Qalyar

I've seen that House of Secrets thing described as a "promo brochure". I'm not sure that it's really received a formalized name. A couple bucks? I'm not sure. These maybe aren't as common as some of the other promotional material you've listed, but I think interest in House of Secrets ephemera is pretty low.

Agreed in all respects. It would be hard to be less subtle about shill purchases unless he renamed his account Shill Silverstein and advertised comics from the Shillver Age. And maybe not even then. And that's arguably not the most damaging action he's taken, measured by material interference with someone else's business. And then we have the posts here. If they are, as he has sometimes claimed, the product of a disorganized mind in need of mental health treatment, then he needs to be prevented from doing business here (or, probably, posting at all) for his well-being as much as anyone else's. If they're just an effort to baffle us with bull in the hopes this all blows over, then he needs sanctioned all the more for it.

Those promotional pieces, in order: Death Talks About Life is collected by Sandman fans. Most copies aren't extremely high grade, even fresh out of shipping boxes (like at least your top copy, for example). $5-10 each unless you have copies that seem really, really flawless; 9.6+ graded copies sometimes go for a lot more, but I would not even consider paying to grade one of these unless it was utterly immaculate. Stardust Preview. Couple bucks, maybe Vital Vertigo. Couple bucks, if you're lucky. For the extreme completionist. Fun fact, there are two versions of this advertising piece. The one you have, and a black and white version that's rarer and still doesn't matter. Hellblazer the Books of Magic Preview. Maybe $5 on a good day? These aren't very common, but demand is very low. Sandman Midnight Theatre Flyer. I'd say $5 on this one. Sandman is a thing, and this is marginally less common than some of these. Swamp Thing / Lucifer Preview Flipbook. Nominal value, maybe a buck or so? I have no information about the Byrne Christmas cards.

You'd think so, but this whole miniseries is pretty much a ghost. Five books and what I can only assume were itty bitty print runs.

Of course, X-Men #6 isn't one of those, so if the example is representative, I'd say "likely not"

All there then! I'm gonna go 7.0 here because of FC LL corner, BC discoloration, and that crease or tear at the right on the 3rd image. But I have less confidence than usual in my grade estimate, because I have very little idea what to expect for Platinum Age grading standards.

Books miswrapped or miscut badly enough to affect story text or panels are fairly rare. I'm not sure that it affects the grade per se, but I have seen "MISCUT AFFECTS STORY" as a label notation for a particularly extreme book.

May I ask for a page count? I know some extant copies are incomplete.

I should contribute here. I've long gotten out of most of the traditionally hot books. I made a lot of money doing so, but it just got to feel more transactional than collecting. These days, i chase a lot of low print run promotional material, all of which is rare (sometimes very rare), but usually worth little. My grail-est book is... back at CGC because they made a shambles of its labeling. My likely 2nd place book is in line with Joey. But here's another favorite. I was amazed that I got to pick this up at all, and think I probably paid fewer digits than I honestly think it ought to be worth: This was only distributed at one SDCC morning panel focused on the cartoon, with the producers and a couple voice actors in attendance. There was no announcement that a comic book would be distributed. Estimates are that fewer than 500 books were printed, and there's reason to believe it was more like 200. Very few copies went to people who cared about comics; accordingly, very few have survived. Its entirely possible that only 50 or fewer copies are extant. Mine is the only one I've seen for sale over several years of watching for it, and I know at least one completionist collector of DC promos has never even seen one. Not sure if this will get slabbed or not. I'd guess this is a 9.0ish book, +/- one grade. A press wouldn't hurt it because there's a slight whole-book bend, but I'm nervous about pressing with the weird foil-y sticker (AFAIK all physical copies have the sticker). And of course, speaking of the sticker, that'll be a green label book... but so are all sorts of pre-signed limited edition books, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Anyway, part of my permanent collection. If you collect appearances of any of the Teen Titans characters, or DC in general, um, good luck with this one! It is 100% a grail-rarity book even if demand is currently low.

Offering to accept a partial refund is saying, "I would only have paid [this lower value] for this item if it started off the way it is now, but I would have wanted it." Sometimes that's actually accurate and all. As for leaving negatives, well, the ebay negative system isn't what it once was. I'm not sure I've had a single negative in the last five years that remained on the account for longer than a month (to be fair, I've probably only left three or four).

I've been trying to find gradeable copies of DC's 2012 Diablo III mini-series for similar reasons. My fiancee and I still couch coop that game periodically. But Diamond orders for those books are more like 5000 per issue, no one cared about them when they launched, and no one has kept track of them since. So I might have to give up on that, and go back to looking for easier books, like poorly-documented promotional giveaways....

You may have to submit your own to get a 9.8 on that Street Fighter book. I've found that a lot of weird, B-tier (or Z-tier) Moderns with a handful of books on census just never show back up for sale. I presume they're in personal collections of people who wanted them to begin with. That book, in particular, is going to be tricky. As I'm sure you know, it was sold polybagged, and we all know by now that tends to make defect-free books tough, if just because of the bag seam. I guess the good news is that, while not exactly common, it isn't one of the really scarce Moderns; making some educated guesses about the Diamond preorder index rank for that month, I'd expect there were somewhere in the 15,000 to 20,000 of these preordered. Which means scaring up a 9.8 candidate (which may need a press because bag seam) will take some hunting, but should be at least possible.

Neither you nor the seller are blameless here. Sellers ought to do page checks; many do not. Sure, they may have known about the page, but I bet they didn't ever open the book much less count pages. But as the buyer, you had a responsibility to confirm the condition of the product you purchased. There's a case to be made when CGC finds something nine months later that you couldn't have reasonably detected -- trimming, subtle color touch, whatever. But you could have noticed a missing page; you didn't because you didn't check either. Obviously, if this was detected sooner, the seller should have refunded your money and taken the book back, or otherwise made you whole. But there's certainly some amount of time after which you can reasonably have been deemed to have accepted the product as you received it. Nine months kinda feels like the latter. If I was the seller here, and perhaps depending on the money involved, I might offer you some sort of partial refund as a gesture of goodwill and to apologize for the issue we both failed to detect.

In this one, Neal self-identified as being responsible for: The Swing's the Thing, Slaying Song, De-horned Cow, Live Wire (as you suspected), Lost Cause (and the untitled material on that page), Cow-ward, and A Drink to Reflesh.

Agreed, that's not color touch. The question is whether CGC will view it as overspray or merely a stain. For my part, it doesn't really look like a traditional overspray pattern...

My book with the wrong title on the label went back to Sarasota under a Mechanical Error invoice, pretty much immediately, and is currently waiting in line to be corrected and reholdered. I'm not sure if I'd bother on a Modern book missing PQ. I probably would, to be honest, because if errors don't make them eat shipping costs, there's even less motivation to clean up the system's flaws.

Right. The goal of a software system supporting an operation like CGC's should be two-fold. First, it should help the employees avoid errors, to the best extent possible. Second, it should provide support for detecting potential errors and attributing them to the responsible party. Unfortunately, from what I've been able to glean about CGC's proprietary software via the sorts of errors it allows, it isn't very good at either of those things. If I lived anywhere close to CGC, I'd offer them a great consultation rate on software and data management services, haha!

More than just a grading (and QC) failure, this really highlights the poor quality of some of CGC's software interfaces. All books should have page quality, just as all books should have a grade (chosen only from the available list) and certain elements of the core label. We know, from errors like this, that their internal software doesn't enforce the appropriate safeguards, because you can have this book with no page quality, or the ".5" graded label that appeared some time ago. I myself have a Mechanical Error book at CGC right now because it's a title that wasn't in the census, and it shipped back to me mis-titled with the closest option that was already in the database; that's a very similar problem. I'm not saying that better software systems will prevent errors in general, but they're clearly contributing to the problems.

So, actually picked up a couple of these to go with ones I already had. Let's take a peek into (some of) the weird world of Kool-Aid Man comics. OH YEAH! The first three issues were published by Marvel, mostly for use as mail-away promotionals from General Foods. None were ever directly available for retail purchase. #1 has 100% the best cover of the entire series, with Kool-Aid Man OH YEAH!ing through the hull of a spaceship. Insert memes here. The normal printings of these books are not hard to find, although as you might expect, kid-targeted mail away advertising ephemera is, shall we say, challenging in high grade. There were also a couple of unique versions given away in newspaper advertising supplements. The Dallas Times Herald and Denver Post got printings of #2; Houston Chronicle had a #3. All of them can be identified by text above the Marvel Comics Group banner indicating which paper distributed them (and a blank price bubble). They're more elusive. Are there other newspaper editions? Not that I've ever seen, but that doesn't mean they don't exist! It is known that the San Antonio Express-News did at least some partnership books with Marvel, so that would be one of the first places I'd look. I think one of the Austin papers did as well. Around the same time as the Kool-Aid books, Marvel also published a similar The Adventures of Quik Bunny; that ended up a one-shot with no known variants, so it's not nearly as much fun. After that, Marvel dropped their partnership with General Foods, and the series moved to Archie Comics. And that's where it got weird. For starters, although they changed the entire plotline (such as it is), they kept the numbering from the Marvel books; evidently someone thought kids would want to be full-run collectors. There are three versions of #4. The "normal" one was a mail-order promotional, and has a cover price of "A 75c value". There was also a version with no cover price but a banner announcing it was FREE (with purchase of enough Kool-Aid products for the redemption offer). It's not real clear what the difference in distribution methods were here, since both were apparently obtained as mail-aways. I swear that I own both of these, but they don't seem to have been filed correctly, so... yeah. However, the third variant is the really unexpected one: Yeah, that's a barcode and an actual cover price, not the silly "value" business. Archie apparently felt strongly enough about Kool-Aid Man that they actually made copies available for retail sale. Why? Why? The world will likely never know. As a final note, #4 has a pull-out Kool-Aid poster stapled into the centerfold on all three versions, although -- as you might expect -- a lot of otherwise-attractive copies are missing the poster. It's the Tattooz of the Kool-Aid Man collection. Moving on. For #5, we have three variants again. The "75c value" cover is the normal mail-away. Meanwhile, the "50c value" book (with no issue number on cover, oddly enough) was apparently given away as a freebie (rather than a mail-away or redemption), and is super cheap. The normal issue has two stories; the "50c value" version has a third as many pages, with only one story and essentially none of the activity extras. Also, it's printed on the flimsiest newsprint stock Archie could find, including the cover. And then we have... wait, really? OH YEAH! Archie apparently sold enough copies of #4 that they made a retail version of #5 as well! I've never been able to identify the logo on the cover at upper-left, which might tell us more about how this was distributed and why anyone would bother. For #6, once again, there are three. This time, there's a "50c value" ultra-cheapo newsprint book (and unlike with #5, this one is also tiny). the "75c value" normal mail-away, and... a "Dollar value" edition. The first two are pretty common books, but I actually have a dollar value copy arriving later this week. Hopefully, I'll be able to figure out what made it different. I've never seen a retail copy of #6 (that is, with a barcode and a real cover price), and no such book is listed by the GCD, MCS, or even Mile High. However, I wouldn't be surprised if a very small number were produced. Someday, maybe we'll see. A lot of indexes claim the series ended there. A few manage to mention #7 -- I think probably because its cover, with Kool-Aid Man riding a pink, sunglasses-wearing shark is so bizarre. But, in fact, Archie ran this series all the way to #9. It's pretty clear, though, that interest was waning. As far as anyone has ever seen, there's only one version of each of the final three books. They're all cheapo newsprint with cheapo newsprint covers and the extra-short length, despite a cover still claiming "a 75c value". Not even Kool-Aid Man could escape the rising costs of publication, I guess, and the whole "mail-away redemption" industry was dying as the calendar ticked its way into the '90s. In any case, here's #8, which was issued after a couple of year delay following #7. I don't own #9 at all, and wouldn't mind picking up a sound, presentable (or better!) copy. As a closing note, the legendary Archie artist Dan DeCarlo did most of the artwork for the entire series, including the Marvel issues (although there's some debate about who did the Marvel-era covers), and his son Jim was the series' consistent inker.

I don't like pressing books, but some of what I collect includes pack-ins and promotional items that end up pretty curly from the inherent packaging (Joey's got one of those now). Also had to have a couple pressed recently because they were sold in a slipcased set by the publisher, and my set had the books loaded in incorrectly, creating an ugly set of corner bends. I just let CCS handle them, and pulled out 9.8s, but admittedly waited the requisite eon that TATs seem to require these days.

For better or worse, the practice of "restoration" in comics has for decades meant "altering the book to improve its appearance". If I had a time machine and god-emperor control over CGC's initial decisions, I would likely have made their label categories be: Universal, largely as it is now. "Pieces missing" books -- including clipped coupons and missing MVS -- get Universal labels but with hard-capped very low grades, and with a label notation. Altered, including any intentional or seemingly-intentional changes to the book outside of specifically permitted conservation. So this gets all the trimmed books, all the color-touched books, the books with married covers or folds... and the books with unwitnessed signatures and sketches. There's still a categorization system for extent of alteration and a label notation for what was done to the book. Qualified, which now holds largely production oddities, like the books with incorrect interiors, double covers, staple-less production, ink variations serious enough to warrant notation, and so forth. Under this system, this is no longer a stigmatizing category, but one that highlights what would be considered errors, freaks, and oddities in philately. Obviously, there will still be vigorous debate over what books get a Universal label "Error Printing" vs. a Qualified label, but c'est la vie. Conserved, which has a much tighter definition than it does now, permitting only specifically authorized conservation processes and materials. Signature Series, as currently exists. As with the current system, it's possible to get bicolor labels when more than one non-Universal category applies. However, I the ship's largely sailed, and the system is what it is.

FCBD is marketing, and that's fine. But 1:1000 "FCBD" variants just seems a little on the nose. The idea being FCBD wasn't just marketing, it was also about accessibility, and this variant nonsense seems rather like the opposite of that.

There are a lot of books that aren't worth much normally but have a huge value bump for 9.8 slabbed books, just because the overwhelming majority of even "pretty much perfect looking" books don't make 9.8. It's like sending random coins to PCGS and hoping for MS-68s. As for that War Machine ashcan, it was basically shipped as a promotional preview shortly before the release of the normal book. It's not very rare, but extremely high grade copies are elusive because of shipping stress, tiny books being generally tougher to get in grade, and the black cover showing defects more easily.

In general, you can ship different invoices in the same box. There are some exceptions. No piggy backing on Mechanical Error shipments, for example, and it's bad form to sneak low tier stuff in a Walkthrough box... But regardless, every invoice will ship back individually.

The "Second-Rate" origin escapes me, at least for now. Assuming for the moment it's a Fox reprint, it's almost certainly from one of the less common books that hasn't had its contents indexed by any of the usual sources online. There's no prima facie reason to believe that all three reprints in this book would have originally been from the same narrow time period. But Women in Love #3 was a late 1949 book, so I've mostly been looking at other 1949 Foxes to try to find this one. Potential candidates include "Deserted Twice" from My Love Affair #3 or one of the "other thrilling love stories" (as the cover tells it) printed in My Desire, Intimate Confessions #32. Of course, if the source material for "Second-Rate" is considerably older than Women in Love #3 then, well, the universe of candidates swells quickly.