Stefan_W

And moved to shipped July 8th as well, scheduled for Monday shipment.

Regular track group of 25 moderns Arrived and SFG on 13 May 2022 G/E/I 8 July 2022

Flipped to Q/C Finalized today, July 8 2022. This sets a speed record for me for ME books. Very impressive.

I cracked open the case on the ASM 315 graded 8.0 with notes saying "moderate staining to cover." There is absolutely no staining and the book should have gotten a 9.0 or 9.2. I think what happened is the grader mistook some of the design from the inside cover showing through on the outside as staining. These covers are thin and white, and all the copies I see out there have the same thing. If this is the case it is an honest mistake when moving quickly with grading, although the financial hit for the mis-grade is the same for me either way.

So this is really cool. A Spawn 119 in my last shipment had a crack on the bottom of the slab so it is heading back for an ME submission, but when I looked at the book again I noticed it also had newton rings. Then when I checked it out I saw that the rings actually made the face of Spawn! If it was not for the big crack this book would probably be a keeper because this is so cool.

10 ME books Arrived and SFG on 23 June 2022 Moved to GEI on 6 July 2022 My experience so far has been that ME books sit in GEI for about 2-3 weeks before they are slabbed and shipped out. The total TATs are always really good.

Darn. I was debating on sending my last shipment fast track and opted for slow track instead. If I went for FT I would have them back by now.

They don't need to do anything like that to pay the bills. Just look at the current TATs to see there is a healthy amount of books in the queue at all times.

I'd like to join up as well

Yeah. If the grade coming back shows I am wrong more than once I am typically done. There have been exceptions along the line but for much more valuable books than these ones.

I am re-subbing the 4 that I believe were undergraded, three will be graded but through Comic Link to go directly to auction (saves money and shipping) and one will not be re-graded at all since in retrospect it was a mistake to send it to begin with. The were lots of lessons in this bunch, and is often the case with comic collecting those lessons cost money.

I am going to eat a bit of crow with this one. I cracked 8 of the slabs that I figured were worth cracking and only 3 of those were clearly undergraded with one at the borderline. The others were graded correctly. Assuming the ones that were not worth cracking are about the same the overall grading was not as bad as I initially thought (although still a bit tougher than usual), and in most cases I just missed small things that I should have caught before sending the books in. Live and learn.

Here is the worst example of case damage. FedEx gave this box the full on gorilla treatment. Trying to figure out how to safely send this back since it is a 9.8 and for my PC and I dont want to damage the book. I will ask customer service whether it is ok to tape the piece of the case back on, and I can sandwich it between two piece of cardboard or something.

I am in Canada, we had our holiday last Friday on the 1st.

Ug. So I had a shipment of 25 books come back a few minutes ago. This was the one I complained about in another thread where the grading was ridiculously harsh to the point where it is an automatic re-sub on at least 5 of the books. The tape on the top and bottom of the box was torn which was a bad sign, and the box looked pretty rough. I had this before where the books were ok so I just took a deep breath and went through them. Without looking too carefully yet I found 6 books where the cases had large cracks and crushes and two other books with very large newton rings. The worst part? None of the books I was going to crack myself were the ones crushed. Oh well, looks like I will be on the phone with customer service again tomorrow. At least CGC is good about fixing such problems.

My first purchase was at a department store. I was a huge fan of Star Wars after the first movie came out, and when my mom dragged me out shopping one day I noticed a two pack with Star Wars 11 and Laff-A-Lympics. I convinced her to buy that for me, and I was hooked on comics. Being a kid I was broke all of the time so I had a tough time working backwards to fill the Star Wars series. I did all sorts of little things to earn a quarter here and there, and worked back to issue 6. Even though they had been released only a year or so earlier the first 5 books were already marked up quite a bit at the comic store and they seemed out of reach. One day when we were going out shopping again my mom agreed to take me to the comic store and she said she would buy me one of those comics. She asked to see copies of 1 through 5, and the store owner went into the back and got them out. I was trying to figure out which one to get, and to my surprise my mom asked him how much for all 5. I think it was around twenty bucks, and my heart sank because I knew we did not have a lot of money. My mom quickly agreed to the price and I was the happiest kid you could imagine. I still have those books and I would not take any amount money for them. They will be in my collection until I die and they will remind me of my mom each and every time I take them out and read them with my daughter.

To give give a sense of how fast the Modern tiers (including pre-screens) are moving through - I was sending a box of books to CGC for grading about every 3 weeks or so, which was one or two per month. In June alone I had 6 boxes graded with the last three in the mail this week. There was an ME shipment in there, but that is still crazy fast. I went from having a bunch of orders in the queue to having only two submissions left to grade, plus one other ME, and I am still not quite ready to send in my next shipment. It is really jaw dropping.

My ME book that they missed putting into a case the first time around just finished way ahead of schedule. SFG May 27 GEI about a week later (did not write down the exact date) QC June 28 Just hit shipping so will ship out tomorrow, June 30

I use the 9.8 pre-screen quite a bit. It works for me because it lowers the risk cost in case I hit a particularly harsh grader. In terms of how consistent the tier is, based on my experience I would say that it is as consistent as the other tiers. That is to say that you can expect to hit one of the tougher graders every 4 or 5 submissions. It is worth noting that I am pretty sure they put their newest graders in this tier, so any toughness is likely due to a new person trying to show that they are precise.

My experience so far has been that this type of hosing happens to me about 20-25% of the time (one out of every four or five submissions). I swear and stomp around for a while and then everything returns to normal, including continuing to send books in. At the end of the day, when this happens I curse myself for not using the pre-screen on that submission. That at least minimizes the loss if the occasional submission gets torched by the grader. And I absolutely could have used a pre-screen for this one. The worst was a book in the batch that I cracked and re-submitted. I could see the presser I used a while back left some fixable flaws, so I opened up the 9.2 case, gave it a solid pressing until I was happy, and sent it in expecting a 9.6 (it did have a small spine tick). After all that it came back a 9.0.

Modern slow track 25 books SFG 26 Apr 2022 GEI 23 Jun 2022 QC 27 Jun 2022 Finalized on 28 Jun 2022 and scheduled to ship out the next day. The last batch that finalized yesterday had surprisingly good results, and this batch was the exact opposite and was completely and utterly hosed by the grader. The grades and not even close to what I was expecting on the majority of books. Apparently I got the grader again who loves giving out 9.0 to 9.4 on books with tiny flaws that would most often be called 9.6.

Even without the zero feedback bidder, the other bidder who always bids up his books and then retracts is pretty good evidence.

Nice catch, seems like pretty clear market manipulation at work here.

Mistakes happen when you send books in for slabbing. Sometimes you get an 8.5 instead of the 9.4 or above you are hoping for and some books become impossible to sell at even grading costs. The money spent on grading is a sunk cost and slabs take up a lot of room so sometimes it is better to just take a loss and move on. That's the way it goes.

Modern slow track with 25 books SFG 26 April 2022 G/E/I 23 June 2022 QC end of day on 27 June 2022 This is awesome