Qalyar

This book does present some vaguely philosophical questions about the current market, though. If I had a copy of Hulk 180 and surgically removed the Hulk from the bottom-right panel of the actual "page 16", would that copy be less desirable than this one? What if it was missing the entirely of some random non-Wolverine page? Even for raw books -- but obviously always for those that remain slabbed -- buyers aren't likely flipping open their Hulk 180s on a regular basis to stare at that one Wolverine panel. But is the value of the book the value of the book or just that tiny piece of it, one character in one panel, on one page?

My level of OCD would demand a copy of the normal printing, too, just for completionism. Regardless, those are nice copies of -- for a couple of them, especially -- fairly tough printings of a great book.

I'm glad they gave us back the laughing face emoji reaction. Unfortunately, I believe this would require the existential horror face emoji reaction, which doesn't seem to be available yet.

At the time, there was a comparatively large registration fee for new periodicals, but not for altering the name of an existing publication. This especially worked to the advantage of some of the smaller publishers when WW II broke out, because the paper rationing allotment for titles that had been in publication for over a year was (generally) larger than for new ones (that's actually what killed Rural Home). Fox never passed up an opportunity to save a couple of bucks, and thus...

Other way around, actually. Krazylife became Nuttylife became Wotalife. And since no one has mentioned it, that random list of books I mentioned earlier that my friend was trying to assemble? Well, the missing numbers in the middle, between Wotalife and My Love Secret -- #13 to #23 -- had yet another different title, but it's maybe a little more familiar. Because it's Phantom Lady.

This was almost certainly the result of the staff running the labeling process being slaves to the dropdowns provided by the database, in combination with an error made when (series 1) Katy Keene #17 (and #16) were first graded.. Let's walk through the issues. If you pull up Katy Keene in the census, the top of the issue list looks like this: See the problem? Although 16 and 17 both have their correct issue dates, they do not have any data in the Year field. This is an example of how CGC's internal software makes their jobs harder and introduces error, because there should never be a case where an issue date exists (and includes a year), but the Year field is null. Yet, here we are, showing these have to be entered manually and separately. Now let's move to the end of that list on page 3: Here we see several of the modern Katy Keene books, including the #17 that caused all this trouble. I am willing to bet that if you try to select Katy Keene #17 in CGC's internal software, and include a date of any sort, it defaults you to the 1986 Katy Keene #17, considering that issue to better match for the provided data than the one with the null date. Alternatively, it might just present both in a dropdown, making it easy to select the incorrect book. A more fundamental problem here is that CGC tracks books exclusively by title -- in most cases -- with no means to differentiate between multiple series sharing the same title and publisher except by date. In the case of the 1980s Katy Keene series, the first six such books were published as Katy Keene Special and so those are listed separately; however, starting with issue #7 they reverted to the original 1950s-era title, placing the new books into the same block of data as the original ones. That's true of any title with multiple series. For example, here's two different runs that no one really cares about (okay, okay, a lot of these are variant covers in slabs, but still): -- A-Force. I opted to use this one as an example because there's very little to distinguish 2015 books from 2016 books on visual inspection. Correctly matching any A-Force issue numbered 5 or lower to the right series requires that you actually check the book (and realize that you need to distinguish between the two runs). And then, that you get it right in the system. There's not really anything that can be done about the way that CGC handles revived, rebooted, or renumbered series at this point. But the rest of the problems could be -- if not remedied -- at least reduced with better-designed internal software that was created with error reduction in mind from the start. Similarly, I've found exactly this kind of error happens much more frequently when the book being graded isn't in the census at all, but something very similar is (I've had two ME returns in the last year for exactly this situation). What the errors reveal shows us that their internal system simply makes it too easy to assign books to incorrect labels when there's any possibility of confusion.

I mean, sure, this take on pressing is slipshod and insufficient and pretty much a one-way ticket to defect reversion. But the way he handles books and cracks that slab is horrifying. He could have the best pressing process in the world, and I still wouldn't let anyone who handles books like that touch even the drekiest drek in my collection.

I have no clue what's going on with True Gein. I would not expect it to command particularly high prices. I'm aware that some unscrupulous sellers have attempted to claim this is a Texas Chainsaw Massacre book, or even first appearance. Ed Gein was the inspiration for the creation of the Leatherface character, but that's not really how any of this works; this is not a TCM book. The only Boneyard Press books that I'm aware of selling at a consistent premium are the two issues of On Raven's Wings, because they're the first published comic industry works of Gerard Way, later known as the writer of Umbrella Academy, and better known to the rest of the world as frontman for My Chemical Romance. Otherwise, I'll note you actually just have two full sets of He Said/She Said. Unless there are separate printing that I'm unaware of, all of those are flipbooks, with each version of the story starting from one cover. They also all originally shipped with a poster bound into the centerfold, which is sometimes missing. Regardless, they're not worth... much. At all.

Fun picks. That From the Darkness is really early Jim Balent work, believe it or not.

This cover is terrible, but it would be less top-of-the-list terrible without the disembodied woman's face and without the first cover appearance of Awkward Floating Almost-Crotch-Grabbing Hand (coming soon to the MCU!).

Fairly sure "Voodoo Comics" was just Krock and Ciancone. I doubt the ashcan was distributed beyond local stores in Kelowna, BC. For a lot of indies of this nature, print runs are very, very small. I don't have any first-hand knowledge of this book, but I wouldn't be surprised if that print run was something like 50 books. I agree that there's no real sales history here, so it's really whatever interest the market would take. Ciancone was a more skilled artist than most of '80s small press / self-published creators, so that's a point in its favor. But the flip side of that calculation is that I don't think Shadow Warrior #1 has any significant demand, either. That makes this book unlike the pre-Aircel stuff by Barry Blair, where the rare self-published prototypes of Samurai and Elflord actually go for nontrivial sums due to interest in Blair's work. And unfortunately, while Shadow Warrior was actually pretty promising for a first endeavor, neither writer Krock nor artist Ciancone appear to have followed up with any further comics contributions. Life turned out particularly poorly for Krock, although I'll leave that there.

Technical grades are not intended to be measures of marketability, at least not directly, just as they do not necessarily correlate with a book's visual appeal. It would not have been appropriate for a label to read "ONLY REASON ANYONE CARES ABOUT THIS BOOK CUT FROM P16". The only problem here is that, depending on your point of view, either CGC mislabeled the page reference or the CGC system of referring to page numbers is confusing (and, if that one, contrary to everyone else's practice).

I've had a handful of books moved from CBCS slabs to CGC over the years. I've generally had neutral or good outcomes on the high-grade books and poorer outcomes with the mid-grades. My theory is that -- setting aside the question of what distinguishes a 9.6 from a 9.8 (and the problem of QA failures, which is... a different issue) -- most anyone can tell if a book is extremely high grade. Are there any ticks, creases, folds, color rubs, bends, dents, and so forth? No? Well, then it's a high grade book, give or take those couple of wiggly points at the top. However, when you've got a book with a bunch of spine stress, a crease on the back cover, and a bit of contact fraying along the bottom edge, the final outcome is going to depend on how different graders and grading companies view those flaws. Does one grading system place more stress on the size of a crease versus its apparent severity? And so forth. So if CBCS thought a book was a 6.0, and it came back in a 5.0 CGC slab, I think that's reasonably understandable. I don't think CBCS is inherently softer or that they're a defective competitor. I do prefer CGC, although I really, really need them to get the QA issues tucked away soon. Regardless, I think the CBCS labels are really ugly, and that breaks ties pretty cleanly. PGX, as always, is a joke.

So, there are a few possibilities here: It was just a one-off, like the couple of random Marvel books that have shown up in Double Doubles. Our identification only seems Fox-centric because a lot of the Fox books actually have good documentation. As we fill in the blanks, we'll see more publishers. Not all of Star's romance books were first publications; it's possible that Popular Teen-Agers #14 may have itself been a Fox reprint book that simply hasn't been identified because the antecedent is so rare.

I am not at all surprised to find that Joe Orlando did one of these covers, and that it is really good.

Adding one to my own thread. Mini-comic, pack-in with S5 action figure King Hiss. No number on the book, but #34 in the the series of these things. There was also a "Snake Attack" book as a pack-in with Rattlor (and maybe Tung Lashor), but especially as drawn on the cover, those characters do not look believably serpentine. In particular, Rattlor looks like an emaciated kobold.

I think it's very possible that by the time Streamline was "republishing" Fox books, there was no one around to enforce the copyright. Fox -- and its affiliated companies, including Central Color Press, its vertically-integrated printer -- went bankrupt in 1950. Fox's assets got pieced out to several other publishers. Charlton bought rights to some of their superhero material. Star Publications (not the later Marvel imprint) ended up with most of their "jungle" stuff, like Jo-Jo and Rulah. I'm really not sure who -- if anyone -- ended up with the rights to their romance titles. Since they're all one-off stories, it's very likely that no one thought there was any intellectual property of value there. I find it unlikely that someone bought the rights to the Fox romance books, then actually licensed those rights to a dodgy little British company for republication.

In favor of this theory, I checked the stories where we do have the splash page intact. None of them appear to have been the first feature in their original book (which would -- often -- have had the splash page on the inside front cover). So it's very possible Streamline was working from remaindered or otherwise coverless copies. It'll be interesting to see if that observation holds through the rest of the books.

I love that Eerie #3 cover although I'm hesitant to add it to my snakepeople list. It's obviously underwater, and Frazetta officially titled that piece "Sea Monster", if I remember correctly. So I don't think it's actually intended to be a snake-creature.

That cutout page makes me think... isn't there some character whose first "appearance" is a cameo entirely in silhouette? One of the B-list DC villains, maybe?

Rural Home would like a word with you about what counts as being "extraordinarily cheap"!

The last few Animaniacs issues (probably starting around #50 or a little earlier, through the last issue at #59) appear in much smaller quantities than the early books. That said, I think people pricing them at $50, $75, $99+ aren't going to see them sell for those prices any time soon.

Updated the summary post with some of the recent candidates. Not included in that list are covers with normal-shaped snakes, no matter how large -- or how awesome the cover is, because a lot of these really are. That's not to say a list of snake covers wouldn't be interesting to put together, it's just not the current project. I'm also leaving out The Thing #15, as the story there is called "The Worm Turns", and explicitly calls the cover monster a super-worm. Ditko monsters are still always cool, though.

I've always assumed that they measured "small" amount of color touch based on the percentage of the entire cover, or some similarly crazy metric, and thus I figure anything with more than "small" color touch has pretty much just been repainted.

Honestly, they usually try to be content-neutral in their condition descriptions, and I understand that. The biggest problem here was the failure to recognize the difference between pages and folds. This problem could have been avoided by citing the page number correctly, or even just going with "last page", a notation they have used elsewhere. At least whoever cut that book used razor precision to de-Wolverine it, so you've still got a recognizable silhouette of the character. It's like "Who's that Pokemon?" but with mutants.