Qalyar

Well, it's not half as good as some of this thread has found, but finally hit a dollar box that wasn't entirely books that belonged in a dollar box:

2 bullseye, 4 pts total this round... ...and I want 9.2s on my books with corner creases like that!

Exactly my opinion. The wide-angle front cover shot looked pretty good. This one's a poster child for why the forum rules request both covers and close-ups of areas of concern! My thoughts as I went through this: Well, some of that UL FC might press out okay... Hmm... are those color breaking creases in the UPC box? Oooh, and a scuff on Mr. Fantastic's shirt. That's a shame. Now I see what Ben's reaching out for. He really dog-eared the Thing out of that LR corner, didn't he... Aaaand crinkly back cover with hideous tape residue stain, mangled corner. Is that a tear at bottom-center? And so forth. There's a chance that a C&P might fix some of the crinkles and maybe mitigate the stain, but I don't think it's going to resolve completely barring divine intervention. And nothing can deal with the paper surface scuffs or color breaking creases. I'll go 3.5 here also -- and if they're feeling generous about the tape residue, 4.0, but I feel CGC has been hammering stains of all sorts for awhile now! -- but it presents nicely for its grade. From the front, anyway.

First things first, it's really hard to evaluate slabbed books. In particular, it's often tough to know if apparent "waviness" actually represents wiggly paper or whether it's just subtle rippling in one of the layers of plastic (or even an optical illusion entirely). It's also a lot harder to figure out what's going on with defects when you have limited camera angles available. I don't quite think I know what's going on in the top corner, which does make me wonder what this book really looks like in hand and deslabbed. But assuming the case and camera aren't really trying to fool us, there's no way I would give this book a 9.2. This book has a pretty thick cover, and CGC is usually (but not always) pretty tolerant of cracked ink along the edge of the fold, because that's how folding ink-coated cardstock works. But this isn't affecting the edge of the book, it's just a bunch of color lift along the spine on the back cover. I've got a book with a heavily inked cardstock cover that has a couple blunted corners but not anywhere near this level of color loss, and it came back an 8.5. I don't think I'd expect anything higher than that here. Again, unless these pictures end up not representing the actual state of the book outside of its encapsulation.

Bleh. Reading dates is apparently hard for me. I... don't think that makes this better, at all.

Dang it. Now you've got me trying to determine what eligible books you're still missing... :P But to the point of the thread, the Registry Awards are intended to show off collectors' love for their books and the hobby. At the risk of seeming a little zen, if your set looks like its purpose is to try to win, it will not win.

7.5, and that presents so much nicer than any of the pence variants I've ended up with!

This really lends weight, for me, to the idea that this was done to conceal a defect and push for a 9.8 to turn around and launder into the McFarlane signing. It isn't color touch if your witnessed signing celebrity does it, I suppose. I'll add this to the list of reasons I don't collect yellow label books.

If the record is not physically attached to the book, the book can get a blue label without the record. And, indeed, it would not be slabbed with the record. Unattached items are never* slabbed with comics. I would unseal the product and remove the record before submitting; although CGC tries to send unattached material back, it isn't guaranteed, and it's more work for them. Which they obviously don't need... EDIT: Also, if you're into such things, these books often, if not always, benefit from a press because of the record itself and the way they were shrink-wrapped. * I'm sure there's some exception because CGC, but they aren't supposed to be.

That one's... probably not what you'd want on the wall of an actual accounting office. It's a weird Canadian anti-government indie... and also an advertisement for Tax Time Tax Services, which -- on the basis of this comic -- I wouldn't trust with so much as a single Loonie. If you want to know more, well, I'll let Linkara'a Atop the Fourth Wall handle that (warning -- very shouty; but if you're familiar with ATFW, you already knew that):

Pesky English, letting you use the same set of words for two different meanings.

They didn't. That comic was an SDCC promo for the film.

I tried finding earlier books that met your interest here. I sort of hoped that maybe there was a mob accountant on a cover of Crime Does Not Pay or something, but it doesn't seem like that was ever the case. There are a bunch of accountants in miscellaneous early romance books (generally as the "safe, right choice" that the title woman rejects for her foolish enjoyment -- alas!) and a few mob accountants in stories. Lone Ranger 86's first story is about an accountant sent to audit the books of the Circle Bar cattle ranch (the managers are cooking the books, and try to kill him before he arrives). Unfortunately, that didn't make the cover, and the cover they went with is... erm, let's go with "culturally inconvenient" now. If you're fine with more recent books, my best picks would either be Tick's Big Tax Time Terror (2002), or Taxman (2000, cover A only):

In my mind, this strongly suggests either a multi-pack or a specific reprint order for a single point of distribution (like the JC Penney books), either of which might explain why they don't have a printing in the indicia; they didn't go through normal distribution channels and so were not viewed internally as a new "printing" in the conventional sense.

That's a #7? Interesting, since it seems 7 released quite a bit later than the Payday-back 4 appears to (from the internals), but both have the same interior ad. I suspect that one of those books (which 100% means the variant 4) released at a different time than expected. Also, at some point, once we get a better handle on what exists, we're going to have to figure out how to refer to these books in a consistent way, to serve as a guide for CGC to label things properly (yeah, I know, none of that from the peanut gallery). Because some of these books have Nth Printing in the indicia, CGC (and the rest of us) will want to defer to the indicia for those variants. But that leaves us with oddities like the #3 Montezuma, #4 Payday, and so on. If we can figure out anything about their distribution, that might shine some light on the issue, otherwise they'll likely end up "Advertising Variants" or some such.

Also, thanks to my proficiency with Google and this 2014 blog post, I can confirm the existence of a #4 with the Payday back cover (and, apparently, no indicia change).

So, wanting to clarify. So far, at least, all variants are distinguishable by issue number + back cover? I don't see any combinations that would require checking the indicia and/or the internal book checklist in order to distinguish them, correct?

I have to admit that this has made me considerably more interested in this series, haha!

Sorry to keep having to ping you on this, Mike, but I'm holding a stack of submissions pending a resolution on this.

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!