COI

The market played itself when it decided that paying an average of 5x more for a 9.8 over a 9.6 was reasonable; now that's just shifting to 9.9/9.8. If 9.9 is the new 9.8, most 9.8 holders will be too busy playing the 9.9 resub lottery to complain, and when that 1 in 10 lands for big bucks, all will be forgiven. If you don't like it, stop collecting labels.

Chiming in again, against my better judgment. Debating something that happened between two people, based almost entirely on conjecture and personal biases, misses the point entirely. If, on one side, you think the deceased is the victim here because he made a mistake that has been blown out of proportion, then I don't see how you can't apply that same logic to the woman who made the accusations and say that she made a mistake that was also blown out of proportion, because of the way she chose to handle this issue she had with him. If, on the other side, you think Piskor's actions were wrong and that it's important that she not be blamed for coming forward, it's reasonable to see that there is no proportionality in outcomes here. We don't give out death sentences for being a "creep". Nothing resembling justice was done here, and I would guess that, far from helping her heal whatever wounds she might've had, the woman involved in this has now been further damaged by the outcome as she will undoubtedly be targeted by the backlash mob, in addition to the shock of suicide and the contents of his suicide note. . Where do these positions intersect? The internet mob escalation made everything in this situation infinitely worse. I get that it's hard to miss an opportunity to look for a single target for your moral outrage - the perpetrator - or a clear victim to sympathize with - the victim - because it's easier and more satisfying than trying to tackle the much more complicated problem that this scenario, and the rest of us by extension, are nested in. But this kind of discourse just makes things worse.

Terrible situation, ugly thread. We've had exponential growth in technology, but we have not grown INTO the technology and we seem to have no chance of catching up. What's worse is that the nature of social media appears to be projecting, exploiting and amplifying our worst traits. Not individually, but in sum. The most extreme, maladjusted and misinformed voices get to dictate the terms of the discourse. We've equipped everyone with the tools to express themselves, but not the skills to evaluate the value of those expressions. I don't think any of us know what we're doing here, but I do know that many people actively make things worse when they decide to add to the noise every minute of every waking hour. I'm not the arbiter of worthwhile utterances, and I'm just as guilty as anyone of saying nonsense, but I think it would serve us all to remember that just because you can, doesn't mean you should. In the vast majority of instances where you feel compelled to speak, you don't have much of value to add, and in some cases you might actually do some damage, regardless of your intentions. I try to tell myself this on a daily basis, but sometimes I just can't help myself. Like right now. My condolences to anyone who knew him..

I don't know if it does or doesn't lead to more bias. My overall point is that the scenario you laid out is plausible, but equally plausible scenarios exist to explain why and how this copy ended up as the first 9.9 to be graded in close to 25 years. It's hard to ignore the great marketing opportunity to feed the modern 9.9/10.0 initiative by having a mega key from 1975 hit the 9.9 mark for the first time. It's a great way to usher in a new paradigm where 9.8 is no longer considered a sort of glass ceiling on submission expectations for moderns, coppers, or late bronze. Whether that's what is happening here or not, I don't think a tin foil hat is required to spot the marketing opportunity.

I get that. Matt Nelson said that in a case like this, more people weigh in than is usually. His point was that decisions like this aren't made through the normal process because they're unusual. It's a major key, where the difference in grade could mean hundreds of thousand of dollars, and this is the first 9.9. I think it's more far-fetched to believe something like this would just go through the normal process.

I saw an interview Matt Nelson did sometime in the last few months where he said that the decision to give a book like this a 9.9 is made by multiple people. As in, when the grader decides this is a potential 9.9, more people are called to weigh in. Based on that alone, you could see how a number of circumstances (like introducing a 9.9 prescreen, recently making an official video about 9.9s and 10s, and so on) might impinge on that decision process. Again, we don't know, but if you're a fan of simple explanations, it doesn't seem far fetched to bump a high profile book to 9.9 because it dovetails nicely with a new marketing initiative. That doesn't mean this is what actually happened, but I think it's much more plausible than you're making it out to be.

I appreciate your reluctance to go full tin foil hat, but I'm not sure your conclusion is supported by this breakdown. The problem is, there's nothing mathematical or inevitable about hitting a 9.9 on a GSX 1, because the assigning of that grade is a subjective call made by humans. It's hard to ignore the myriad of incentives that could have potentially played a role in assigning a 9.9 to this particular copy at this particular time. So I don't think Occam's Razor applies here; it might just be a straight up 9.9, or it could just as easily be a marketing decision. There's no way to know for sure, so everyone is just going to believe what they will.

CGC has become so big and so rich off of collectors pressing and resubbing books dozens of times, or sending cases of brand new books straight from the printers, that they've forgotten what's important: the collectors. We, the collectors, who press, resub and prescreen (9.9 baby!) out of love. I'm not sure how a business predicated on enriching its clients by facilitating the unregulated, high value trade of commodified non-essential goods through a mostly arbitrary and subjective process, has so thoroughly lost its way? Come back to the light, CGC. My retirement depends on it.

Billion dollar companies don't care about me?

I understand. To be clear, I'm not saying that on an individual level, collectors only care about labels. Obviously, most people are in this because they love the books. But when you're looking at the way the market behaves, functionally speaking, the label is what ends up mattering. The main function of third party grading is to commodify comics to better facilitate trade. The label then becomes the criteria for assigning value, and therefore the focal point when real money is involved. Someone loves ASM 300, so they buy a high grade raw copy. Then they want a slabbed copy; then a 9.8; then a newsstand 9.8, and so on. The story they tell is that they want to have 'the best' copy of the book they love, but that pursuit takes them to a place where the label is what counts. The impetus for the pursuit might be a love of the book, but the label is the only real basis for paying those premiums at the highest levels. That's what I mean when I say the label is all that matters.

You guys remember when pressing in and of itself was controversial? Most of you probably don't. 15 to 20 years later, the lesson I learned is that the actual contents of a slab is far less important than what's written on the label. It was inconceivable to me back then that the market would ever be okay with paying a significant premium for some '9.6' when there was a real possibility that the '9.6' in question was sitting in a '9.0' holder just weeks prior. How quaint, right? I'm not saying that this situation is analogous to pressing; what I am saying is that the pressing scandal and subsequent change in paradigm surrounding the practice is evidence that the vast majority of people trading in slabs will do the mental gymnastics required to move past this scandal as well, because focusing on the label and ignoring the contents of the slab is the entire game. How else can you explain the market adapting so easily to pressing, or forgetting that there may be tons of unaccounted for 'Ewert Specials'. OR for that matter, the very fact that there is a premium for WHITE pages, or the sometimes obscene price spreads at those arbitrary 9.6-9.9 levels on common-as-dirt books? The label is all that matters. No one is going to stop buying Hulk 181s because there is some unknown percentile chance that some of them may be qualified books in universal holders. I'm not saying this is good or bad, right or wrong, nor am I saying I agree with the mindset, but that's where we are. No one cares about what's in the slab; what they care about is that the cert number on their book isn't on a list. Some number of provable examples will surface and be taken care of, based on the efforts of CGC and some motivated collectors, then the 15, 25, 35 percent-ish of terminally online buyers who are even aware that this happened at all will move on. The community isn't going to sacrifice the golden goose because of a bunch of missing value stamps, tattooz, or over graded Mark Jewelers copies, especially in the context of a market where the grading company under scrutiny holds 90%+ of the market share, just as they didn't sacrifice the goose over violated principles in the pressing scandal, or violated books in the Ewert scandal.

A few things: Saying it's not as profitable to be a youtuber as it is to be successful in business is weird on its own, because there are people who make ridiculous money on youtube and having a youtube channel IS a business, so I don't understand the distinction. Maybe there isn't as much money in being a comic book youtuber, but he's using youtube to market his business and I don't see an issue with that. Apparently it's a bad thing that's he's trying to build an auction house...because reasons. He's not complaining in the video; he's explaining why he's selling stuff that in prior videos he said he was planning to hold. Considering how rare it is for anyone to ever admit to being wrong about anything, I think it's refreshing for him to come out and talk about losses. It's very clear that on the internet, you can never 1) admit you're wrong or 2) apologize because it will always be taken as cynically as possible. So all I see here is either schadenfreude, or people jumping to judgment without watching the actual video. Or maybe people don't like him because of who his father is. I don't know, but I don't see people calling out Vincent Zurzolo quotes for all the carnival barking he does about investing in books. Of course you're going to believe in and push the thing you're investing all your time and money into.

You guys are being super cynical about that Youtube guy. He's selling books to keep his business going, and he's far from the only person who 1) is suffering because of 2021 and 2) was wrong about stuff in 2021. Half the video is him admitting mistakes, like losing money on an FF 4 or speculating on a modern. Cut him a break.

I'm sure that's true sometimes, and other times I think dealers/collectors over-extend themselves and need to free up cash. I've never understood trying to ascribe motives or specific rationales to the buyers behind the numbers, when we have no clue who they are most of the time. I understand the reasoning that someone in a position to spend five or six figures on comics MUST have some sort of 'bigger picture' plan in place, because for most of us average folk, the idea of casually throwing the average middle-class yearly salary on a book impulsively seems absurd. Yet, we see the evidence of people making horrible decisions with large sums of money all around us, including people who 'should know better'. *cough* NFTs *cough* Being good with money isn't a necessary condition to having it; there are wealthy people who are also impulsive and wasteful, just as there are poor people who are frugal and resourceful. When I see someone lose $10K on a book, I have no idea whether they also made $15K on another book in the same auction, or if they're going to be using the proceeds from that book to stave off foreclosure. Neither would surprise me.

When you're buying labels and not books, might as well go all the way with it.

If the owner is who I think it is, they've had it for 20+ years.

Interesting. Especially considering who the current(former?) owner is(was?). Wonder if some big-timers are cashing out?

I don't really disagree with anything you're saying. I think my main point, which I don't think I was clear about, is that this hobby is so segmented that no matter what conclusion is drawn from any particular set of data posted, someone will inevitably chime in with sales of different books or maybe a different strata of similar books to counter that drawn conclusion. If you look back in this thread, it has happened over and over. That's where I think the discussion is mostly moot. There are so many different books and data points that you almost have free reign to make any kind of argument you want to make about the state of the market. When low grade copies of a certain book are down, people will point to high grade copies not getting hit as hard. Sometimes it's the reverse, where the 9.8 tanks, but low grade copies are humming along. Low grade BA keys, as an example, is a different segment than high grade bronze keys; high grade bronze keys, I would argue, is then an all together different market than top census/9.8 BA keys, and so on. So you can see patterns and trends, and certainly the ocean of red we've been seeing in DC#'s charts can tell us something, but it's also really easy to both generalize AND to get overly granular in our assessments. Then you add layers of confirmation bias on top of that, and the conversations go off into the weeds. Hence the never ending back and forth, with people either complaining that the books they're trying to buy are still strong, or the books they're selling are all going to 0.

The market isn't some monolithic thing that you can encapsulate with some perfect set of books or data; it's heavily segmented. Just the fact that we're sticking to certified books here ignores probably 80% or more of comic sales. Sales data is best used to track the prices on individual books at specific grades, mostly certified to get some sort of consistency; collecting data on a range of books and trying to draw a conclusion about the market as a whole just doesn't work, because there are too many books and too many variables surrounding those books. Even when you're talking individual books at specific grades, there are other variables like the venue they're sold in, page quality/eye appeal, etc. And when you get books that trade only a few times a year or even less frequently than that, you can't really conclude much of anything about "the market". That said, I still like looking at data, and I appreciate everyone's efforts at compiling it here. Data I would love to have is how much of the market is buying for the long term vs the short term, but that would be impossible to gather. I tend to be less concerned with prices falling as I am with how often books trade hands. It's telling to me that there has already been enough turnover on the Promise Collection to track 1 million in losses. If you want long term health, you want to see as much 'buying for keeps' as possible.

I've said this many times, but long time collectors get overly fixated on their perceptions of supply. Firstly, books like Hulk 181 with high value and turnover are going to have tons of ghosts on the census, so number crunching on that basis doesn't work. All that really counts is what is available on the market at any given time. Secondly, the availability is already factored into prices. It's not that a book as "common" as Hulk 181 sells for way too much, it's that it would sell for way more if the supply were constrained. If Hulk 181 were as scarce as Hulk 1, it would be a 7 figure book in high grade instead of being a low 5 figure book.

We all have different experiences and temperaments, so I can only really speak to mine. When I'm having issues with people, I just don't expect any sort of moderation to make things right or even be consistent. That's not to say they can't, I'm just not holding my breath. I'd rather be proactive and focus on myself and my own behavior. When the room is turning on me, I try to figure out exactly what it is that people are trying to say. That doesn't mean I have to agree, but I can at least address the issue when we're clear about what the issue is. As opposed to getting defensive and doubling down. And that has served me well. I can be pretty argumentative, but as far as I can tell no one has held any grudges in 20 years on here. If they have, they're keeping it to themselves.

I agree with the part in bold. I think any reasonable person would agree that abuse needs to be addressed and stamped out. But because social interactions are complicated, you can't always neatly delineate these things. We're already in a time and place where abuse is not only acknowledged, but is often overcorrected for in an attempt to make things simple when they just aren't. Hence why being able to read social cues and adjust your own behavior is important. The other thing is, this is a comic message board and we're all adults. No one has to take any abuse here. I've had nasty things said to me over the years, and I just don't care. As soon as it becomes clear that the person I'm talking to is no longer engaging in discussion and is just trying to insult me, I mentally tag them as knuckleheads and stop paying any attention. Maybe that's easier for some than others, but this isn't like a woman getting harassed on the street or someone being abused at a job they need, so I'm not crazy about words like "bullying" and "abuse" being thrown around casually.

You're using "subjective reasoning" just as I am, because we're talking about perceptions of social interactions here, not quantified data. We're speaking conceptually here about dynamics of socializing based on personal experiences and observation. Not to mention that your perspective on who Kav is and what he contributes is all subjective, just as my perceptions of him are. If you don't get that, then you misunderstand subjectivity vs objectivity. People like to throw out "subjective" when they think they see things as they are and the person they're talking to doesn't, but both of our positions here are subjective. As far as victim blaming, I appreciate that you're telling me that I'm victim blaming even though I went out of my way twice to say that I wasn't. Thanks, Carnac. We have a different perspective, and you know me well enough to know I'm down to debate anything, so take my argument with good faith and try not to read between the lines, because you got it wrong in this instance. My point was, socializing is an exchange between individuals and groups; there is feedback. When someone is consistently picked on, that's a type of social feedback. It's UNFAIR and often CRUEL (caps for emphasis, because you need it) but it's how socializing works, and you ignore that feedback at your own peril. The reason I mention this is because it's unpopular to say, and you demonstrated exactly why that is by calling it victim blaming straight out. That's not me "normalizing abuse" that's me saying abuse is normal UNFORTUNATELY, but can be mitigated somewhat by a little introspection. Everyone knows abuse is bad. No sheeit. But it exists. Stealing also exists and is also bad, but mentioning that you should maybe lock your doors isn't "normalizing stealing". I thought you liked nuanced conversation?

By the psychological definition, I'm a pretty disagreeable guy, in real life and online. I like stirring the pot and I don't mind confrontation. I still manage to get along with people just fine for the most part though, because I also understand how others perceive me, and I calibrate accordingly. An example is having a thicker skin and expecting/accepting that some people just won't like me. It's fine. I don't get to have my cake and eat it too by being disagreeable and a little antagonistic, then crying when people say mean things to me, which is a roundabout way of saying I know that if I dish it out, I have to be able to take it. I do think that people sometimes get targeted unfairly, but often times, people who are bullied or feel persecuted bring at least some of that on themselves. That doesn't justify bullying or abuse, but social interactions are always a two way street. I agree with you, most people are agreeable, which also means that when someone is being picked on or centered out in some way, there's usually a reason for it. AGAIN, that doesn't justify abuse, but it's often the case that the people who are targeted get extremely defensive, which isn't conducive to self-examination. Because the vast majority of people aren't sadistic psychopaths who randomly target people, when someone is regularly targeted, unfairly or not, I think a little introspection by that person is in order. I don't really know Kav. I've had some exchanges with him and I definitely teased him a bunch, but there was no malice on my end. I do think, however, that he wasn't the best at reading the room. I vaguely remember the whole "TWSS" thing, where he wouldn't stop spamming threads with it, and it was driving a lot of people nuts. I don't believe in moderating speech except for the most extreme examples, but on the flip side, if you don't understand social cues, you're going to have a bad time. That's just how it is.

*My opinion*, as someone who has been here from year one, is that it's a combination of everything already mentioned as well as a shift in moderation that happened sometime around 2012-2013 or so. As groups get bigger, you get what I would refer to as 'social entropy', which occurs because bigger means more complex, and complexity leads to clashes in terms of personalities, temperaments, and expectations. If you're trying to moderate a growing group, you either let the chips fall where they may and risk alienating some newer people, or you try to appease everyone, which requires a "flattening" of the content to level the field and grind down some of the sharper edges. In the process of flattening, you may get rid of a few bad seeds, but you're also making things a lot less interesting and fun, as well as alienating the long time members who don't like change or see the need for it. The mods here at the time opted for the latter option, and it didn't work. There are no perfectly safe spaces, and you can't create camaraderie with a set of rules and heavy-handed enforcement. I think Mike's doing a good job with moderation now, but the 'great flattening' combined with the changes in technology and social media engagement over the subsequent years, means this place is probably never going to be what it was 15 years ago. Nothing lasts forever, I guess.