Qalyar

Grades in. Mostly happy with my round 1 performance, but I don't feel nearly as good about some of these. We'll see.

If I was shipping a $100,000+ comic, I would probably either buy a plane ticket and deliver it myself or look into one of the logistic companies' secure courier services (the UPS one is called Express Critical Hand Carry; I don't have any experience with the alternatives). Yes, it's certainly possible to carry insurance that would, in case of disaster, make you whole in terms of market value (but watch those terms and conditions, because they will get you) -- and, clearly, you should also do that. But $100,000+ books aren't like copies of Hulk 181; you can't take an insurance payout and just replace what was lost, damaged, or destroyed. I would never let something of that value go through the normal shipping channels, regardless of the carrier involved. They're really not intended for that sort of thing. EDIT: Just to add... let's say it costs you $2000 to either hand-deliver a book or transit it via a white-glove courier service. On a $100,000 book, that's 2% of the market value as an additional shipping cost, or the equivalent of paying 20 bucks to ship a $1000 book (or two dolla on a $100 one). Anyone with the means and interest to put six figures down on a comic ought to have no problem at all with that order of magnitude in (legitimate, of course!) shipping and handling costs in order to safeguard their purchase and investment.

Also, apparently by the mid-90s, even Marvel concluded that Mystique-centric stories should actually have the character on the cover, because when they reprinted Uncanny X-Men 177 as X-Men Classic 81, JRJR gave it a new cover to do just that.

In my experience, Saga of Crystar 11 isn't as hard to find as some of these neglected mini-series titles... but it's real tough to find copies that aren't beat, because apparently no one else thought its condition mattered either!

I think X-Men Adventures 14 is the first cover that canonically depicts Mystique in a form other than Mystique's natural one.

For a character that has made as big an impact as she did, it sure took awhile for Mystique to get a cover appearance that isn't, as you said, "busy". Frankly, it's sort of surprising how often she's a major factor in an issue but doesn't get cover space at all. I may have missed a few (this is harder to search for than I'd expected it to be), but I think all of her pre-1990 cover appearances are: Avengers Annual 10 Rom 31 (also the first Rogue cover) Rom 32 *Avengers Annual 15 X-Factor 8 *X-Factor 9 *New Mutants 65 *Captain America 346 *Uncanny X-Men 225 *New Mutants 78 Uncanny X-Men 255 * EDIT: I missed these on my first pass. I may have finally found them all, although odds are good there's a tiny Mystique in the back, like on Cap 346, in some issue I didn't snag. There are a lot more in the 90s -- including Sabretooth 2, X-Men Unlimited 4, and... I'm not even going to try to find them all. I think her first solo cover is X-Factor 108, followed by X-Factor 127 (oof, I do not like this cover), and X-Factor 130. Don't take that as gospel, though!

Tricksy little thing. Oof.

I always liked that Nestor Redondo cover on New Funny #3. Too bad the contents are not, shall we say, the same quality.

We ask for whole-book pictures to evaluate grades because comic book grading isn't a system where specific faults have specific point value adjustments. With that said, if this book is priced like a 7.0 or 7.5, it is probably overpriced. Also, I really don't think this is a "mint, except for..." book. To start with, I assume that third picture is a damaged interior page. It's hard to tell with your ridiculous cropping. If so, is it the only one? Regardless of that, despite your cropping, I see areas that look like light foxing or tanning. In this front-cover image, at bottom left, around the CCA logo and the word "Authority": And here, in most of the field, but especially just above center and again at bottom-left: How much that's likely to affect the grade depends on, frankly, the rest of the book. Bottom line is that any number provided on the basis of these tiny corner images alone is only a hair better than guesswork; that's not how grading works. But I am certain that this copy is an attractive book that presents very well for its grade; however, technical grades are not -- and are not intended to be -- a measure of a book's aesthetic appeal.

Batman 200, in that condition, is not a worthless book. MCS lists VG+ (4.5) raw copies at $115 apiece, and that's probably what yours would grade out at, give or take a grade or so. What you are proposing to do will result in a book worth approximately zero dollars. I can't tell you what to do with your collectibles, but I'm pretty sure there are better ways to put a cover on the wall, if that's your sole motivation, than destroying this copy.

Almost certainly not the same Gateway, since Shadow Warrior was the product of some guys in British Columbia and the Gateway Comics logo on Stalker -- the 2012 book -- looks like the St. Louis Arch.

You'd think so, but there really isn't. Which is part of why I think this really was just Krock and Ciancone's show.

It's my understanding that magazine-sized slabs are still exclusively the old style. The images of the sides look normal for this style of slab; the broken bit of plastic encapsulated with the label, of course, is not.

This book is the indie comics product of Terry Krock (-script) and Bart Ciancone (art), who lived at the time in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. I don't really know much about Gateway as a publisher, but there's really not much to know; this is the only book they appear to have ever released. It's entirely possible that Gateway wasn't anything more than Krock, Ciancone, and their friends. In any case, they'd test-marketed a #0 preview issue in Kelowna (as "Voodoo Comics"), but this one got much wider distribution and isn't particularly rare. Despite promising quarterly issues, this is the last the world saw of Shadow Warrior. Ciancone was a lot better artist than most of the people putting out these sorts of indies, but as far as I know, this was also his last effort to produce comics art for publication.

Playing devil's advocate here, it's still a Sailor Moon cover on an English comic-format book, four years before Mixx Zine 1.

Some pretty nice books there. I find that Near Mint 24 interesting. I've never had a copy myself, but I thought they were on a cream-gray-ish cardstock cover. Not that it's surprising that a fanzine would have more than one cover stock option, really. Looks good on that orange, tbh.

Obviously, you and I are never going to agree on what we would like to see from the Registry. Because you bright-line do not want sets to have separate slots for DM vs. newsstand copies. You consider them the "same book". I very much do want them treated separately, hate that I have to kludge distinct sets for them now, and think that any books that are reliably distinguishable due to any production elements are not at all the "same book" even if the cover art is the same. But I think "indicia trumps everything" is sort of a mess, regardless. There are a lot of books -- mostly from smaller publishers, but not exclusively so -- where there are 100% distinguishable second (or later!) printings but the indicia makes no indication of that. Heck, there's a thread right now over in General about the early issues of Transformers (back when it was going to be a limited series), where there have generally been threeish recognized printings, except that the internal issue checklists and back-cover advertising makes that far more complicated (and CGC isn't always flawless about noting what's going on, but that's beside the point). None of them have indicia changes. Or, if you don't like Transformers, consider Classics Illustrated. I sold off the entirely of my Classics collection and will never look back, but at one point in time, I was trying to assemble a comprehensive specialist collection of the title, with all of the HRN variations and so forth. I was only about 70% complete (and almost exclusively in raw books, but let's pretend), but I would have been very disappointed if the Registry only permitted me one line per title in the run. The point was to collect as many of the minor variations as possible. That's what collecting is about, for me. I get that not everyone collects the same way, and I feel like there has to be a way to offer Registry space for people who just one one of "each book, broadly speaking" versus people who want "one of each book, in the narrowest sense possible". If I were to collect Crisis, I would 100% want those slots for CPV copies, and slots for the US newsstands, too. But I appreciate that people who just want to collect the set should have a way to do that without being condemned to having their set rate in 5th place or somesuch. As for the PS issue there, where you get one awesome book and then tromp all over 20 sets with it... my personal opinion is that the Registry should be one book, one set. That has the added benefit of ensuring that, if there are separate sets for with- and without-newsstands/price-variants/etc, you can't win both at the same time with the same books. You can choose how you want to collect and compete... but you have to actually choose.

Quoting myself here, because I can. One of the other problems I have with using FMV as a component of anything is that it raises the inherent question of how do we determine the "reference" FMV for a book? Do we benchmark against CGC 9.0? That's fine for, say, Silver Age books. But a lot of the important early books don't even physically exist in 9.0 Universal; meanwhile, most Moderns at 9.0 are effectively worthless. Perhaps this is another benefit of bucketed "values". It's likely at least somewhat easier to distinguish between a book with tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars, or thousands of dollars -- in whatever form it's most frequently traded -- without needing to get into the weeds about where it's benchmarked in terms of grade?

The problem -- well, okay, a problem -- with using the CGC Census as a measure of actual scarcity is that the Census is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. People largely (but not exclusively) get books slabbed because they are perceived as having broad market appeal, which in turn ensures they are more visible on the secondary markets, which increases that very perception. Books that don't get drawn into that cycle -- especially including disfavored genres like joke books or non-Disney funny animals -- are encapsulated less often on both a relative and absolute basis. It is very difficult to take that (or any) single data set and use it to distinguish between lack of available copies versus mere lack of interest.

Strictly speaking, Omaha's first appearance is in Vootie #8. However, Vootie was an APA (like a fanzine in a sense, but effectively distributed exclusively to its member-contributors), and so is vanishingly rare. Also, it's almost certainly not eligible for CGC authentication due to the nature of its production. But still, first appearance.

I ... don't really have a horse in the race for what I think newsstand books should be "worth" in terms of points vs. their DM brethren. I just want there to be at least some way to have sets that include both. Right now, for a couple titles, I maintain two separate sets, one for the DM copies and one for newsstand copies. I'd much rather be able to put together one set where they all have their own slots, because that's exactly how I view them, as distinct collectible versions. I'm not unsympathetic to people who don't feel that way, but... it's definitely how I approach them. No different than a distinguishable printing or a price variant or any similar shenanigans. Of course, first CGC has to fix the way it's labeling these newsstands. Sigh. But that's entirely unrelated to how we're dealing with them.

NFT Comics, 2008 edition. They don't make any more sense now.

Well, yeah. It would be a philosophical re-building of the registry point system. On the other hand, it's clear something does have to change. Maybe not that much, though...? A less drastic approach is to "bucket" FMV. So the goal is no longer to care whether a book is worth $250 or $450, it's to determine if a book is worth... a few dollars, maybe a hundred bucks, a few hundred dollars, a couple thousand, a lot of thousands, or ludicrous stacks of cash. Assign a base value to each bucket. Say... 20, 100, 250, 1200, 5000, 20000 (these are literally off the top of my head; do not take as gospel!). Books won't move between bins very often, absent major changes to their desirability. I still don't like the idea of having points based on FMV, because in a perfect world, I don't think the grading authority should care about FMV at all except for insurance (I don't like FMV-tiered grading fees either). But no one asked me when this all started.

The idea behind this system is that the actual dollar value doesn't matter. Just the rarity / value / prestige / interest of each book relative to the rest of the set, on a fixed scale of 1 to 5 (some registries that do this sort of thing are 1 to 10 for a wider range of values; we maybe should do it that way, but I started writing this post using 1-to-5, so that's what you get!). So, to choose a set entirely not at random, Spawn Complete (and fair disclosure, I know about actually collecting Spawn): Spawn 1 is probably like a 3 or a 4? It's certainly more valuable than random issues, but it's also important to the idea of a set for the title. Malibu Sun 13 might be a 4 or a 5? It's important to the set -- AND it's a rare book that demands comparatively high values in the market. Spawn 163 and all the other random run fill that's freely available? 1s. For the most part, after an initial period of assignment drama, the points won't change often, because the prestigious, rare, high-dollar books don't swap positions a whole lot. A fairly recent example of when a book would change base value is West Coast Avengers 45, a book literally no one cared about until "1st White Vision" suddenly became A Thing That Mattered. It's easier to set up. It's easier to maintain. The only drawback is that points don't compare between sets. For the sake of argument here, let's give that Malibu Sun 13 a base value of 4. It's a solid book, but it's not like an instantly recognizable key, right? Your 8.0 copy would be worth 32 points. Meanwhile, in the pre-Batman Tec Comics set, this utterly amazing Tec 1 (obviously a base value of 5, it's Tec 1 in a pre-Bats Tec set!) in 6.5 would score... 32.5 points. That's a big chunk towards dominance of the set it's in, but you obviously cannot compare the point values between sets ... except to say that people with more points likely have better, more important books in more sets.

If sets are (re-)scored so that the points only compare within the set, that makes it easier to fix this sort of problem. Do like PCA does and have a 5 point scale. Whatever the rarest and most valuable book or two is in a given set, they have a base value of 5. Run fill? Base value of 1. Individual grades get a score based on grade and base value, determined algorithmically. I'd suggest a simple [Grade * BV], with ... some sort of modifier for non-blue labels. You'll still have to do some adjustments when the first appearance of Randy from Boise in Dollar Bin Comics #17 becomes a sudden key issue after they cast Leonardo DiCaprio to play him, but you won't need to do adjustments just because speculators drive that book's price up and down the field. The drawback to this plan is that my 8.5 slab of Dollar Bin Comics #17 (Base Value adjusted to 4, thanks Leo!) might be worth 34 points in the Dollar Bin Comics run, but that doesn't mean anything at all about how much money it is worth compared to other books, in other sets, that are also worth 34 points. Would that bother people who actually jockey for numbers? @ADAMANTIUM?