Qalyar

Black Hole 12 was released 9 years after the series started, so needless to say, interest had waned a little bit. 4324 copies ordered per Comichron, but Fantagraphics did a lot of nonstandard distribution; still, total copies are probably in the ~5500 range at best. Pleased that CGC gave it the "last issue" notation. Another 12-issue run, but this one sadly didn't get a "Last issue" call-out. Also sad that I couldn't squeak out a 9.8 here. And, yeah, I know, literally no one else here cares about Midnight Nation, but it has a lot of personal significance for me. And hey, here's a thread where it's on-topic to post about it. Pirates of Dark Water was a 6-issue mini based on the under-rated cartoon series. This is issue 9 of 6. They apparently felt it sold well enough to warrant continuing the run past the original series end. This last issue inexplicably has a fantastic Charles Vess cover that doesn't match any of the artwork used anywhere else in the title. And yes, this series had both direct market and newsstand distribution; this newsstand 9 presents tolerably well despite a couple significant, unfortunate defects. These are surprisingly not-growing-on-trees for early '90s books. I have an Animaniacs 59 around here somewhere that I really wanted to post in this thread, but it's not where I thought it was, so there's going to have to be some box searching in my near future.

End-of-week check-in on this. I know you've been talking to the web folks on the grounds that this might be a display issue, but I suspect that this is actually a data entry problem, wherein whatever new process was set up to flag these books as Newsstand Printings is putting that data in the wrong database field. How big a problem this represents depends very much on which of us is correct...

What does the indicia say? Many, perhaps most, of the reprints on this series have reprint notes.

That really is the most likely answer, and I'm sad I didn't think of it right off the bat. But let's be honest, weird printing shenanigans from Image sound plausible, you know? I mean, CGC doesn't recognize them, but you've got the copies of Spawn 1 with the broken inside-front-cover logo due to a printing problem for part of the run. Weirder things have happened.

Ah. Well. That's reasonable. It's not that I don't think those are deserving of real space in sets, in some fashion. Hell, I collect weird foreign republications of weird books no one else cares about! I've got a whole custom set for foreign repubs of Black Hole and would have slabbed copies of the Italian edition of Midnight Nation except that the only copies I've ever been able to get are sub-reader dogs. But CGC's labeling of foreign variants and foreign republications has gone through at least one major change in the recent past, and might very well do so again before the dust settles. Accordingly, the census for these books is a disaster, and trying to codify them into the registry would be a nightmare.

I don't think this is necessarily true. To be perfectly honest, I think that every mini-series, maxi-series, or ongoing title that has ever been published should be able to be represented by a competitive set if someone is inclined to assemble one. If that's the only person in the world who cares about Vext (DC, 1999), Captain Canuck (Comely, 1975), or Adventures of the Jaguar (Archie, 1961) then that person is going to get the "best in set type" badge every year until the sun dies. And that hurts no one. The value of those little green ribbon icons is not lessened by having more of them distributed. Sure, the small, obscure, and/or unpopular titles will not win Best in [Foo] Age. But so what? Most sets won't, by definition. And who knows, maybe someday the world's only remaining superfan of Archie's Jaguar will put together something worthy of Best Presentation. We collect comic books; anything could happen. No offense, but I hate this. Making all variants automatically non-competitive is a shorthand way of saying that your way of collecting books matters more than mine, when one of the guiding principles here on the boards (in theory, at least...) is that people ought to be free to collect how and what they like. It's also very anti-Modern, because for a lot of Modern sets, the variants -- of whatever form -- are the only things that are difficult to find, or worth bothering with. Even for older books, that might be true. That Adventures of the Jaguar collector might very well be disappointed to find out that his rare 15 cent price variant copies (I believe there are 5 issues with these!) wouldn't count for anything at all. To my surprise, there's even one 15c variant on the census right now, so this would be relevant if someone asked for a set for this book today! Here's the thing. I want people to be able to have sets that display what they enjoy. I don't want that to take away from others' ability to have sets that display what they enjoy. Some people want one book per issue. Some people don't think newsstands are any different from direct market books, but still want cover variants and distinguishable reprints. Some people want as deep a collection of their preferred titles as they can get. And I think we should celebrate all of those options. My interest in standardizing sets isn't to take away from the experience of people who want something different than I do -- or, for that matter, something different than you do, because I certainly don't want my sets to be exclusively first-print only. In general, the Registry does ... okay ... with the idea that there can be versions of a set with and without slots for variants (although I hate the "Complete" nomenclature; how about just "With Variants"), and I'm fine with the idea that we might need a third category for "...and newsstands too" (I like calling the latter "Specialist", as these sorts of things are called specialist collections in other collectors' hobbies). I'm not at all okay with the idea that only one of those gets to remain intact. On the other hand, I do want to help figure out a way to make the inclusion criteria for sets make sense. When it is limited to just one specific title? When is it an entire category or theme of books? Right now, that's the part that's the Wild West, and what I think needs to be re-examined. Let's go with that hypothetical Captain Canuck collector, because that ought not single anyone out. We'll pretend that there are suddenly slabbed copies of this whole thing. It's a thought experiment, people! The title was a 14-issue run in 1975 from Comely Comix, but there are a ton of one-shots from various publishers (the 2014 Calgary Entertainment Expo exclusive Captain Canuck Summer Special is a moderately difficult book to find). And the series eventually got picked up and continued by Chapter House Publishing. Unusually for indies, that 1970s series has (for at least some issues) both direct market and newsstand distribution editions, but no variant covers; the later titles featuring the character sometimes have many variant covers. How do we represent this with sets? We could have: Captain Canuck (Archie, 1975) [Title Only] -- this has only the 14 slots, one per issue of the title itself Captain Canuck (Archie, 1975) [Title Only, Specialist] -- there is no "With Variants" here, because the only variants are newsstand editions; this slot has 14 direct market slots, plus one for each issue with NS copies. Other titles with enough issues to count as a set could qualify for their own slots, too. Captain Canuck (2015, Chapter House) certainly, but not Captain Canuck Legacy, which was advertised as a miniseries but only saw 1 issue. Captain Canuck [Category] -- this has one slot for every Captain Canuck book, from the original Archie series to the Chapter House stuff to the various one-shots. Captain Canuck [Category, With Variants] -- same thing, but now Captain Canuck Legacy #1's 1000-copy special edition has its own slot, as do the retailer incentive covers of the 2015 Chapter House series, and so on. Captain Canuck [Category, Specialist] -- as the previous one, but the 1975 newsstands have their own slots too. If we did that, our Captain Canuck collector could get little green ribbons for 5 or more sets using effectively the same physical collection of books. But so what? You can't cash those in for CGC credit. It doesn't matter. It inflates their "total collection" point value, but that is literally the least useful thing the Registry offers. On the other hand, it means someone who just liked the original series can compete with their 14-issue nostalgic run without getting into the weeds or caring about some wacky revival series 30 years later, and if @Iconic1s decides that Captain Canuck is cooler than some dead Superman guy, there are sets available without the newsstands but with all the other goodies that made his sets so compelling. Everyone wins.

I pinged @Lobstrosity to the original thread on this in Ask CCG, and hope he has some input. It's... inconvenient that the discovery copy of this weirdness is a Signature Series slab, because we can't investigate the interior without breaking the chain of custody on the yellow label, which you shouldn't do. Hopefully, someone else can scare up another copy like this. For everyone else's reference, this is what the back of Spawn 9 normally looks like: This cannot have been an accidental creation. One, because that's not how printing works; and, two, because the addition of the white speckling in the black border indicates that the back cover was specifically altered between the two versions, in whichever order they were produced. That leads me to two plausible scenarios here, neither of which is very satisfying: The "no text" back cover was produced as some sort of preview or promotional item and predates the normal print run. Okay, sure, but then why is this a newsstand printing? The "no text" back cover represents a second printing of Spawn #9 newsstand, presumably produced in or after May 1993, so that the "Coming in the May 1993" text was no longer appropriate (nor was the "and every month!" because Shaman's Tears didn't release on anything like a consistent schedule). But the barcode is the same, and should have been changed for an intentional 2nd printing. EDIT: It occurs to me that the label says "signed & sketch by Ash Gonzalez ... on front & back cover". I'm pretty sure I see the back cover signature at upper left above the red frame. Is there any chance that Gonzalez painted a new white-speckled black frame over the existing border? @Coolspider Can you provide a close-up image of the upper left corner, and perhaps also the lower left?

That's interesting, since neither of those covers are particularly explicit.

@CGC Mike Any update on this? I've seen a couple other recent newsstand-labeled slabs, but they all have the same problem. The serial lookup shows the newsstand designation was entered as a Pedigree instead of a Variant, which makes them sort incorrectly in the census (and the registry, which inherits categorization from the census).

On aesthetics alone, the red one looks much better than the gold one. One, black-on-red is better contrast than red-on-gold. Two, red is a Superman color; gold is not. That gold one looks more like a celebration of the 49ers than Superman. No really guys, the S is for San Francisco!

@Lobstrosity Have you ever seen anything like this?

Sun fade. Especially with that area at bottom left mysteriously still in color. It was spared sunlight exposure, probably because of a price sticker or other label.

I love these wacky PSA promotionals. Out of curiosity, I've heard conflicting information about the different printings of #5. Does yours have newsprint or glossy interior pages?

I think figuring out how to actually define sets in some sort of standardized fashion will be helpful if there are going to be completion bonuses.

Agreed on all accounts. In increasing order of availability: Standard Direct, Newsstand, Deluxe Direct. But none of these should be at all scarce, and what the actual is with those prices? Entirely divorced from the reality of the book's supply; this is a bubble.

Wow. That is... not what I would describe as "color lift". They didn't remove ink from the paper surface; they removed the paper's surface.

I'd Mechanical Error that Marvel Must Have back to get the title corrected, since they seem to have confused it with the stand-alone #1. But I might not do so this instant, because they ALSO filed that newsstand designation as Pedigree not Variant, like the other ones above. And that needs to get addressed before any of these will be labeled correctly.

Huh. What do you know Wednesday, coming to Netflix Nov 23. Which is a Wednesday; I was going to be very disappointed in Netflix had it been otherwise. I guess we'll see how that does and if it restores interest in the franchise.

Entirely anecdotally, I'd say that #2 and #3 are tougher books to find than #1. And most of the mid-70s Gold Keys that I've encountered tend to be fairly beat. So this is a nice book! I do think if they ever do another film reboot of the property (and it's good...) or something else to bring the franchise back to public recognition, we'll see quite a few of these mysteriously emerge from their current resting places. But, again, I'd expect more mid-grade copies than 9.x if and when that happens.

Agreed. I think it's likely the CT is along that fragile-looking top edge. Removing amateur CT literally means taking a razor blade to the cover and scraping the ink off the paper. Even if that's what you want to happen, given the chipping I'm pretty sure I see along that margin, I would be concerned that more than just CT would get razored off.

The choice of issues that got the DC Universe treatment, on the other hand...

Out of my personal curiosities, do you have any newsstand copies of Rising Stars (especially #15+) or Midnight Nation? For the former, I'm trying -- without much success -- to determine the last issue that saw dual distribution. I don't think Midnight Nation had newsstand distribution at all, but the dates make it an outside possibility.

@wytshus First and foremost, thanks for everything you do for the Registry, including opening this dialogue. I can only imagine that it's long, thankless work made harder, not easier, by choices made long before you got the role. Thank you. Now, onto my thoughts! Problem 1: Setting and maintaining point values is an impossible task Under the current system, the Registry points for individual slots are, at least in theory, loosely tied to the "value" of the book. When the Registry was created, the comics market was a lot more stable than it is now (and the Registry was smaller), so this value was determined by physically looking up then-recent sales history and kinda-sorta converting that to points. Obviously, that's no longer tenable: The volume of books in the Registry makes determining FMV in this manner impractical. There are entire sites dedicated to attempting to track the market value of books, and even they struggle to keep up. CGC cannot -- and should not, because it presents an appearance of conflict of interest -- be trying to track values like GoCollect or GPA. As an aside, I've long believed this is a problem with the CGC grading fees scaling off FMV, but that's off topic for this thread. The current nature of the market is prone to extremely high, extremely rapid spikes in book values which do not always persist in the long-term. This process simply doesn't work for books that are infrequently traded, whether due to actual scarcity or mere scarcity of collector interest. Additionally, there is arguably a problem where single key books can vastly dominate the Registry value of the rest of their set, although the Registry is ostensibly supposed to reward broad, run-based collection. I did a lot of math about this last year, but basically you can take a title like Albedo (or, to some extent, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and the single hyper-valued key allows for one book to outrank essentially the entire run without that one book. That's fine if the goal is to make Registry sets a measurement of the monetary value of the collection, but: "Registry scores do not equate to market dollars." We also discussed solutions last year. I still like the approach PSA uses for its card Registry, which should clean up the algorithm mess, too, but may or may not be practical from a systems engineering standpoint. However, this does still need consideration as to... Problem 2: How are sets are defined in the first place, and what to do about newsstand editions? Right now, we've got sort of a mess. And it's going to get a lot worse. You can, as it stands, have sets that are: Strictly by title Strictly by title for a specific (sometimes seemingly arbitrary) run By title, but including related books (like one-shot spin-offs) By category, such as all books involved in a cross-title promotion. Death of Superman, just to choose something at not-even-close-to-random. By character (or setting) appearance, regardless of title By artist (or potentially by other contributor -- I wouldn't mind a JMS writer-credit set, but currently there's no precedent for that) Did I miss options? I bet I missed options. Additionally, some sets are (Complete) or (Complete with Variants) or something of that nature. I'll come back to that. The first part of this problem is that it's not entirely clear what belongs in what set. There's a marked conflict when someone thinks a set should be one of these types, but someone else thinks it should be another. And there's quite a bit of logical collection space that gets lost along the way. Let's use an example: The Walking Dead. There are a TON of sets related to The Walking Dead: Walking Dead (2003). This set includes all of the issues of the main series, but with only one slot per issue number. That is to say, it doesn't include any second printings or any variants of any type. However, it does include a whole bunch of books not literally part of the series: Capes 1 and Agents 6 (containing previews of the upcoming series), several spin-off one-shots, plus lots and lots and lots of books that contain short comic stories that belong in the same storyline as The Walking Dead itself but do not share the title (everything from an annual publication of the CBLDF to an issue of Playboy!). Walking Dead (2003 Complete with Variants). This is everything in the above set, plus separate slots for all of the million billion reprints and cover variants this title -- or the associated other books -- has featured. Walking Dead (#1-#48). This is a run set for the title's first storyline, "The Rise and Fall of the Governor". It's a "non-Complete" set, so it doesn't include variants, just one slot per issue by number. Except that it also includes slots for Walking Dead --script Book 1 (a text-only publication of the scripts for the first 6 issues, as originally drafted) and Walking Dead Special Edition 1 (even though this is, fundamentally, a reprint of The Walking Dead 1 with a different indicia). I'll agree those books are related, but surely they're not part of the run, right? Walking Dead: 15th Anniversary Edition Variants. This one is what it says on the tin, which is nice, except... Walking Dead: 15th Anniversary Edition Store Variants. This is a pretty logical grouping, and this time really IS exactly what it says on the tin. The only concern here is that the previous set doesn't really make clear that it's the non-store Anniversary Edition variants (store variants are only in this set, not both of these). Plus separate sets for Walking Dead Deluxe, Walking Dead Deluxe (Complete with Variants), Walking Dead Survivors' Guide, and Walking Dead Weekly (this one contains variants but doesn't say so). And a bunch of foreign republication sets which I'm not going to link because I'm lazy. Whew. Okay then. So here's the problem. Let's say you literally just want to collect the main TWD title (with or without variants, frankly). There's no set for that. Even the issue-limited "run" set includes other, related books. Let's say you want a set for literally everything TWD there is; there's no set for that either because the 4-issue mini (et al) is disjunct. And the new elephant in the room is what those "Complete" or "Complete with Variants" sets really entail. Off the top of my head, you potentially have: Multiple printings, whether or not they have a different cover Variant covers, including everything from retailer incentives to store exclusives to convention swag to just issues that shipped with 50:50 cover ratios because reasons Books printed concurrently with the main run but intended for foreign distribution (Canadian Price Variants, pence copies, etc.) Occasional weird stuff, like test-market price variants Licensed foreign-market (and typically foreign-language) republications And now, newsstand distribution editions... Also, before we move out, pour one out for MJIs, which are noted on the label but not in a ways that makes the Census-distinct so they cannot ever have Registry slots for those so-inclined. Currently, the status quo is that "normal" sets don't include any of that, and have one slot per issue, no questions. "Complete" or "complete with variants" sets have extra slots for multiple printings, for variant covers, and for the weird stuff (like the 35c price variants), but not necessarily the foreign-distribution copies, and not ever the foreign-market books (except for the ones that do, like the various German-market books in the corresponding Spawn set). Set titles don't always make clear what's what. Chosen at random, the set for the 1993 Gambit 4-issue miniseries includes a slot for the Gold Edition variant of #1, but isn't marked Complete or anything of that nature. So I have no idea. And now we're going to have newsstand editions. Probably, anyway. Right now, the newly-slabbed newsstand issues aren't being broken out in the Census correctly, which may or may not be just a display error. But the community is pretty divided between people who are really excited about getting to incorporate newsstand editions into their sets (fair disclosure: I'm in this camp) to people who would rather not participate in the Registry at all if their sets are contaminated with slots for newsstand editions, to probably a cavalcade of intermediate stances. What probably needs to happen is for there to be someway to maintain current Complete sets but also allow a Really Absolutely Complete This Time tier of sets that includes newsstands also (but those still won't include foreign market republications, I assume, so...). What would I do? It's somewhat academic, because no one has likely read this far. I'd try to standardize things. I'd make it clear that there are "title" specific sets (which can have "variants" versions), in addition to broad-focus sets with everything. I'd probably make numbered run sets only what they are (and not typically have variants or other shenanigans options). I'd like to think that for TWD above the set list would look like: Walking Dead (2003) [Title]. Contains one slot for each of the 193 issues of the series, and nothing else. Walking Dead (2003) [Title, Variants]. Contains god knows how many slots for the 193 issues of the series, their reprints and variant covers, but nothing else. Walking Dead (2003) [#1-#48 Run]. Contains one slot for each of the 48 issues in the first storyline, and nothing else. Walking Dead Survivors' Guide [Title]. Contains one slot for each of the 4 issues of the series. Walking Dead [Broad]. Contains everything related to the setting, but only one slot per issue. My problem here is that I don't know how to define a set that includes all the random extras in the current Walking Dead (2003) set but excludes related titles like Walking Dead Deluxe or Walking Dead Survivors' Guide. For that matter, should we? Or should broad categories mean broad categories?? Walking Dead [Broad, Variants]. Same deal, but with all the options. And what to do with newsstands? I think allowing them to have slots in the Variants sets as we have them now is clearly going to make a lot of people unhappy, but not giving them Registry space defeats the purpose of splitting them out. Obviously, I picked a dumb example title, because TWD doesn't have newsstand distribution. But if it did, I'd assume we'd want to permit an additional tier of "completeness" with additional sets titled... I don't know, like this?: Walking Dead (2003) [Title, Variants/Distribution] Walking Dead [Broad, Variants/Distribution] ...or something like that. That still keeps the foreign books out of the main Registry sets because there does seem to be a broad consensus that they're not wanted in the normal listings (and given the state of foreign book collecting and CGC labeling, I'm not going to belabor that point). Character appearance sets get a [Character] tag so no one confuses them with the inevitable series named after that character. Creator books can get a [Creator] tag; perhaps artist categories would be [Creator, Variants] by default since you want variant covers in an artist set, while a writer set is probably fine with one slot per physical issue unless someone wants both available. Some existing sets might not fit in the standardized rubric, and could probably be tagged [Legacy] to grandfather them in, with the understanding that future sets should follow the patterns where possible.

And featured artwork by an artist with what could be described as Nazi sympathies. And somehow managed to land Gatherer card id #1488, a significant codeword number for neo-Naziism. That had to go. Most of the rest came along for the ride. As for Earthbind and this inane 30th Anniversary product... meh. We know they're not gonna print art like that again. They aren't memory hole-ing it, just not including it in this stupid non-play-legal cash grab product. I'm... not really concerned. Besides, there's credible reason to believe that they may not have had reprint rights from Quinton Hoover's estate to begin with.