RockMyAmadeus

The way to differentiate fact from self-interest is to look at the evidence. People interested in the truth will present independent evidence to corroborate their claims. People who are only interested in self-promotion...won't. Doesn't matter what anyone says...if it can't be independently verified, it's just opinion. Evidence is the key. One person hyping Fantastical Comics #673? Maybe legitimate, but probably not. Four people from different areas of the country doing so? More chance of being legitimate.

That's an odd...and dark...reason for a book to become valuable.

There was no Thanos in the SS run pre-Starlin.

Other than the non-continuity "Thanos Copter" story in Spidey Super Stories #39, Thanos did not appear in the Marvel Universe as a current character for 13 years...from 1977 to 1990. That's non-flashback, non-index appearances. And Thanos was never "pre-Starlin." Nearly every Thanos appearance from 1973-1977 was written and/or drawn by Starlin. Thanos was his baby, start to finish.

For what it's worth, it appears that the "the listing you're looking for is no longer available. Here's one we found for you that's just like that one!" has been ended, at least for now.

You don't stop complaining just because you don't get the results you're looking for. Your comments here are bizarre. How you get "people don't appreciate such comments" from "As problematic as CGC can be, they are light years beyond the PGX+ service that CBCS is", is beyond me. My comment wasn't a "what are you talking about, CGC is perfect!", as you make it seem. Maybe dial it back a bit. If you were concerned about "back and forth", you're perfectly capable of sending a PM, rather than issuing a direct challenge publicly.

I think CGC needs legitimate competition, which they do not have. They are in their "post-competition" ways. CGC is well aware that CBCS' chance to be that competition was totally squandered. Seeing "CBCS is looking better" doesn't phase them now in the slightest...nor should it. The only other option is to make your complaints known, and continue to make them known until and if something changes. That is hardly engendering warm, fuzzy feelings from CGC. Who is "jumping on CGC's bandwagon"...?

That is your opinion. Again: it is not impossible to read a book that is in a slab. Solution: open the slab.

The answer, as mentioned before, is to continue to make noise about this until they fix things. It's arbitrary, and an unnecessary hassle. Continue to write to CGC about it.

As problematic as CGC can be, they are light years beyond the PGX+ service that CBCS is.

No, I'm intentionally dispelling a persistent mindset that can be detrimental to the market. As far as "there are far more cost-effective ways to do so", there are many advantages to reading comics in their original format that cannot be obtained from digital "copies." And yes, there are people who buy slabs for the purpose of looking at them outside of the slab. There are more reasons to crack a slab than just to read the book, though that's certainly paramount among them. Are we arguing just to argue, yet...? Just want to make sure what phase we're in.

Don't say things that aren't true, and I won't need to be a pedant. I may know what you mean, but I am not the only one who reads what you write. There are far too many people who think that slabs are sacrosanct and can and should never be opened, and that is a serious flaw in how people treat slabs. Slabs can be opened. It's perfectly ok.

Slabbing doesn't make reading your books impossible. Slabs can be opened.

How many would you like...?

x2

That's because they were (mostly) not distributed.

Because DC doesn't print things "in the 100s", especially one of their best sellers. How do you know..."for a fact"....that it had the lowest print run? Nobody but DC knows what its print run was. And what does "hardest to find" mean? Just because something was hard to find for you doesn't mean it is therefore the hardest to find for everyone.

You were told wrong. The 14th printing is very tough to find, but it did not have a print run "in the 100s."

How delightful! That's not a particularly compelling issue, but fun nonetheless, and it does have an Omen reference on the cover. The parameters of the thread have been met, so I'm content with that.

Oh, was I supposed to have shown pictures of them? Oops.

Poor books.

600 copies each of Brigade #1 gold, Supreme #1 gold, Youngblood Strikefile #1 gold, and Youngblood #0 gold. Yay!

This should come as no surprise to anyone watching closely over the last two years. These symptoms manifested themselves particularly through their message board. I wrote a short PM to a person "in customer service" with a user name of "Jake Ellis." I got no response. I wrote back, several days later, casually "wondering" (and, of course, already full well knowing the answer) if that account was an active account. At that point, this "Jake Ellis" person responded with a terse, clipped response, letting me know that the account was active, while completely failing to address the issue I was having. And remember: this is someone who works in their customer service dept. Ostensibly, someone who is trained to deal with customer concerns and resolve them to the customer's satisfaction, or at least to be able to point the customer to where they should go for followup. And, of course, their moderators are embarrassments to the hobby, moderating based on their personal feelings, rather than abiding by, and assuring that everyone else abided by, the same set of clear, unambiguous terms of service, which quite obviously was never the case. "But that's just their message board. What does that have to do with the company itself?" some may ask. Good question, and the answer is this: these things do not happen in a vacuum. You can easily tell the attitudes of the people in charge by the way the people who interact directly with the customers behave. They are a direct reflection of those people in charge. These people wouldn't have been able to get away with the things they were had the people in charge not allowed, and, in fact, encouraged them to behave in such a manner. These attitudes don't merely exist on their message board: it's their entire corporate attitude. So, when push came to shove where and when it counted, the integrity, the character, the dedication to customer service even in the face of complaints and criticism...it didn't exist, because it never existed in the first place. There was no foundation. You had a group of people who liked comics, some of whom were really good at grading comics, but who were completely unskilled and unproven in the jobs they were given, and were chosen solely because Borock liked them personally. That's no way to run a company. Then, sadly, when those people...from message board moderators on up to general managers...had to deal with criticism, they folded like cheap suits, and grew increasingly combative with their customer base. And the most amazing part of it all is that CBCS was started because someone had a bad customer experience with CGC...and they then turned around and did the exact same thing to their customers. That's irony for you. So, no, the problems they have experienced with this move to Beckett is not at all a surprise. Maybe Beckett can rescue them...but not with current management.

That's cool print run info. Where did you get it?