Qalyar

Dollar box, huh? That's an amazing find! May I ask the circumstances of its discovery? I'd love to see if there's anything connecting this to one of the previously known but vanished copies. That looks like a pretty clean copy, too!

I'll go 8.5 if that's a printer's crease, or 8.0 if it's a post-production crease or surface abrasion. Regardless, pretty nice presentation. Copies of the UK printing are tough.

If you mean that defective logo on the inside front cover, some percentage of the print run has that defect. CGC doesn't treat it differently from non-splotchy copies, there's no value difference, and no one seems to care. Basically, not all copies have that, but it's essentially normal.

Since this is a PGX 10, I'm guessing it's a Modern book, and probably a fairly recent one at that. For older books, especially GA/SA material, I always recommend de-slabbing PGX products prior to doing anything else with them, because they've never had a strong track record for page checks and the like. Regardless... If you plan to resell the book, do some market research first -- and assume that your PGX 10 would be a CGC 9.6 or 9.8, unless there are visible defects that would suggest a lower grade. Just come to terms with the near certainty that it will not be a CGC 9.9 or 10. Depending on the book, crossover grading may or may not be financially viable. For some books, you may have the best luck selling them raw. Even for 10 labels, there's a pretty small constellation of titles where the PGX slab is a value-add; most people recognize that their grading is simply not reliable. If you plan to keep it in your personal collection, much of that still applies, although the factors that determine whether it's "worth" slabbing at CGC may be different. I know I have quite a few CGC slabs in my PC that are not, financially, worth the cost of encapsulation. But that's not why I did it. Other than that, I personally wouldn't want one of their slabs in my collection, so I'd rather deslab than keep a comic in that state. If you opt to crossgrade, I'm neutral about whether to deslab yourself or let CGC do it. There are risks of damage either way.

Recent evidence suggests CGC isn't as harsh on sun shadow as I would have expected them to be, but I think there's still more potential for wiggle room here than usual. I'll go 7.5, but let's say +/- one grade depending on their mood at the time regarding that defect. Whatever technical grade this gets, that front cover is stunning.

MH's prices have lost any connection to reality. I occasionally check them as a sort of database for weird variants, newsstands, etc. although as this demonstrates, that's hardly reliable either. I think what makes the prices worse is that they've absolutely got the worst grading of what is consider the "major" internet comic retailers. NM and VF aren't supposed to mean "Not Mint" and "Various Flaws"...

These sorts of panel-exclusive giveaways are often really hard to find copies of. This one happens to also be the first cover appearance of a character who was a big hit in the MCU, so it has that going for it also. And, frankly, it's a sharp-looking book. I like the partial sketch variant much, much more than the fully realized cover art.

Did not know that! Guess that makes these a lot more accessible than they were originally. Publisher stock dumps and warehouse finds always mess with things!

If Counterpoint does something that makes the replacement copies distinguishable, then they'd be considered 2nd printings. If not, no notation. This is actually the reality for some underground comix, where there are known to have been multiple printings, but no reliable way to distinguish them. The situation is a little weirder here because Counterpoint numbers the copies of most of their books, so in principle, someone who has knowledge of the books in question would be able to identify the reprints by copy number, but I don't think that's enough of an issue to make them "2nd printing" for label purposes. More than anything, this is a reminder not to trust advertised print runs! It also indicates that Counterpoint is willing to behave more like a print on demand service than a normal comic publisher, but I can't quite muster the effort to be surprised by that, given what a joke Counterpoint is as a "comic publisher" to begin with. They're basically just a vast factory for an endless series of covers, wrapped around a tiny number of largely low-effort books to pretend they're still comics. I have never understood why they hold any demand at all.

Diamond makes some bad decisions some times, so I wasn't sure if ND had worked something out. Because otherwise, I really feel like the ND foils are pretty much the same sort of thing as the C2E2 books. A retailer modified existing comics and marketed them as exclusive variants. When it comes down to it, that's what happened in both cases, right? I know that CGC gave at least some ND foils a blue label, but I wonder if they would make the same decision now if they had that choice to do over again. Honestly, I think any of this sort of aftermarket customization ought to be in a green label; my only real question is how "legitimate" does such a thing have to be in order to earn a label variant. Surely, I can't just go foil stamping books willy-nilly and get them encapsulated as green-label "Qalyar Special Edition" books, right?

I'm always happy to see that one. That's the Starbright Foundation give-away book, and while I wouldn't consider it extremely elusive, it definitely doesn't show up in the secondary markets as often as some of the other "health" promos do. Likely because this was intended as a promo for kids with life-changing injuries (the story is a young X-Men recruit who suffers disfiguring facial burns), it probably didn't have the print run of similar books with a wider target audience. There are actually two versions of this one, also. Starbright had a Spanish-language variant produced for non-English speaking kids. As an added bit of info, if that cover art style looks familiar to some folks, that's because all the art for this promo was done by John Paul Leon, better known for interior pencils on Earth X and the first 9 or so issues of Static (and a ton of other stuff at both DC and Marvel). Sadly, Leon passed away from cancer last year at age 49.

Did New Dimension market those via Diamond? I ... honestly couldn't remember. I certainly ignored them at the time, regardless of how they were marketed. Regardless, we certainly don't require books to have gone through traditional distribution channels to be "valid" variants or whathaveyou; especially these days, there's quite a few variants that are (or are effectively) web sale exclusives. Certainly though, I'll agree that the New Dimension Miracleman foils have the benefit of being 90s creations rather than something happening now, but that really just underscores the need to come up with a consistent approach for this sort of thing. If I bought a bunch of copies of a book -- does it matter what book, even? -- and, under the auspices of the comic store I used to manage, reissued them with a cool foil stamp on the cover, would that warrant consideration as a new "variant"? If so, are they blue-label eligible? Would it matter if I got Diamond to act as an intermediary for my sales?

If I promised that received books were being held in a secure facility, and then realized I was about to hit capacity on that facility, I would either: 1) stop accepting new submissions, or 2) disclose what my mitigation procedure was going to be. Honestly, if that happened, the right solution would probably be to acquire some comparably secure, nearby warehousing solution to use as a holding area. That's ... not great, but it would probably be at least kinda-sorta tolerable if done with appropriate disclosure. Sure, some people would halt submissions until you sunsetted the overflow storage, but, hey, if you're operating above processing capacity, that's not the end of the world either. What I would not do is covertly mail received books to Randy in Boise while allow everyone to believe that I was still holding them in my existing facility.

So, I was late the party on this nonsense because I was out of the country for a bit, but... Obviously, there's some downright skeevy stuff going on with purchase limits being ignored for "favored" people and immediate resale, all of which screams "market manipulation" in a large, bold-faced font. Let's ignore that for a second, and just consider the idea of a "re-publisher" taking an existing book and stapling a new cover over the existing one. That's new (I think), but it's not entirely without precedent. So far as I know, there have been at least two other rounds of after-market cover manipulation. CGC hasn't handled them all the same way, and I'm curious what the "right" answer should be: New Dimension Comics bought a big pile of new old stock copies of various issues Eclipse Comics' Miracleman after Eclipse imploded. Deeming them "Archive Editions", New Dimension stamped a Miracleman head on the cover in variously-colored foil (silver, gold, blue, and red exist; some in extremely limited numbers). CGC appears to grade these as Foil Edition; for example, here's the listing for #23, including the "Platinum Foil Edition". As far as I can tell, these are eligible for blue labels if there's nothing else that would alter that; a lot of them are also signed, so it's tough to know for sure what's up with the green label slabs. Wizard, back when they were doing co-published #0s and #1/2s and various shenanigans, had a great idea. They would sell creator-signed books with a little hologram stamp added to the cover to indicate authenticity and marked them as "Wizard Authentic Editions". As an example, here's Rising Stars #0's census. As far as I know, all CGC-graded Wizard Authentic Editions are green label books ... but because they are also all unwitnessed signed copies, that's the best they could be. Regardless, CGC does offer these their own label designation. Although it's worth noting that they've been deemed "non-competitive" for Registry purposes. So... /shrug? And then, of course, we have the C2E2 Acetategate kerfluffle, where a "republisher" stapled a new cover on the book and declared it a new product. I feel like the New Dimensions foils are actually a lot similar to the C2E2 books except for the shady market manipulation side plot. And, at least initially, they both were blue-label eligible. The C2E2 tomfoolery probably won't be the last time a third party company uses existing books they didn't originally produce or contract for in order to manufacture a new collectible. Obviously, individual collectors can care, or not, as they desire. But what do we want CGC to do with these sorts of things?

Thanks for the assumptions. I've had an account there for quite some time (sine May 2020; I had to go check). Believing that CGC represents the best offering in this industry does not mean that I have not dealt with their competitor, not that the encapsulated books I own (and have owned) have been exclusively CGC's. But, yes, if we discover at some point that CGC removes unslabbed submissions from the Sarasota facility, ships them to random employees' houses in and outside of Florida, and then has those people ship them back to the corporate office for actual slabbing, I'll be exactly as angry with them as I am with their competitor. Because that's such an amazingly stupid process that no one should ever have considered it.

Distinction without a difference in this case, sadly. Although with the amount of shipping back and forth apparently involved, my first guess would be shipping failure rather than employee misconduct. But the fact that you can't tell the different is just one of the many problems with this purported arrangement, if it did indeed operate as described.

If the communication on the lost books over at the other guys' operation is to be believed at face value, they had set up a system during COVID where (apparently unopened) shipments in the receiving backlog were being sent to employees' homes for them to do the inbounding process, and then re-ship the indexed books back to the company operation for grading. If that's accurate, holy . Transportation is the riskiest activity for books in the entire grading and encapsulation process. Lost books entirely aside, the idea that received books would be shipped to a residence, handled by an individual outside of the controls of the corporate environment, and then shipped back -- regardless of what method of "shipping" was employes, is horrifying. CGC has certainly had some problems, and I've been as happy to call them out as the next guy, but CGC has always made it clear that books received in the CGC facility are secured in that facility until they go back out the door on their way to their owner. Hell, not even the other other guys -- which we all universally make fun of as a slapdash operation with dubious-at-best standards -- has ever (as far as we know, I guess...) allowed books to leave their facility and return in the middle of the grading process stream. I already considered CGC, problems or no, to be the best choice in the industry, but this is a hell of a coffin nail. The other guys might as well try to change their name and reboot their processes at this point.

I haven't seen one of these, but I believe it was a promotional piece distributed primarily to media contacts as advertising for the TV show. Nice pickup

Probably not possible to distinguish based solely on census data. Based on upper bound estimation, I would confidently say that there probably are fewer than, say, 3000 copies of either book extant. Do the census numbers imply that there are significantly fewer copies of 242 vis-a-vis 252? Wellll.... The two controlling variables, neither of which we can actually know, are the actual population (which is what we want to estimate) and the slabbing rate (which we can only make semi-educated guesses about, at best): Market snapshots of the day aside, I'd argue that "first appearance of Supergirl" is a more distinctive book than "first appearance of Brainiac". Brianiac is a good villain, but there are lots of good villains, and he's certainly not the sort of character that has a lot of currency outside of readers of the Superpeople titles. Supergirl, on the other hand, got herself an (admittedly terrible) 1984 film plus six-ish years of an eponymously-titled CW TV series in the Arrowverse. That suggests that slabbing rates may be higher for 252. All else being equal, this might mean the slabbing multiplier for 252 would be lower than for 242. But we also need to consider that, by 1958-59, we're well into the era where intentional preservation via collecting is an important factor, which means print runs matter more. I don't have any data about the print runs of 1950s Action Comics issues, and its fairly likely that no such data exists in public hands. It's fairly likely that there were simply more copies of 252 to begin with, and -- all else being equal -- later books are more likely to be preserved in numbers than earlier ones. On the balance, I think it's likely there really are fewer copies of 242 extant than 252. The census shows disparity as essentially every grade level, including the top of the chart where financial incentive leads to a higher percentage of copies getting encapsulated. I don't think we can confidently say how many fewer, especially with factors pushing our napkin math in opposite directions. If I was told to make more precise estimates with the understanding that they may not be more accurate guesses, I might think that 242 is a book that fits the normal model for its era, and so has, let's say 1500 extant copies, give or take a couple hundred, but that 252 probably has a slightly tighter multiplier, representing 2500 or so copies. But there's a lot of uncertainty there, and the error bars are nothing to sneeze at. If the Information Fairy descended from On High and revealed that there are actually exactly 2197 copies of each book in existence, I wouldn't feel that represents a failure of the overall model.

It's been widely reported that Action Comics 1 had a print run of 200,000 copies. This wasn't actually the highest known print run in the era (one of the Famous Funnies may have had twice that), but it's a lot higher than known or estimated values fo many of the '30s books, especially from publishers that weren't DC.

Cover stock of this era is not completely opaque, and a certain amount of translucency is expected. How visible that translucency is depends on lighting and positioning factors. In my experience, slabbing often (but not always) tends to make it more visible, both because the wells place the book under a certain amount of pressure and because the geometry of the slab tends to make the lighting conditions more amenable to the effect. I definitely don't think this is actual "bleed-through", where ink from the interior cover migrates through the paper to the outer cover. That's rare outside of shenanigans with solvents. I'm sure that the translucency issue can be made worse with bad pressing, but honestly, especially looking at the slabbed BC LR corner image, I think this is just a visual artifact, and nothing unusual at all. EDIT: As an aside, that cleaned up nicely, which I think guaranteed you the 9.0 out of the 8.5/9.0 book you started with. I suppose there was an outside shot at a 9.2 with this, since the dirt/gunk on the back resolved. But honestly, the color breaks you see in the before shots are still there because pressing isn't magic pixie dust; some of them are just harder to see through the case. I still think this was graded correctly. Looks sharp, though.

Well, I'm a data analyst, although not for Disney/Marvel, haha! Let's take a look at this as something like a Fermi problem. We won't get exact answers, but we can do better than "no idea!". This isn't super short. We'll start with two of the most important comics of all time: Action Comics 1 and Detective Comics 27. Why? Well, because money talks. Basically, AC1 and Tec27 are worth so much money that the incentive to have them professionally graded and encapsulated is unusually high. And, importantly, that the monetary incentive is still ludicrously high regardless of the condition of the book (Tec27 in 0.5 is still worth sacks of cash, and so is worth grading; that's very different from even most more "normal" keys). That doesn't mean there aren't still raw copies; indeed, we know there are raw copies. But it is reasonable to believe that the percentage of extant copies of those two books that are slabbed is higher than any other comparable comic, so that's a great place to start. CGC's census lists 75 copies of AC1 and 74 copies of Tec27. Now, before we continue, it's important to remember that one of the important caveats of the CGC Census is that books can appear on it multiple times because of cracking and resubmission. In an ideal world, the cracked label would be returned to CGC so that the original number can be decertified, but that was never going to happen consistently. For these particular books, there's been an effort on the boards to identify re-slabbed copies by identifying marks and have the original numbers removed after the fact. But it's almost a certainty that there are some physical books -- especially in the mid-to-lower grades that attract less attention -- that have snuck into the census more than once. Regardless, that means the census sets an upper bound on the number of slabbed books; there might be fewer, but there cannot be more. If you want, you can reduce the number by, say, 10% to account for slab duplication. But this is back-of-the-envelope math, so it doesn't really matter very much. Technically, there are copies in the Other Company's slabs also -- 8 of them for AC1, for example. I'm not going to worry too much about those. Several of them are extremely heavily restored at this point, and may very well be cracked out of CGC slabs. If not, we can just pretend they're still raw. Again, it doesn't really change the outcome significantly. As a final notes, census counts do not include NG books, which for Golden Age especially means "coverless copies". Maybe you count a coverless book as a "surviving" copy; maybe you don't. I don't think there are actually that many coverless copies of most books, but I know there are some issues of some titles with warehouse weirdness. It really isn't likely to change the order-of-magnitude estimates, but it's worth keeping in mind if you're into such things. All that still doesn't tell us how many raw copies there are, and there no way to know that from the census. But it's certainly a topic that's been talked about a lot in the hobby over the years. How many Tec27s are "still out there" -- which, for this discussion, means both known copies (like the Mile High/Dentist's copy of AC1) and unknown copies (that Tec27 you would have found if you'd just looked five minutes longer in that little antique shop!)? The longstanding estimation is that, for these Greatest of All Keys, the CGC slabs represent about 50% of the total world population. I could talk a lot about trend lines and diminishing rates of encapsulation and do some statistics here in an effort to convince you that's a little too high, and that the slabbed Tec27s are more like 70% of the population... but let's not. Let's go with the 50% standby. It's a good, round number. Besides, aiming high on these estimates is good for us. So, all told, we can reasonably say that there probably aren't more than 150 copies each of AC1 and Tec27 in the world, regardless of slabbing status or condition. Now, we know that those books were quickly recognized as special even at the time (and, especially with AC1, we know they printed an amazing number of copies for the era). So it's reasonable to think that print runs plus survival rates mean that AC1 and Tec27 were printed in higher numbers and were also more likely to survive that other books of the same era. And, indeed, if we look at the pre-Batman Tecs, we see that their census totals run around half -- or sometimes less -- than that of Tec27. There are only 16 copies of, let's go with Tec14, on the census. Tec27 gives us an upper bound of around 150 copies; if we apply the same math to Tec14, we get an estimate of, say, 40 copies. Although still a really pricey books, the pressure to slab is probably not quite as high for Tec14 -- a random pre-Bats issue with nothing really interesting going on and a serviceable but not distinctive cover -- than for Tec27. If you don't like the 50% slabbing rate we used earlier, feel free to lower it here too. But as a sort of first order approximation, we get that there are between 40 and 150 copies of Tec14 in the world; I'd favor a number near the bottom of that range, and say that, give or take, there are about 50 of them, most of which are currently unslabbed (and most of which are consequently probably fairly-to-very low grade). For what it's worth, if you do all this math with a 70% slabbing rate instead of a 50% slabbing rate, you end up with a reasonable guess of around 30-35 copies of Tec14 extant; as I said at the start, it doesn't matter much and these are rough estimates. The general process holds true for quite awhile. We can use the next two big books, Batman 1 and Superman 1, to benchmark the rest of the '30s, as print runs and public awareness of the medium increased markedly. There are 289 Batman 1s and 168 Superman 1s on the census; it's likely that there are not more than, say, 500 copies of either book remaining in the world today. And I think those books set the high water mark for the '30s (yes, I know, Batman 1 is a 1940 book). Whether you're looking at relatively well-known books the Fox/Holyoke Blue Beetle 1 or obscure comic strip reprints like Tip Top Comics 44, it's safe to say that there are fewer than 500 extant copies, and for many (perhaps most) such books, fewer than the 150 threshold established by AC1 and Tec27. Especially for these earlier books, the original print runs are comparatively unimportant; there was no widespread collecting hobby, and so preservation has disproportionately favored happenstance or early adopters who retained large volumes of a very diverse array of books; Edgar Church is the broadest and best example, but there's a reason why the "pedigree collection" is a dominant feature of '30s and early '40s collecting. That's not to say that books which started out with fewer copies don't have fewer copies remaining; they typically do. But the relationship between original print run and surviving population is not necessarily as clearly defined as it would become; otherwise, there would be a LOT more copies of Action Comics 1 than we see. Once we pass in the '40s and the rest of the Golden Age, it becomes a lot harder to track. Print runs often (but not always!) increased, and preservation often (but not always!) became more likely. The overall process still holds, though. Find the biggest key within a year or two of the book you're interested in. Multiply the census total by 2, assuming that slabbed books represent only half the population for even very expensive Golden Age books, and that's your rough upper bound. For a lot of minor titles with minimal collector interest and few slabbed copies, that's a huge overestimate; some of those GA books may only have a few dozen extant copies, if that. But that's the best we can do with napkin math. By the time you're into the '50s and the Golden Age is giving way to Silver, you probably need to increase that multiplier. The further away from the lofty prices of AC1 / Tec27 / Batman 1 / Superman 1 you get, the less incentive there is to slab, especially low grade books. There are 551 copies of Showcase 4 on the census, and 1269 copies of Showcase 22. For the latter, especially, you can see the census count drop off steeply for books below 3.0; even though a beater copy of Showcase 22 is still a valuable book, there's less urgency to get literally every copy professionally graded. We can conclude safely that there are, proportionately, a lot more 0.5 or even 2.0 copies of Showcase 22 than the census suggests. So maybe the multiplier now is 3 -- that is, only 33% of extant copies of Showcase 4 or Showcase 22 are sitting in slabs. That suggests there aren't likely to be more than about 1500 copies of the first appearance of Barry Allen, or more than around 3000 copies of the first appearance of Hal Jordon, and those numbers feel reasonable enough. Looking at a comparable book, Action Comics 252's first appearance of Supergirl, also gives us the same 3000 copy estimate. Just like with AC1 and Tec27, it's good when more than one data point suggests about the same conclusion. Likewise, it's probably safe to assume that some random '50s book with little collector interest has no more surviving copies than the big issues do, and often substantially less (because, after all, most of them had lower print runs). Most issues of the DC's long-running 50s title Flippity and Flop have all of ZERO graded copies on the CGC census, because, well, who cares about an off-brand Sylvester and Tweety knockoff? But we can be virtually certain that those issues have fewer surviving copies than the 1500 we expect from Showcase 4 (probably a lot less, but we can't really guess how much so with such minimal data). Much past the '50s, though, the answer tends to merely be "there are a lot of copies out there". Depending on your assumptions, it's possible to believe there are as many as 10,000 copies of Amazing Fantasy 15 out there (although its rocket ascent in value means I think it's more likely to be slabbed than you'd expect, and there are "only" like 7500 extant). Books from the 60s onward are generally only "rare" in a pure mathematical sense if they started that way due to restricted print runs or else had special circumstances that made preservation unusually unlikely. The 1977 Marvel 35 cent test variants took it on both ends of that calculus, for example; or the big indie keys like Albedo 2, or various undergrounds. But that requires specific research outside of the scope of the census; the census is still a nice tool there for other reasons, but this post is quite long enough already.

No. But it will always be a high-dollar book and an indie key. Which is quite good enough, really.

If anything, those fanned pages make me think trimming is less likely than my original take.

Trimming is just about impossible to make a definitive statement about via photo. Okay, that said, on a 1 to 10 scale of increasing suspicion, I'd give this one a 6. The problem, in my eyes, is not that some of the reading edge is rough-cut and wavy. As you can see in those graded books, Marvel's printer didn't exactly use cutting-edge (ha!) technology in the late '60s, and so a LOT of their books like that. My problem is that parts of the reading edge look that way, and parts of the reading edge look sharp-cut and smooth. You've got rough-cut sections at the bottom, and aligned with the R in the title. But compare those to the sections aligned with Iron Man's left hand, or just below his knee. That's not conclusive evidence either way, but it's easy to imagine this began with a markedly uneven edge that was then shaved down. Alternatively, parts of the production cutting blade may have just been sharper than others; we know that the printer wasn't real concerned about QA. I'm suspicious of this book, but I don't think you're going to be able to get a conclusive answer from anyone who doesn't have the book in hand.