Qalyar

@CGC Mike I know you've already been pinged to the discussion of this in the Modern section, but in the interests of wider attention... Books that have been broken out this way appear to have the NS edition entered as a Pedigree rather than a Variant, which means they aren't showing up separately in the Census (among other things). Is this intended? It certainly doesn't seem to be what was advertised regarding the policy change.

Glad I haven't mailed my planned box of reholders yet!

There was another recent NS edition book upthread also, a Fantastic Four #399. Same problem. @CGC Mike Pinging Mike on this one, because it is my understand that this was not the intended outcome of the new newsstand policy, and this needs to be handled ASAP to minimize the effects.

Grade date on that book was 10/06/2022, so that's almost certainly a post-policy-change newsstand designation. Nice book. ...even if my wife did walk by while I was looking at it and commented, "They have a Ratman too?" And now I can't unsee the title that way. So I'm sharing with everyone else instead.

Without regard to whether this signature is legitimate, many forged signatures are on low-value books. The idea is that the books can be bought up for essentially nothing, turned into "signed" copies, and then flipped (usually below the typical market value for the signature) for 100% profit. You could build a paper fortress entirely from the mid-grade run-fill that has been defaced with fraudulent Stan Lees, for example. More broadly, this is sort of why I think that signature authentication without provenance is dubious at best, especially when you're dealing with creators who are trying to sign with unfamiliar or uncooperative pens in the often-hasty conditions of signing booths. Sure, the "-an-" in McFarlane looks a little weird on this book. Does that mean it's a forgery... or that he merely fell short of total consistency with all of his signatures?

I don't believe anyone has attempted a similar monograph for any other Image books. It is my understanding that Witchblade #74 is the last issue of that title to have a newsstand printing, but that's honestly received wisdom at this point. Odds are... pretty good that there are similar levels of shenaniganry on that run as with Spawn (although perhaps the Top Cow stuff is different? Who knows!).

Sure, I'll embarrass myself!

I consider that document to the be the gold standard of specialist investigations. It's easy to read, it's thorough, it's (as far as we know, anyway!) comprehensive. Out of curiosity, I've always wondered... do we know what distributors handled which bar codes for the two-distributor era? I'd assume Diamond and Capital, but the paired bar codes continue rather a long time after there was no such thing as Capital.

I just want to say that for anyone interested in mini-comics from the '80s "new wave underground" era, some of these are really nice. You found a good, if very niche, collection there, rjpb. Very little of this material is common in any sense of the word, but a couple of the things listed here (Weird! Mutants of the Future, Recombinant Timmy) don't even show up in the usual indexes to these books. There are two (ish) distinguishable variants of this one, and I've heard that they might correspond to the copies that were bundled in Tuna Casserole #5 versus sold separately, but I can't confirm that as accurate. Or provide any guidance as to which is which even if that's true. In any case, this version has Wayno's signature at the top-right of the front cover. The other version reads "No Way Secret Publication #1" there instead. That... isn't really helpful, but it's all I've got. Anecdotally, Wayno may also have reprinted this book (in the signature version) sometime after 2000; reprints are apparently on shockingly-bright Halloween-orange stock instead of this sort of buff-colored paper. For the record, this is a 2nd printing. First printing copies are black and white on yellow stock.

This. Grade a book with facsimile components as if they were not present at all (because they aren't). So in this case, you have a coverless book with additional pages missing, and that's way, way into NG-land even if the cyborg bits make it look pretty.

Nope. Print run wasn't real big for those last few Alf issues because who cares? And then that issue in particular has become a meme collectible for obvious seal-molestation reasons. Not recalled, though.

From roughly December 1993 to October 1998, Image had two concurrent distributors, which resulted in them printing newsstand copies with two different bar codes. The first 5 digits of the barcode were used to distinguish the two sets of books. For their primary distribution account, they used a wide variety of numbers, but the secondary distributor code is almost always 73361 (Spawn #50 -- and perhaps only that book -- used 74851). The 73361 books are potentially less common. We have one legitimate data point to support that argument: Cure of the Spawn #16-19 exist in newsstand only with the 73361 code, and they are considerably less common than most Spawn newsstands (indeed, Curse of the Spawn #17 newsstand is somewhat-anecdotally believed to be one of the rarest books Image produced). However, that doesn't mean all 73361 books are at all rare. I actually suspect that some of the early 73361s may be more common than their counterparts, at least on some titles. Regardless, even more so than the normal direct market/newsstand split, anyone who tries to tell you precise ratio numbers or anything of that nature for these likely also has a bridge to sell you. Indeed, the weird landscape of Image newsstand variants is pretty well-documented for Spawn, but virtually unknown for Image's other titles. Does everything with a newsstand printing in that timeframe have two barcode variants? No one knows! I do know that the Image stuff I'm currently collecting falls entirely outside the relevant time range, so -- while I consider this extremely interesting -- I don't have much firsthand input to offer.

TI-99/4A. Played a lot of TI Invaders, Chisolm Trail, Hunt the Wumpus, and a great many of the Scott Adams Adventure cassettes.

The longer this goes on, and the more the posts devolve into babble, the more I suspect that these originated as a totally normal copy of Batman Noir that was, in some fashion, modified to produce these 'zomg special rare movie cast secret printings'. @Joseph eaker I assume you have ... whatever these are ... in your possession. What you should do is to post, for each book, clear photos of the front cover, the back cover, the inside front cover, and any page that contains publication information (that dedication is not publication information). Ideally also a photo showing the edge of the spine. At that point, it might be possible to make a better determination about what's going on here.

Contra is actually far from my favorite franchise, but I'm a huge fan of these weird little promotional comic one-offs, and this one's been on my radar for awhile just because of the obscurity. Mega Man, for what it's worth, has a far larger comic book presence, including a 55-issue series (plus a couple of related mini-series and one-offs) from Archie Comics , a 4-issue mini from Dreamwave, a 4-issue mini from Udon, and a 6-issue mini from Boom. And that doesn't count an abundance of cover variants. Which is neat and all, but I'm not quite that big a fan.

Contra actually has become a pretty large franchise, with 10-ish main-series games and sundry spinoffs. I, too, feel that I was better at them when I was younger! This 2002 comic is the only comic book ever released in association with the franchise. It was created for the launch of Contra: Shattered Soldier on PS2, marking the series' return to non-handheld consoles for the first time since 1992's Contra III: The Alien Wars on SNES. The comic itself, with all interior text and dialogue in both English and Japanese, is more or less a plot summary of Contra III, so that players would be familiar with the storyline from a decade prior. General consensus is that it was supposed to be distributed as some sort of promotional give-away, including with the US release (which was actually the first region for this title). That didn't happen, and as far as anyone knows, no copies were ever distributed in North America. Oops. The overwhelming majority of known copies were pack-ins in the clamshell case of 真魂斗羅 (Shin Contra), the Japanese edition of the game, although there are reliable reports that not all JP games include the comic (my guess: there was more than one pressing of the disc, and not all of them were paired with with comic). A very small number of copies of the comic (single digits, from reliable reports) were apparently also given out directly thought other promotional channels in Japan. Perhaps because of the limited distribution, Konami Tokyo made a digital edition of the comic freely available; that website is long gone to link rot, but the people who maintain the Contra Wiki saved the images, for anyone who wants to read this strange little thing. Solid black cover mini-comic that almost exclusively shipped underneath the plastic case clips in a Japanese-only video game clamshell case? Yeah, these are not everyday discoveries, and condition tends to be terrible. This copy's a bit bendy, and has indentations on the back cover from the case molding, but none of that seems to break color, so I think if I'm ever so inclined, it might be able to press up to a 9.4-9.6.

Any fans of the video game franchise? Here's one you very much don't see everyday!

Off the top of my head, there are a few possibilities for what these are. These are probably not exhaustive: They could be privately produced (that is to say, not an actual DC product). For these books, that would probably mean that someone took apart a copy of the hardcover and converted it into individual "comic books". This is the worst outcome in terms of collector interest. They could have been produced for internal distribution. Publishers sometimes produce exclusives to give away to their own employees (or, perhaps, to a film cast...). There's rarely any acknowledgement that these exist, and sometimes the general public does not learn about them until well after the fact. This would be the most interesting possibility, obviously. It's possible that DC considered releasing Batman Noir as individual books and these are printer's tests or plate proofs or something of that nature from a project that was ultimately cancelled (or, less likely, from pre-production of the hardcover). This probably wouldn't be as exciting as if these were internally released, but would be better than a privately-created product. I pretty much never take sellers of weird stuff at their word without confirmation, and it's going to be ... difficult to determine their origin without more information than we currently have.

That actually reads "Will Jungkuntz", and isn't unique to ... whatever these are. Will Jungkuntz was a comic artist who died of a sudden heart attack at age 30. He had cited Frank Miller as a major influence, and Miller dedicated the first volume of The Dark Knight Returns to him. If you want to see his work, the most representative example is probably his "Blood n' Gutz" series, serialized in issues 1-4 of the 1985 Savage Tales magazine. It was intended to be a 5-part story, but he died before completing it, and despite efforts to get other artists to finish the story on his behalf, the magazine was cancelled shortly afterward, and that never happened. He's probably better known for his work on Echo of Futurepast and Crazyman, but for both of those, he just did pencils with Neal Adams following up with ink work (and it's pretty clear that the finished product owes more to Neal Adams). None of that gets us any closer to identifying what these are. I agree that they look like the contents of the Batman Noir: The Dark Knight Returns hardcover, except that, you know, they're not a hardcover.

The really interesting thing about your 2012 ASM Hooky is that it is a newsstand edition.

Anyone reading or collecting moderns has probably seen Nate Piekos's work. He's the letterer on a lot of books from just about every publisher, and is the creator-owner of the font and typography company BlamBot. He was also the writer and illustrator of the webcomic Realm of Atland. In 2004, Piekos was one of a group of webcomic creators who pooled resources to become small-press non-web comic creators under the PV Comics banner, and in 2005 Atland launched as a physical book. Eventually, the whole PV Comics thing didn't work out, and Piekos published later issues directly under the BlamBot name. All told, it ran (I think) 11 issues, and the first few actually went to second printings. In the years since then, with Piekos focusing his time on BlamBot, the webcomic itself has fallen offline as well. None of the PV Comics titles are particularly plentiful, nor -- so far as I know -- does anyone actually collect any of them. But I was fond of Realm of Atland during its 8-ish year run (plus a brief revival circa 2015), so was happy to pick up this pretty nice copy of Atland #2.

Nice book! Although I'll just pause here to say that CGC's treatment of this particular comic is ... annoying and inconsistent. There are three separate listings in the census for Snatch Comics #1, plus multiple printings listed under that first entry. Some of the information on some of the labels is incorrect because of how they have approached these books. Let's look a the listings: The first census listing gives these books a "No Date" publication year. Which is defensible, as there is literally no date printed in the book (although that's going to cause some conflicts in a little bit). However, we're off to a questionable start because there are no first printing copies attributed to this census record (we'll see them soon, though). What we do have there are second, third, fourth, and sixth printings. The absence of a fifth printing is correct; as the fourth printing label notes: "4th & 5th printings believed to be indistinguishable". Buuuut we have another problem. Because the labels also say that these are all published by Apex Novelties, and that's wrong. In fact, only the first three printings are by Apex; the 4th/5th and 6th printings were produced by Print Mint. Ruh roh. Also... if we're going to "No Date" these books on account of the lack of a printed date, then it's interesting that we have publishers at all, because neither Apex nor Print Mint actually acknowledged their responsibility for this thing on the printed paper. The second census listing is for first edition copies, and attributes them with a 10/68 release date. Again, that doesn't appear in the book itself, but it is actually correct for the first printing. First printing copies of Snatch #1 are considerable rarities, as very few were produced (the Kennedy guide says 800; a quoted figure of 250 came at one point from Don Donahue himself). Whatever the exact number, they're quite rare! The last census listing up there is duplication. It includes only the 4th printing (again mis-attributed to Apex Novelties) but this time lists the 6/72 publication date that was, in fact, when the 4th printing released. I guess that could be a lot worse... For the record, for anyone happening across a copy of this book in the wild and wondering what they have found: If it has a 25-cent cover price, it is an Apex Novelties printing: Check pages 10-11. If the comic whose text begins "A Few Mates" is printed across both pages, it's a first printing (250-800 copies, 10/68). Congratulations! You might consider having this graded. Demand and value is high in pretty much any condition, as this is one of the defining books of an underground comics collection. Otherwise, "A Few Mates" will be entirely on page 10, with a different comic on page 11. Now check pages 4 and 12. If page 4 has a Crumb cartoon with a bus stop sign and page 12 has the "Git Whitey!" cartoon, it's a second printing (5000 copies or less, 1969); these are quite rare but not nearly as valuable as firsts. Otherwise, those two cartoons will be reversed and it is a third printing (probably 10000-30000 copies, 1969). Technically, Donahue/Apex printed "third printing" books again in 1970 and 1971, but those three runs are identical (and not counted as separate printings, unlike the 4th/5th; just run with it...) and a 1969 date seems as good as any. Otherwise, it's a Print Mint copy. If the cover price is 50 cents, it's the 4th printing (25000 copies, 6/72; that print run includes the 15000-copy 5th printing in 1973 because those two runs are indistinguishable). Otherwise, the cover price should be 75 cents, and you have a 6th printing (10000 copies, 1973).

Thanks for the response! No worries about the delay there, I know you had bigger, hurricane-shaped things to deal with for awhile there. Best wishes for everyone in the area.

1st printing. Steeldragon Press, $1.60 CP 2nd printing. Steeldragon Press, $1.75 CP Kitchen Sink Press reprint. There are 5 printings. The first four all have a $2.00 CP and I don't believe are distinguishable from the front cover. 5th printing copies have a $2.50 CP. These are probably not worth buying except at dollar bin rates. There is also a #1 from a mini series with its own numbering, from Fantagraphics. Different cover, with a white background. That's not a great rarity, but it's probably a $10ish book or a bit better

Third and later printings are from Kitchen Sink Press instead of Steeldragon. EDIT: For clarity, Kitchen Sink reprinted the Steeldragon #1 (in a book that went to 5 printings with KSP). At least as far as I know, there is no Steeldragon 3rd printing.