Qalyar

Historically, the American laws criminalizing suicide (originally a felony in most jurisdictions) follow from British law, where the intent was less about trying to arrest the deceased, and more about how their estate was handled afterward. In the US, in fact, most jurisdictions have decriminalized suicide, although it's arguably still a "common law crime" with implications for certain estate issues and insurance payouts. Likewise, most US jurisdictions no longer try to arrest people for attempted suicide, recognizing that it's a mental health issue, not a criminal justice problem (except at least Maryland, for... reasons, I guess). Your eager willingness to view actual victims and (potential) wrongdoers as equivalent is disturbing.

Suicide in cases like this is a tragedy, not only for the loss of life and the devastation it brings to friends and family, but also because it ensures justice is forever denied -- regardless of which way Justice's scales should have ended up tilting.

I view eBay "stories" with a grain of salt the size of my car, but... agreed.

That book is fantastic, and seeing it with a blue label (and what I agree is exactly the right grade) is a beautiful sight.

Ugh. I knew nothing good was going to come of things when the initial story broke, but this is not the way anyone would have wanted it.

At the very least, I'd be a little dubious of that 9.6 ASM300 that's also been reholdered with a custom label. The sig series books are probably okay. The real question, of course, is whether the seller is aware that they're got one (or more, if we're pessimistic) tainted books, or if they're the unwitting victim of the original scam and haven't been following the forums. @CGC Mike CGC's team is probably going to want to reach out to the seller on this one, since there's a known bad book in this lot.

I suppose that's what makes it a good prank. From anyone else, this would have been obviously implausible. But with Dinesh, well... you never quite know, do you?

I won't be home to grab images of them, but I have about 75% of a set, including most of the variants, of The Adventures of Kool-Aid Man, in generally pretty high grades. OH YEAH. The comics in my Midnight Nation registry set are probably worth less than their plastic slabs, much less the grading fees, but I don't care, and have no regrets.

I've talked about this elsewhere, but the problem with philately is that the number of collectors has sharply dropped. Twenty years ago, when stamp shows and even brick and mortar stores were common, most collectors weren't in a position to buy truly exceptional copies of "key" issues. But that's okay, because there are a LOT of what are essentially mid-grade stamps for all but the rarest of the rare. With those collectors largely out of the market entirely, demand for best-in-class pieces is... pretty much exactly the same as it always was. But demand for the stamp collecting equivalent of "reader copies" has dropped at the same time that a lot of old personal collections were dumped into the market. Net result? If you want a set of, say, the Columbian Expo issue in really nice-looking -- but not flawless -- grades, they've never* been cheaper. If you want a set of them in PSE 100 or 100J, that's still going to set you back solid chunks of change per stamp (for the values that even exist in those grades). Exceptional collectibles generally retain value even through market contractions or collapses. Collectibles that are "good enough", do not. *Okay, almost never. $5 in 1893 is about $170 now due to inflation, and you're still not getting a $5 Columbian that doesn't look like a dog chewed on it for less than $300. So I guess "on the day of issue", they were cheaper. But still...

Sucks when your collection gets devauled by a warehouse find.

If you do this, please spend the fairly trivial amount of extra money for archival grade tape instead of Scotch tape. Scotch tape is adjacent to the devil.

There's an unexpectedly crazy number of variants of that giveaway book.

That one's pretty impressive, actually. The 1:10 ratio covers on this series are all really, really elusive. I think DC vastly overestimated comic book readers' interest in this property, haha! And they did this 1:10 thing all the way through #4, although I don't think I've ever even seen the #4 ratio in person. Pretty sure I found the eBay listing you got this from. That was a steal!

Yeah, I don't think that's gonna be a 9.8... but on the other hand, no copy of that book has been a 9.8 so far (top of pop are a pair of 9.6s). And no, that wasn't me as the buyer either.

Because they changed the text color on the cover for each (well, for most) of the new printings, and this book has been reprinted a whooooole lot of times. Here's an excellent visual breakdown.

It means you're probably going to want to contact CGC Customer Service and see if they'll let you ship this to them as a Mechanical Error for label correction. Edderkoppen is the title of a couple of different Scandinavian -- there are Danish and Norwegian books with that title -- republications of various Spider-Man titles (some Web of Spider-Man, some ASM). There is no book that is titled Edderkoppen #66 that reprints ASM 238. Both the Danish and Norwegian Edderkoppen series DID in fact reprint ASM 238, but as #1 in both languages. Only the Danish series has an issue numbered #66; that's a reprint of Web of Spider-Man #26. This book is, of course, an entirely normal US newsstand copy of ASM 238 and not an Edderkoppen anything. So this label is pretty whack; not only is it not appropriate for this book, it's not appropriate for any book that actually exists. It's a clear mechanical error and shouldn't cost you anything to have corrected.

In that you don't have an image for the book, or you never tracked one of these down? There's 4 on the census, so I assumed...

Not necessarily true. I actually don't expect JSA signatures to be labeled the same way as witnessed signatures in part because that would immensely devalue their in-house signings, and lower the market appeal of any witnessed slabs dated after the JSA acquisition.

Almost always printed from a single location. That was true in the GA, and it's true now. There have been a handful of exceptions, usually when something weird happened. I know there were some relatively recent DCs that had split printing between two facilities, but I'm not sure if they wound up being distinguishable copies; I'll add that to my to-check-into list. GA, though? One printing site, absolutely. Physical plates were used to print the books, so the cost of local production would have consumed any hope of improved logistics value.

If that's a 7.0, most of my books ought be about 15.5.

At least one other unnumbered copy exists, a signed copy in a CBCS slab. I believe there's at least one other such raw book, also. There was discussion that these books are errors -- that is, that there were intended to have a serial number, but something went wrong with the process of printing the serial number, leaving the back blank. I find that... unconvincing. I suspect that these were copies produced for outside of normal distribution, such as company file copies; media/promotional copies; or copies comped to members of the design, production, or printing teams. But that's honestly just speculation. I don't know what CGC would do here. I'm going to guess blue label with a note reading "printed without serial number" or something like that, but if they opted to green label this book, I wouldn't exactly be surprised. I would not expect them to treat it as a unique variant. I don't really have any idea what the market would do with these in general. I don't really pretend to understand what the market does with normal copies of this book, although I'll note that there's typically an exceptionally high 9.8 premium for this (probably because of the likelihood of a transfer bend/crease from the polybag seam).

Although my personal preference would be for them to be listed separately, I understand the community of collectors with skin in this game have traditionally preferred the alternative, and I think this is a perfectly cromulent compromise. Thanks!

I feel like, in general, CGC is reticent to break out clearly distinguishable versions of Very Important, low-population, GA Books. That's true for Superman 1, and it's true for Batman 1. I can think of some arguments in favor of the current approach, but honestly, it makes me a little sad especially from the standpoint of adequately documenting the history of these books.

You, um, got your money's worth out of that purchase. Do make sure you do a page check on that Spidey Super Stories 39. That issue's in the period that had "Spidey Stamps", the kid brother to the MVS.

There's really no doubt that this is a replica cover (by which we mean counterfeit, not one of the "Marvel Replica" editions) attached to the now-coverless interior of True Believers Deadpool (2016). There's no plausible reason for this to have been created for legitimate purposes. Whoever did so did it because this took about $10 in materials to produce and is a fairly passable simulation of what could easily be a $1000 book in its apparent condition. There's no way to know from here whether the seller you were dealing with is the perpetrator or merely another victim in the line. But, needless to say, this is utterly worthless in terms of collector value.