Qalyar

So, if you're not familiar with Diablo: Tales of Sanctuary at all (which isn't actually that surprising), the retail version (with the black cover) is quite a bit easier to acquire, although ebay prices for it are sometimes, erm, interesting and good luck if you want a copy better than my 9.6 (although I guess there are 3 on census in 9.8...). My apologies for that photo quality, by the way; I'm awful at comic photography, but even I'll admit this is worse than usual for me. It's actually a really pretty book and slab in person. Anyway, Tales of Sanctuary is an anthology book, containing three unrelated short stories. It's a chonky 64 pages, and a weird nonstandard size; all in all, it's a very "Dark Horse"-looking book. I'm pretty sure it was intended as a backdoor pilot for one or more Diablo miniseries and/or ongoing titles, but since this apparently didn't perform well -- perhaps due to a small print run and minimal advertising of its existence, hmmmm? -- Dark Horse never published any other Diablo material, and there wouldn't be another Diablo comic book from anyone else for another decade (2011's miniseries from DC, which also had a microscopic print run and no fanfare). Which is all actually sort of a shame. I'm not going to say this is the pinnacle of the comic book medium, but all the stories here are pretty good reads. The paladin one (-script by Dave Land) suffers the most from ending on a cliffhanger that will never be fulfilled. The necromancer one (-script by Phil Amara) is probably my favorite of them, but the druid one (also by Land) is quite good as well. All the art is by Francisco Ruiz Velasco, who is probably best known in this thread for Alien vs. Predator: Deadspace and Predator: Hunters, but who has also done a bunch of stuff over at Marvel. Fun fact, he was also a concept designer on Hellboy II: The Golden Army. He's not an A-list artist, but I think he's pretty good; he definitely does a solid job nailing the Diablo II-era aesthetic here. The blue cover version is a promotional item of one form or another, given that it has no cover price, and the ISBN has been removed from the back cover. No idea where that was distributed. Was it part of some sort of press kit? Advertising give-away? Contest? Convention loot (but predating Blizzcon, so who knows what convention)? No idea, and at this point, I'm convinced the internet doesn't know either. In any case, if the normal version is a pretty standard "low print run modern", then the promo variant is just downright rare.

Found a second copy of this weird, presumably promotional, variant. Despite my best efforts, I still have absolutely no idea how these were distributed, but wherever they came from, it seems like it was hard on books. My first copy might manage a 5.5; this one could probably get pressed all the way up to a 6.5 or 7.0! Truly, these books are miracles of preservation, to have survived even in this shape all the way from the bygone time of ... 2001? Hmmph, nevermind. Really, though, I'm still looking for information about how this was distributed (and looking for a copy in actually collectible condition...).

It definitely wasn't the highlight of that unboxing day.

June 1979 is not ... the high point of comics publishing. I guess the "best" book that month is either X-Men 122 or Marvel Premiere 48? But I'll pick something different to feature instead. Regardless, I'm fairly sure I own zero books with a June 1979 publication date.

Graders notes on high grade books are very rare. For better or worse, my sense is that the graders mostly only take notes when they're indexing the problems with books that have more substantive defects. I've had books as low as 8.0 without notes. But in general, never expect graders notes. It's nice when they're present. I wish they were present more often. Heck, I wish they were mandatory, but I know what that would do to the already substantial turn around times.

And since they're unquestionably kidlit titles, average condition of surviving copies skews, um, lower. And add to that, a truly comprehensive collection of Star books might well include both direct market and newsstand copies. I am 100% certain that there are Star books I have never physically seen as newsstands (but then, there are Star books I have never physically seen at all -- Visionaries #6 comes to mind. Plus, CPVs! Star could easily be harder to hunt down than many better-known options, but with absolutely none of the resale value!

This was aired as a TV movie with no theatrical release. And... managed to win a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Visual Effects. Given the nightmare fuel that those visual effects represent, I'm horrified to consider what might have lost to it for that award. Regardless, the Star books are probably never going to substantially appreciate because they are pure kidlit, but assembling a complete high grade set would be surprisingly challenging, I think. Hugga Bunch, in particular, is unlikely to ever cycle back around. After the success of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, it's clear that all it really takes is one visionary to revitalize old children's programming franchises, but this one was a partnership between Kenner Parker Toys (now Hasbro) and Hallmark. Both companies have more appealing product lines, so I think it would be an uphill battle for even someone of Lauren Faust's caliber to even have the opportunity to reboot it. But you never know.

Honestly, if you're interested in anything like a mainstream title -- especially if you don't care about chasing top condition slabbed books -- it's a pretty good time to be a run collector. Sure, you're going to have some holes in those runs where the speculators have pushed prices on the keys up to crazytown, but the speculator money isn't being dumped into the rest of the runs right now. And honestly, from a value perspective, there are probably three ways comic pricing can go long term. The current status quo might endure, with the keys being increasingly viewed as investment commodities separate from the traditional "collecting" perspective, and the rest of the books stay more or less where they are, supported by the niche interests of non-investment collectors. Or the keys crater and the people who treated this as an investment get washed out. Or the keys stay largely stratospheric and interest starts to spread out to surrounding issues. We're 5, 10, 20 years from knowing the answer to that, and it's going to depend on a lot of factors. But, if you assemble good runs of viable titles, you're probably don't lose big unless the whole market bites it, and then you're still not out as much from a dollar perspective as the investment class would be. If the rising tide lifts all boats, then, hey, congrats. And, regardless, you got to collect and enjoy a lot more individual issues than the guy down the street who only wants the big-dollar books.

This is actually exactly what happened to stamp prices, going back to the original post. Philately isn't dead dead, but the market definitely contracted. The problem for a lot of individual stamp values is that the market contraction has put demand at roughly the same level as the supply of exceptional quality pieces for many issues. For example, the Columbians. Because the Columbians were, in part, marketed as collectibles when they were first printed back in 1893, they exist in relatively large numbers in high grades, with nice centering, and large margins. The stamps in the initial post have... none of those things. They're poorly centered (which is a more serious defect in stamp collecting than miswraps are for comics) and some indeterminate number of them are advertised as "thinned" (this is a serious physical defect; the comic equivalent would be a book with substantial back-cover color loss due to abrasion or the like). Stamps like that never brought in anything close to catalog value, but the smaller philatelic market is rapidly pushing those prices down even harder because there simply aren't buyers of "filler-grade" material ... just like there aren't really many comic buyers snapping up random pieces of mid-grade SA/BA run fill.

I would not recommend an airtight anything for long-term storage of collectibles in general. And that's before even considering what the likely VOC out-gassing products of that foam lining might be.

In descending order of importance: Being the book I'm looking for. I'm mostly a Bronze/Modern collector, but my collection skews weird, and some of the pieces I have (and many I'm still looking for) are books with 200, 100, 50, or fewer copies known (or in some cases even produced). As with GA books, sometimes the search is everything. If I run across some promo item that's only had two recorded sales in the entire internet era, then the flaws are whatever they are, you know? Price. While I'm willing to aggressively overpay for some rarities, sometimes people have insane ideas about what books are worth. That's especially true hunting for newsstand copies of otherwise dollar-bin titles. I just today tried (and failed) to explain to someone that I was willing to pay $20 for the newsstand printing of a specific book that is otherwise worth less than a buck, but that literally no human on the planet would pay his $125 ask. Good luck to him, I guess. Grade / condition. Modern stuff just really isn't allowed to have significant defects unless it's something extremely unusual. Because my interests are recent, page quality is rarely an issue, but I'd be extremely unlikely to pick up a Modern anything that wasn't "white pages" (except for a handful of self-published grails I'm chasing, which I would take literally regardless of condition at this point). However, I do not collect yellow label books; I'm not interested in aftermarket modifications. Green labels are acceptable for books that were distributed signed from the start; otherwise, blue or go home. Wrap. Perfect centering is nice, and I'd of course take a better-presenting book over the alternative, but I generally would rather have a technically sound copy than a slightly mis-aligned one with a physical defect. Holder / holder condition. I am not bothered by Newton rings, nor minor scratches within reason. Holders that are significantly damaged are another story, because I'll have to reholder them eventually and -- cost aside -- that's its own bucket of drama. Plus, abused slabs raise the risk of post-slabbing damage. Meanwhile, all else being equal, I prefer the new CGC slabs over the old ones (or the oldest ones), but it's not like I'm going to turn down a book on those grounds. I very well might turn down a book if it had a custom label though. No love at all. I press relatively few of my books, and probably should press more of them. I've got a few 9.6s that likely could have been 9.8s otherwise. But I fence-sit gloriously on the topic of systematic pressing. Accordingly, I'm pretty agnostic about whether my books are previously pressed. It is what it is. I do not collect books that qualify for pedigrees, and wouldn't really care if I did. Technically, I have a book that was pedigreed when it was in a CBCS holder, but not anymore now that it has been moved to a CGC slab (and the CBCS pedigree doesn't qualify as a "pedigree" here). I kept note of the original certification and such, but as far as I'm concerned, nothing of value was lost by the reholder.

I don't collect Sienkiewicz's work in this way, but I'm happy to help out in making sure the registry set is comprehensive. Thus, also add to the Bill Sienkiewicz Covers: Jim Henson's Labyrinth: Coronation 1 Sienkiewicz Variant Cover (1259606006) Slot added 3/23/22

Comprehensive... so far. Given that there are still weird gaps in a lot of the known runs, and that onlyweaknesskryptonite seems to find a new issue of these every few months (using what I can only assume is some sort of superpower; I sure as hell don't find unrecorded DCU books in the boxes I look through!), I think we're a long way from knowing what a truly "complete" set of DCU variants would look like.

Please add the following to the Labyrinth (Complete) set. Sample certification numbers included in parentheses: Jim Henson's Labyrinth: Coronation 1 Fried Pie Edition (3946774006) Jim Henson's Labyrinth: Under the Spell 1 (3946774010) Labyrinth 30th Anniversary Special 1 Nerd Block Edition (3946774012) Legends of the Dark Crystal/Return to Labyrinth #nn (3946774001). Please note that this is the 2006 book of this name, and so is actually different from the 2007 book that's already in the set listing (and this one should ideally appear before the existing one in the set display order). I'm sorry to make things difficult by having two #nn books with identical names. I didn't do it! Slots added 3/21/22 No problem, I labeled the Legends of the Dark Crystal/Return to Labyrinth issues according to year.

These might be the weirdest, least explicable reprints I've ever seen, and given some of the things I collect, that's a high bar to clear.

@CGC Mike Kinda suspect that we aren't going to hear back on this, are we?

Not exactly a Modern "comic", but comics-adjacent material. This is Kitchen Sink Press's 1996 catalog, featuring the cover of Black Hole #2 here on the front, and various spinoff material from The Crow on the back. Threeish small spine ticks on this one, which is about as good as I expect any of these to come. Probably not much interest in these since they don't have any original comic material, but I try to hunt down the Black Hole-related stuff when I can.

light crease top of back cover moderate spine stress lines tear top of front cover I don't see that crease in the photos, but in the slab, in the white field, it almost certainly won't photograph well and might be hard to see.

Agreed. Even SCS shouldn't alow the book to shift that far in the inner well... if it was encapsulated properly.

Ah, right, I knew I was missing a really great example...

Certain counterfeit collectibles have always had some measure of collector appeal on their own merits. In philately, off the top of my head, that includes the London Stock Market forgeries and the forged WWII German stamps produced by the OSS as part of the Operation Cornflake propaganda effort. Over in the coin collecting realm, the Omega Counterfeits are pretty big money, as are the (presumably) Soviet-created 1923D and 1930D dimes; the Henning nickel is popular but not FMV is still only a few bucks Henning made just a huge number of them. For comics, the counterfeit TMNT 1 is probably the biggest example, although I know there's been some collector interest in the counterfeit Cry for Dawn #1 also (to the considerable dismay of Linsner, who is very firm in his belief that they should not be collected in any way).

Are they all in the database already? If so, the odds are in your favor. If not, then when they are checked in, the receiving department will load them into the CGC processing database with ... whatever they want. Usually, that means the book you submitted without the variant information, or, for books that aren't in the database at all, whatever shows up first on autocomplete when they type in a few letters. The chances you get correctly labeled books then drops starkly, for some reason. My last two shipments have both had books with defective labels for this reason. One, a second printing that wasn't previously graded (so was listed without the second printing line by receiving), and one a book that had never been recorded by CGC before that was labeled as something completely different through the power of autocomplete fields. The first one was obscure enough that I considered it almost excusable that grading didn't catch there was a second edition to distinguish; the latter is proof that the receiving process is very, very broken.

@CGC Mike Friendly ping that it's the start of a new week, and that I'd still very much like some details about this, because it still really looks like Bad Idea was allowed to buy specific grades for their gimmick book. Ideally, I'd like to see some assurance from CGC management that specific grades won't be for sale again in future, but if that seems to be off the table, I guess I'm interested in whether I can get in on the same offer if I self-publish something.

Interestingly enough, I'm not sure that's actually true. Off the top of my head, Femforce #1 is certainly not a dollar book, but is a long way from what Cavewoman demands. A Distant Soil is pretty well renowned, even the first #1 from Warp is fairly available for under $10; only the Panda Khan issues demand much money.

This is far from my first rodeo, or even the first time I'll have to ME a book. It's not so much that one individual slab has an error; errors do happen. It's the volume of issues, even for gloriously obvious failures. This one is, in particular, tough to excuse because it's not even like they swapped labels on two books they actually had, or fat-fingered the wrong issue number. I actually have a pretty good idea how this particular grading and QA failure happened but that requires failures by multiple people in the process. After they've said they're working on the problems. After they said they're raising prices. Encapsulation is a useful service for this industry, and CGC has, for decades, been the industry leader. I simply can't understand why, over and over, they seem to be in a rush to squander it all.