to look for this kind of thing, that I can live with.

That is true. I am fairly sure I would have immediately thought "damaged holder" not "tampered holder, swapped comic." Thanks to this thread, I was hyper alert to any differences between this holder and the ones in my collection, which are all either new, undamaged and at the bottom of my pile, or from another company. The real issues though, were apparent moisture damage that disagreed with the grade on the label. An "8.0 off-white" shouldn't be warped from top to bottom, with pages near the center top fatter (due to moisuture) than the sides of the pages. Also, these pages are visibly yellow on the edges, not white. Maybe they were white inside, but the yellowed edges aren't a good sign.

These don't bother me. What bugs me is the open corner. As I wrote, the comic could have easily been removed. I was tempted to do it, but changed my mind after reading your warning. I don't have it any more because I sent it in, so I'll send a drawing of what was going on. It was easy to show if I was holding it in my hands, but not when lying on a table. EDIT: I must have gotten so used to centimeters living in Europe for over a decade that I forgot what inches looked like. I just looked at a measuring tape and see that the gap labeled "1/4"" in the drawing is closer to a full inch.

I just realized why you weren't convinced about the corner. It didn't occur to me there was another way to slide the paper in as I did, but you guys are oviously on top of these things. I slid it through the open corner. You guys were probably thinking I slid it through the normally open sides. It didn't occur to me to try that, and I didn't know there was such a thing as a slab with open sides. However, it went through the corner. The only reason I used a thin strip like that is that happened to be what was sitting on a table nearby. I could have put a full sheet of typing paper in there if I'd felt like it.

No. Closest was when CGC damaged a comic and offered to reholder for free. I figured it wasn't worth it, so I didn't send it in. In that case, the holder was fine, but the comic's cover was detached. I wrote it off as a dead loss.

It's hard to read through some of your typos, but I get the gist. You have convinced me it is a "popped" older slab. Meaning, the exterior thin label at the top is normal, the wavy inner label is normal, as is the pale gray color of the grade. You have also somewhat convinced me that an open corner is normal. What you have also convinced me of is that because these are apparently normal, there is no way I want to be buying these from dealers who agree with you about this. By "this", I mean the open corner and any related damage. That would mean I could expect to run into more slabs like this, where the CGC grade may or may not bear a close relationship to the comic inside. This one for instance, clearly had moisture damage that likely postdated the grade, possibly due to the open corner. I'd rather just buy what looks good to me, but I can't tell what that is if I can't open the book. And this gets back to the holder tampering that started this thread. Admittedly, that's what I thought I had in my hands when I unpacked the CMA 51 because the comic is not an off-white 8.0 with moisture damage and yellow pages, but the idea of an untrustworthy CGC grade is related. Frankly, I find the apparent normality of open corners much more worrying than Zaneglor, because Zaneglor is more predictable and likely smaller scale.

I'm sorry I didn't slide it up farther then. It seemed to me this was good enough to be a proof of concept. After all, if the corner is detached (it is) and it isn't sealed on the edges, then it can be lifted all the way to the corners. But that's fine, because you can't see it. I could feel a little flex about halfway up, which would have risked cracking if I'd gone further, though the plastic was separated up to the corners. It's just that the gap was widest at the bottom, and wide enough at the middles to slide the mylar out with a bit of care. In any event, the opinion that counts here is mine when it comes to my buying decisions, and I'm not buying more slabs after this. Ironically, if not for the comments on this board, I would have been happy to buy more, and assumed this one experience was an aberration. Instead, you and others have convinced me that this kind of thing is not only common, but dealers who sell these don't think it is a big deal. That is what has decided me. If I had known it to begin with, I never would have started buying slabs in the first place. So, I'm still in the market for a CMA 51 in VF+, raw only.

It's tough to show without holding it open, but when I held it from the top, the bottom was hanging open. Also, the comic was sliding all over inside. When it arrived, part of the inner mylar seemed to cross over into the label area. When it's lying flat, the top comes down thanks to gravity, but since it was broken, I thought people who are used to seeing these thing (I'm not) would know what to look for. The fact that none of the commenters can tell that it's popped tells me that this is a form of broken corner that you haven't trained yourself to see. I was very tempted to slide the comic out, which absolutely could have been done with the gap involved, but thanks to your earlier admonition about not making it any worse, I didn't. Also, it's pretty clear the comic had significant moisture damage. Whether that is because of the broken corner or it's a different comic doesn't matter to me, it isn't a CGC 8.0 now, nor was it when it was shipped. This was it for me, I'm avoiding slabs (not just CGC) from now on, particularly GA. If I find something I want and it happens to be in a slab, it's coming out and staying out. Also, I am not trusting the grade. As far as I'm concerned, I'm back to the old days of haggling about the grade, except slabbed comics get an automatic deduction because the interior can't be inspected.

Since it opens almost 1/4", I have no problem beliieving I could slide the book out. However, I got a refund, so I didn't want to do something like that. In any event, if this is normal, then to hell with slabs. My opinion, this was open enough that a) I couldn't trust the comic in the slab was the comic on the label, and b) even if it was, the damaged slab allowed moisture damage, meaning the comic inside was no longer a legit 8.0. Either way, the slab is meaningless or worse, because it makes it difficult to inspect the comic and allows damage or tampering. Actually, I have to thank you gents for your remarks, because they've made me much more sour on the idea of buying slabs than I was this morning when I shipped it back to the seller.

Not a chance. This was the best packing job I've ever seen. And if you think it looks fine, maybe you should stop buying pre-opened slabs. I have over 100, and every one of them is sealed tight. This one could lose the comic if picked up by the top two corners.

No I'm not, but thanks for trying to lend a hand.

I see. I've never seen a case like this before. I took my better shots just now, here they are. You can see that it would be easy to slip the comic out. At least, I think you can see it in the photo where the strip of paper is slipped in from the corner.

I'm going to use my good camera to get a picture of this. It's basically a microscope. It should be able to do it. When I picked up the slab out of the box, the whole corner opened by about a quarter inch. At rest, it looks like this.

The corner is separated.

The case is literally open on the bottom left corner. The entire comic can be slipped out.

I think I just bought a comic with a tampered holder, possibly with a switched comic inside. I don't think it is related to the ZaneGlor incident, but I am posting here as an example of holder tampering. The case has obviously been opened and the label looks screwy. Here are some (bad) photos. I'll take better ones later. The registration number matches, but there isn't a photo, so that doesn't tell me anything.

My question btw, applies to any set of equal value comics. I was thinking of it primarily in the context of modern newsstand edition comics. I have about 1,500 of those, most published in the 2001-2013 time frame. The values I see attached to them are quite high in some cases, and I find myself thinking I'd rather have the value in a GA or SA comic.

CMA isn't restored. I say "apparent" because it isn't graded, so it's what it looks like to me. In the CGC grading contests btw, I consistently grade Golden Age comics about .5 to 1.0 lower than CGC. This CMA is the nicest looking GA comic I've ever owned, condition-wise, and that includes GA comics I bought in the 1970's, when they weren't nearly as old as they are today. The cover even still has some gloss.

The Flash Gordons are a lot better than the Fawcett material. I assume he got better later, just as other artists did. For instance, Carl Barks is my favorite comic book artist, but I have a hard time getting excited about his first comic, Four Color 9, because he hadn't developed his style yet. I feel the same about early Kirby, but they often have Schaffenberger covers to make up for his inexperience in the first couple of years.

Here's my emoji: I don't know if it's good or bad, which means it's probably bad. A lightning bolt without the cloud and rain would probably be good. This, I think, means "whoops" big time. When grading previous contests, I almost always graded everything one point less than the actual grade. For that reason, I went with my high estimates this time. And now I'm remembering that grading on moderns tends to be stricter than for the GA material we've been grading until now.

I've always liked MP1 but recently discovered the Captain Marvel family of comics and have been targeting them. For what they are, they are seriously underpriced. As an added bonus, I recently realized that C.C. Beck is one of the best GA artists, though his contemporary at Fawcett, Mac Raboy, gets all the attention. My opinion, Raboy isn't even that good, let alone brilliant, but his covers suck up all the collector dollars, leaving the Becks very affordable.

I was looking at the wrong grade for the CMA price. In 8.5 it's about $400, but more like $2k in 9.0. So just pretend it's an 8.5 for this example.

I have an LCS whose owner seems to prefer silver age Marvels to anything else, regardless of value. That is, if value is equal, he seems more willing to buy SA Marvel than anything else. I was just thinking about this in the context of my collection and wondered which of the following comics, of approximately equal value, are most appealing: CGC 9.6 X-Men 266 CGC 9.4 Hulk (2008) #1 newsstand edition CGC 8.5 Marvel Premiere #1 Raw (app. CGC 9.4) Captain Marvel Adventures #30 I'd put them in reverse chronological order for preference, making the CMA 30 the most appealing, followed by the MP 1, then X-Men 266, and last, the Hulk. And yet, the Hulk is easily the rarest of the group, and all are worth in the $350-$500 range.

An example of the difference between Raboy and Beck, with two similar covers. The biggest difference to me, and a typical difference between Raboy and Beck, is that Raboy does not integrate his figures with the perspective of the scene, but Beck does. This is typical of artists don't understand perspective well enough to make the best use of their photo reference. It is also typical of artists who use photo reference of models in their studio, or even drawings of models in a studio. This trait is most easily spotted when the artist uses three-point perspective, characterized by an overhead view looking down, as in both of these covers. In the Beck cover, though the effect is subtle, Captain Marvel is clearly oriented so that his feet are closest to the "camera" and his left fist is furthest from the camera. In the Raboy cover, every part of Captain Marvel jr.'s body is equidistant from the virtual lens, as if he were a specimen on a glass slide under a microscope. Every cover I've ever seen by Raboy and Beck are like these: the Raboy's feature characters that appear to be mounted on glass slides parallel to the camera's viewing plane, and Beck's have characters that are integrated with the perspective of their environment. This is not a small thing, because it highlights the lack of a fundamental art skill in Raboy's case, and the presence of it in Beck's. This particular metric is one of the easiest ways to spot artists who never fully understood how to draw in perspective. The second issue, less easy to spot in these covers, is the lighting. While it is possible to have multiple light sources cast shadows from different directions, it is unusual to see that in a daylight landscape, like in these covers. The little rocket held by Captain Marvel Jr. has a highlight indicating a small light source above and to the right of Captain Marvel Jr. The battleship below him has shadows indicating a large light source (the sun) above and to the left of Captain Marvel Jr. The lighting on Captain Marvel Jr. indicates a broad light source roughly centered on his figure and slightly above his head. This type of mistake is common among comic book artists, but Beck never does it. In the Whiz cover by Beck, the shadows on Captain Marvel are consistent with the cast shadows on the island below. A secondary related point is that the density of shadows on the Whiz covers are consistent, but they are inconsistent in the Captain Marvel Jr. cover. The battleship has solid filled blacks, Captain Marvel Jr.'s body has fine soft edges leading to narrow solid blacks, and the rocket has nothing but soft feathered shading. There are artists who use photo reference well, capably integrating characters and environments, like David Mazzuchelli. Others, like Raboy, Starlin, Sinkevitch, and Alex Ross, are much less successful. The reason it is easiest to see this with three point perspective is that a bird's eye view is more difficult to simulate by photographing a model than a more conventional perspective. Most artists don't have a way to physically get above their model to make such an image. This is irrelevant to artists like Beck (or Gil Kane, Romita Sr and Jr, Johnny Craig, Jack Davis, etc) because they understand both perspective and structure. And that leads us to structure. Beck has mastered this, but Raboy clearly hasn't. An easy way to illustrate this is to imagine the difference between a circle and a sphere. Lazy artists, and those who don't know the difference, or artists in a rush, will use a circle template or a compass to represent a sphere. This is wrong for a reason that should be readily apparent. A circle is a cross-section of a sphere, but cannot represent a sphere accurately because a sphere bulges equally in all directions from its center. Thanks to perspective, this means that the circular cross section is distorted at the center, creating a subtle bulge. C.C. Beck is aware of this, as is evident in the way he draws his characters. Despite their simple outlines, he always takes into account the volume of the structures he draws. Raboy (and most other artists, even those that understand perspective well) don't do this. For that reason, Beck's figures appear more fully rounded than Raboy's, which are flat in comparison. This is also visible in the way each artist draws rounded objects in perspective. Beck's drawing of twisted train tracks, for instance, beautifully retains the volume of the curved metal rails as they twist around each other. I have a hard time believing Raboy could have drawn this as well unless he had a sample of twisted tracks to draw. This is the reason perspective is so important to comic book artists. Without that knowledge, you become reliant on the exact camera angles and state of an object's structure as seen in photo reference. If you understand structure and perspective, you can invent things, such as the twisted train tracks. Next, we come to the compositions. Here, Beck's advantage over Raboy is that he exhibits considerably more variety than Raboy, he cycles about three or four basic compositions, many of which are so similar they could be mistaken for each other, as in Master Comics 18 and 34. Look at the difference between Beck's covers and notice how he changes camera angle as needed, and how in each case, the subject in front of the camera is doing something more interesting than anything found in a Raboy cover. Last, another issue related to lighting. In photography, it takes considerable knowledge and skill to light a subject favorably. It takes almost no skill to light a subject so that his or her image is visible to the camera. The latter type of image is often described dismissively by professional photographers as a "snap shot". Meaning, no effort went into crafting the image. The lighting in Raboy's covers resembles snapshots more than professional photographs, which is what Beck's work looks like. This is particularly evident in the cover of Master Comics 45, where Raboy's carefully drawn shadows mar the face of Captain Marvel Jr. Beck never does anything like this, but Raboy does it fairly often, though rarely as obviously as in this particular cover. When I worked for Sony Pictures as an art director, I let an artist go (a very highly paid artist) because he made the kinds of mistakes Raboy makes in every drawing. In his place, I hired Dan Spiegle who was much better. It is possible to make excellent covers and interior art regardless of drawing errors. Jack Kirby is an exceptional example of this, as is Matt Baker, both of whom capitalized on their strengths (action and GGA, respectively), to deflect attention from their weaknesses (Kirby's frequent use of multiple perspectives in the same frame, Baker's shortcomings in anatomical knowledge and perspective). In the end, not only do I prefer Beck to Raboy, I prefer almost any artist to Raboy because the exact suite of problems found in Raboy's art represent all of the qualities that make an artist a poor choice for sequential art. It doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't work in the industry, nor that they can't be successful, but they go into it with serious handicaps. Their saving grace, as with Raboy, is often their inking style combined with a static minimum standard of artistic fidelity met by slavish use of photo reference to maintain carrect proportions in all characters. The good news for me is that Raboy's popularity make Beck's work that much more affordable to me.

That CMA 18 is fantastic. It's on my want list. Same for number 132. The thing about Beck is that he is very capable of creating a compelling cover. Carl Barks is more of a "cartoonist" because he focuses on the story to the exclusion of all else. His covers are sometimes excellent, like FC 199 (my favorite), but usually amount to well-drawn gags. I think Beck is better than Barks at cover illustration, though Barks is, in my opinion, the best comic creator to have ever worked in the medium. Raboy, I class with any number of of temporarily hot artists, whose work was different from others of their period for a little while, but who didn't add much to the medium, like Gray Morrow or Joe Quesada.