Happy Noodle Boy

I actually really like Kirby's work on ASM 8; it's my favorite of the single-digit Spideys. Pete punches out Flash Thompson, insults the Human Torch and leaves Sue Storm a valentine made of webs! Great issue.

You know, I never realized just how bad that drawing of Spider-Man was on the bottom of the cover of the first Fantastic Four Annual. The worst Spider-Man I've ever seen. Was that Kirby? Or did he just draw the Sub-Mariner section at the top?

I've always believed pressing is restoration. CGC can't always detect it, so they decided it isn't restoration. But I think it is. As for slabbing -- it's never been my thing. I like being able to look at my books. It has always surprised me that CGC has been so successful with slabbing comics -- I had assumed that it just wouldn't catch on because comics aren't like stamps or baseball cards or coins. Who would want to slab a comic book when that meant the inside pages couldn't ever be viewed? I was wrong.

I generally agree; most of them are all about the latest key issues based on the latest MCU rumors, and they treat comic books like stocks. But I found one great channel that doesn't treat comics that way, but is instead about the pure love of reading comics. It's called Old Guys Who Love Old Comics and it's hosted by Jason Mink. It's just Jason introducing you to a different stack of comics every video, opening them up and talking about them. He has no CGC slabs; he doesn't care about condition at all. He just likes reading the books. You never know what kind of comic he's going to pull out of the stack. Gold, silver, bronze; superhero, Archie, horror; Marvel, DC, Atlas, Charlton, Gold Key, Whitman, Dell. Watching him has really revitalized my collecting and reconnected me with my love of comics.

I'm not a person who submits to CGC or buys many slabs, so forgive me if this sounds naive--but maybe CGC could offer a discounted rate to anyone who wants to get any CGC book reholdered and regraded?

There's enough money involved here that I can see some people filing lawsuits against CGC if they refuse to take any sort of action. People have apparently been scammed out of thousands of dollars.

With all the ideas presented in this thread for new measures CGC could take to make sure this doesn't happen again, the cost-per-slab to CGC needs to be taken into account. Because any security measure expensive enough to significantly increase the fees to slab comics could result in CGC losing business. And CGC has to take that into account. I don't send books in to be slabbed, but whatever the price is, if it were to, say, suddenly double due to new security measures, that could lead to more casual customers deciding to stop slabbing their books entirely.

As I said on my previous post, a human being could flip each of the pages and the computer could scan and grade them. The computer wouldn't need to be housed in a robot that handles every single step of grading and encapsulation. Human beings could do the physical work (handling the comic, encapsulating the comic) while the computer scans pages and assesses condition. This would save CGC a ton of money in the long term ( no more having to scour the country looking for people who know how to grade and are willing to do it all day long) and it would eliminate subjectivity in grading.

Aren't there computers in hospitals assisting in surgeries right now? A funnybook just isn't that complicated, man. Maybe CGC (or whoever) would need a human being to turn the individual pages and set them up to be scanned, but that's about it. Sure, they'd have to teach the AI to grade first, but there are zillions of examples of graded comics for an AI to learn on.

Exactly.

Yeah, this is a big, complex, tangled-up mess. All I would realistically expect from CGC now is "We're looking into it." Especially since it's the holidays. It will just take time.

The idea that actually reading comics is somehow "elitist" is the stupidest thing I have ever read on this board.

I used to watch Automatic Comics and Swagglehaus, but I got tired of their flipper-focused content; they treat comics like stocks. The one comic-focused youtuber I follow is Jason Mink, whose channel is called Old Guys Who Like Old Comics. He's an old guy (well, in his fifties anyway, like myself) who likes old comics. That's it. He pulls out eclectic stacks of old comics from his collection and shows them off. And these aren't "keys" (I hate that word so much.) They're just comics. Archies, Marvels, DCs, First, Eclipse, Pacific, Atlas, whatever; they're just silver and bronze age books that he likes (with the occasional golden age book thrown in.) He does not care one whit about condition. He has plenty of coverless books. He doesn't care if a book is a reprint. He owns no slabs. He just likes reading comics. I'm constantly discovering cool old comics I've never heard of through his channel. He's into action figures (especially Mego) too, but the channel is primarily comics-focused. It's neat.

I think CGC will have to publicly respond somehow, even if it's just to say "We're looking into this." There's too much money involved, and too much potential damage to their reputation involved, to just ignore. I do agree though that people will keep on submitting to CGC as always. A lot of people's collections, and even their conception of the hobby itself, are inexorably attached to, and dependent upon, CGC. There are plenty of people who like to collect the way coin and card collectors do, with their books on display in nice cases. And although I'm not one of those people, I get that the "bags and boards and long boxes" manner of collecting can be both an inconvenience and aesthetically lacking. (All those beautiful books just hidden away in a box somewhere, when they could be prettying up your shelves as display-pieces instead.) At the end of the day though, I see collecting slabbed books as being very much like collecting classic cars that you don't have the keys to. You can look at them, but you can't ever take them out for a drive. You can't even open the door. Where's the fun in that?

LOL. (CGC isn't "the world" of comics collecting by the way. A lot more people buy raw than slabbed.) And you're misinterpreting what I wrote. I didn't say I want the grading companies to go under. (I actually don't want them to go under, because raw books are that much cheaper because of them.) I said that if they do go under, the hobby will be just fine. What I wrote was, "The people who actually like comics beyond their monetary value as collectibles to be bought and flipped will all still be here, buying and reading." And you're saying that you enjoy comics in other ways beyond their monetary value. So we're saying the same thing. So maybe untwist your knickers?