Qalyar

Honestly, unless it's a real beater, you're probably quite a bit ahead with the 2nd printing at $5, too!

Coffin Comics stuff is ... weird, and I don't think they're representative of the market. Virtually all the Lady Death limited-run stuff sells out. Relatively little of it appears on the secondary market, so it's safe to assume that it's not going to some misguided market of short-term flippers. I guess there could be people buying these high-priced limited variants as mid- or long-term speculation buys, but I don't think that makes much sense either. Lady Death isn't likely to become a suddenly-hot mainstream property (technically she even already had a film adaptation, kinda sorta). And gambling on high-cover-price books from a really niche indie publisher seems dumber than most speculation plays. No, I think the Coffin limiteds sell out because Lady Deah (and Brian Pulido, more broadly) has a small but dedicated following that buys up pretty much all the related merchandise. I assume the number of those collectors is roughly parallel to the number of copies in those limited runs. That's why we don't see piles of them regurgitated on eBay; they're going into the personal collections of people invested in the franchise, and who want to have what are in a lot of ways limited edition art prints of Lady Death as drawn by various cover artists. On the other hand, I suspect most of the buyers of Counterpoint's books do think that they're investments because they are rare and gimmicky. There's little (at best) story to any of the Counterpoint books. There are no characters to be dedicated fans of. Everything Counterpoint produces is literally just a delivery engine for endless variants. It... makes very little sense to me, but I think some people with huge stacks of these are going to be very, very unhappy at some point in the near future. The economics of Marvel or DC books with Too Many Covers is likely another thing entirely. The big question in my mind is how store variants, specifically, are judged by future collectors. I think the answer will be "poorly", but we'll have to see. Stuff like convention releases or especially RRP variants have a pretty good stake to relevancy so long as their base books have appeal. I don't think the Batman 608 RRP or Saga 1 DRS/C2E2 are going to have their price floor fall out from under them any time in the foreseeable future, absent a total collapse of the collectibles sector.

I don't care if pedigree books are worth more points than blue labels. Heck, I think that's a better idea than having SS books worth more points than blue labels (although I'm unabashedly anti-SS). But pedigree books shouldn't have their own slots, because they were not created as physically-distinguishable books by their publisher.

The weirdest thing for me about this TPB is that it collects the first 3 issues of a 4-issue miniseries. To be fair, there was a really long delay before President Evil #4 released, and I think there was some question as to whether it was ever going to happen. So I guess, since the series got some press attention, that they'd compile what they had as better than nothing.

You an Archer Prewitt fan, Beyonder? This has always been such a weird book. Anyway, CGC's graders tend to really hate these "full book" defects that go from the front cover to the back. I could see them sending this back with like a 9.2 just for that. On the other hand, I looked as close as possible at the front cover and don't see a color break there. If this presses out, you're in the 9.6/9.8 world. I see no other defects. Sof'Boy would be happy no matter what grade, of course.

Do normal reholders and reholdering for the purposes of the newsstand designation count as the same service level? That is to say, if I send in a shipment containing both types of reholders, will they be shipped back to me together or separately (and thus incurring additional shipping costs)?

I have only slightly greater respect for Coffin than I do for Counterpoint. Coffin does still at least publish actual stories with the characters they own the rights to, so there's that. But their abuse of variant cover madness makes 90s Image look tame. I can only assume the contents of their books are a secondary concern at this point, because they're basically a publisher of limited-edition art prints disguised as comics. I really can't imagine that either publisher's oeuvre will hold value in even the medium-term. There's just too much of it to be legitimately collectible, sold at prices that I can't imagine the secondary market would ever recoup.

Planet is one of the premier titles in its genre, though, so I'm not sure I'd draw any assumptions from those sales to less-well-known books.

I feel theft is an impractical explanation here. Perhaps is #101 was the affected book, but it seems very strange that a thief would pick a much less valuable book in the same submission to target. Sadly, especially given the trend of recent process failures, I think comprehensive incompetence and institutional apathy are the most likely causes. @CGC Mike Appreciated, but is there any chance that you -- or some other representative -- can give us some sort of public feedback on this one? The error itself is bad, but pretty much any chain of events I can envision that would lead to this involves some pretty serious mishandling of submitters' books. Having this happen immediately before you're going to start getting newsstand reholders is not, let's say, encouraging.

Increasingly, it seems that submissions are simply playing the numbers game. Most of them do go off without a problem, but things like this are very much cause to reconsider.

Exactly. It sucks when they flub a 2nd printing, or swap two books from a single submission. Or even when human error damages a book in their possession. We are right to complain about all such things, no matter the frequency, because an authentication and certification service should strive for perfection. But it's still good to remember that people are people and a few of those types of events are likely inevitable; the goal is to minimize them and have a means to mitigate their ongoing effects. This event isn't at all excusable, because it implies that each submitters' books are not being properly segregated. Blue label instead of green, yeah, that's a problem, but literally a different customer's book swapped into the case in its place? That's worrisome. Presumably, this means that somewhere between the grading floor and encapsulation, books are not being containerized by submission, but instead... what? Bandied about in big stacks? I really don't know. The worst thing is that this instantly makes every claim of "this book is misgraded because CGC swapped it out for a different copy!" suddenly seem more plausible.

Obviously @CGC Mike is a little busy with a major hurricane at the moment, but I look forward to him chiming in here to confirm that this is passed to the QA team so that someone can get sent to a reeducation camp or outright terminated or something. Mike, I know you can't and won't be commenting on internal processes, but after you tell the QA department to roll some heads, you should ALSO tell your bosses that there's a serious workflow problem somewhere in the operation, because there's zero reason why this should even be possible unless books are not being handled the way that we've all been assured they are. Seriously, I love the service this company provides, but you've got to get your together on stuff like this...

I also could be wrong. I collect some late 70s stuff but the bulk of my current focus is quite a bit more recent. And I've never been a Hulk guy.

Are you sure about that on Hulk 234? I don't have one handy, but I don't believe any copies of that one had a strikethrough UPC box.

That's probably the smart bet, but I'd like to think that since they're implementing this as a new process, they have a chance not to make a total -show of it from the start.

I'll be particularly interested in seeing how CGC handles the weird edge cases. In particular: Spawn #2. Image changed from the DM glossy paper to the newsprint NS paper during production of Spawn #2. Literally during. NS copies exist with both papers (additionally, the thin-paper one has the month ("JUNE") removed from the cover. Spawn #16 through #77 (excluding #69-#71). Image shipped NS books via two different distributors for this period, because reasons. Accordingly, these books exist with two different ISBNs. One of them is consistently much rarer than the other (for #69-#71, NS copies were only available through the low-volume distributor). As far as the hardest books to distinguish NS vs DM? Unquestionably the various issues where the barcode is on the back instead of the front.

And at least in some cases, the physical printer. Needless to say, I'm really happy with this change. Now, if we can just get CGC to end the occasional practice of "two different covers exist" and similar things of that nature for books they decided weren't interesting enough to break out, that'd also be great!

CGC's previous policy was to differentiate NS editions from DM editions when there was something -- anything -- other than the barcode/image box that distinguishes the two. In a lot of cases, the NS books have a different cover price, or some added (or removed) line of text. In the case of some Spawn issues, the difference is paper; the NS were printed on a thinner, less-glossy paper stock than the DM copies. Needless to say, this was sometimes somewhat arbitrary.

Of all the things I've searched for for my personal collection, some of the hardest to find in high grade have been otherwise common issues that either are now or once were deemed dollar-bin fodder. For exactly this reason. I've had large retailers ship me unbagged, unboarded comics that were ostensibly "NM" or "NM+" and tell me that I shouldn't have cared about the condition anyway because they aren't worth anything. Books don't go from ultra-discount drek to hot market movers very often, but you'd think we'd have seen it enough by now to stop treating disfavored titles like origami paper at the least. I don't actually think I knew about this one. Add another piece of obscurity to go on my ever-widening watch list!

Honestly, one of the things that makes me sad about -- not everyone, but broadly speaking -- the current state of our hobby is that the primary concern about everything is so often "what it's worth". I think that's what makes the discussion about these books so likely to become heated. And I know, this is a business, not a hobby, for a lot of people here (it used to be mine). But we're supposed to be collectors, too, right? And I think one of the really compelling things about the distribution variants -- especially at the ends of their timeline -- is the story they tell. The early DM books, the ones with the slashed barcodes, exist because of the growing industry influence of dedicated comic book stores. The whole point of that distinction was that direct-market books weren't returnable; if they didn't sell, too bad, the store still had to deal with them. The comic store as many of us know it, with all those long boxes of back issues to browse through and discover, exists in a large part because of the financial gamble that those early slash-coded books represent. To some extent, we're here because of those books. And then, on the other end of the spectrum, you've got the late newsstands. Comic book stores had won; they hadn't just co-existed with returnable distribution, they pushed returnable distribution out of the market entirely. But those last, late newsstands -- sold mostly in mall bookstores, but also airport kiosks, convenience stores, and a handful of other outlets -- were the publishers still trying, even as finances turned against them, to reach out with their stories to people who would never think to walk into a store dedicated to the hobby. Or the smaller publishers along the way who gambled on allowing returnable distribution just to get wider exposure, facing the real risk that a bad month of returns might cost them the money they needed to stay in the game. Yeah, there's a big stretch of time in the middle when major-publisher newsstand copies aren't really anything special, when the distribution was equal or close to it, where maybe the only thing one version has over the other is that direct market books were a little more likely to be sold to someone who cared more about their condition than their contents. But the rise and fall of distribution variants is the story of comics books' modern history, and we get to see it on the covers of the books we collect. Surely that's at least as worthy of our collecting attention as, say, books that are only special because of cover art that a specific retailer paid to have exclusive distribution rights to?

I hate that there's been so much rampant and unvarnished market manipulation with these books, because I do think the distribution format variants are worth collecting as their own entities. The people who've tried to argue that their books are worth $56146 because DM:NS print ratios are 2359:1 or whatever nonsense have obviously done a lot of damage to the public perception, though.

I would never remove post-manufacturing staples. It doesn't make the defect disappear (okay, you don't have staples, now you have staple holes), and the potential to make things worse is high.

I hope you'll reconsider ... both aspects of this, really. First, you have fantastic registry sets, and I don't think the potential addition of newsstand slots is going to make any of them at realistic risk of being dethroned from their positions. Especially looking at the Death of Superman set, there's just no realistic way that someone could take any realistic inferior set, add some newsstands, and beat what you've accomplished there. Nor, honestly, do I think anyone would try to do so. There may be some edge-case sets out there somewhere where the addition of newsstands will be a major issue in competitiveness but I expect that to be the exception rather than the norm. But I'd also like to encourage you to consider... actually being interested in newsstand printings, at least for some of these books. Obviously, there are a lot of differences between distribution printing variants versus secondary printings. But there's sometimes also a lot of similarities. Something like Superman #82, for example. The first and second printing are almost "the same book"; they differ by the presence or absence of a roman numeral II in the upper left corner (and, I believe, a note in the indicia). The cover art is the same. The content is the same. To a lot of people, they're the same book. But, of course, they aren't (and that 9.8 2nd printing you have in that set is particularly nice). The difference between a 1st printing DM copy and a 1st printing newsstand is, of course, just the contents of that box at the bottom-left... but also the story of the book. What kind of businesses it was sold to, what journey it took to get from production to collection. With Death of Superman, in particular, I think it's amazing that Superman 75 not only went to four printings for the direct market, but that it went to four printings for newsstand sales, also; I'm not sure, but it may very well be unique in that regard (and I actually didn't realize all four printings had NS editions until I was looking up books related to your set!). That's a testament to the uniquely enormous cultural impact of that book. Most newsstand comics probably never sold out their entire run and had copies returned for refunds (which is why no one does them anymore), but so many people outside the comic-book-store crowd wanted to buy that book and read about the death of Superman, that it sold out in bookstores and newsstands not once, not twice, but at least three times. I'm probably not going to pretend that I'm going to convince you -- or anyone else -- that these books are interesting or worthwhile if you've decided otherwise. And I get that irresponsible pricing by market manipulators has soured a lot of people on newsstand collecting in general. People suck. But regardless, I hope you reconsider packing up what you've accomplished here. I love the hunt, especially for books that are subtly different from what they seem to be. So I'm really, really excited that I have more books to find, and more -- sometimes challenging -- books to showcase. But that doesn't lessen your collection's value as it stands, even if you don't want to change anything.

Contrariwise, I hope there's some way to incorporate this decision into the Registry.

Nope! PS2-exclusive spinoff of the more familiar PC EverQuest. This comic, in particular, also wasn't a pack-in with the game itself. It was a preorder bonus, although not all preorders got copies; details are scarce, but there's some evidence that only people who preordered through the PS2 online shopping portal received them.