Qalyar

As far as condition goes, you've got a pretty ugly color breaking spine tick, and then what looks like a bit of color loss at the FC UR corner. The sort of splotchy foil job at FC LR is actually pretty common on this issue; I have no idea whether or not CGC would consider that a defect. This certainly isn't the worst copy ever in that regard. I'm going to say something in the 9.2 range, give or take a grade. The certificate means nothing so far as CGC is concerned, so that would come back on a green Qualified label. As for value, well... There are quite a few signed copies of this book listed on Ebay right now, some with Maus's signature, others with Steven Stern's. Almost all of these can be had for $25 or less, sometimes for a lot less, including one probably slightly lower grade (some foil lift, wear at FC bottom, something wonky going on near FC UR) book with Maus's sig currently listed for all of 5 bucks. I don't see any evidence that this book is moving rapidly at any price, either. So I'm gonna say $10, but expect to wait for a sale even at that price point. There are definitely some Zen books that can still demand pretty good prices, but those are mostly from the 1987 debut miniseries; I'm afraid there's just not a lot of collector interest in the later material.

I will admit that the whole Archie-esque genre is a category of books about which I know almost exactly nothing. But, wow, looking that one up, yep, you've got a winner there too!

I'm not a "press everything" guy, but I'd have this one pressed. That should take care of the bend at FC UR, reduce (or maybe eliminate) the corner trauma at BC LL, and improve the BC UR. I think the couple spots of color loss at BC UR are going to be controlling for the final grade here, especially if that LL corner cleans up nicely. So I'd say 8.5-9.0 now (those broad bends at the top are guaranteed to press out, but they're large by area, and that earns bigger hits), but 9.2-9.4 post press depending on how well that corner recovers. Also, nice book.

It's tough to tell what's going on here from the pictures, but certainly none of my current-gen cases appear to behave that way.

+1 for the newsstand printing of Warlock and the Inifnity Watch... and the DCU printing of Sovereign Seven.

Well, damn. George is a wonderful artist and more importantly a really great person. I wish him all the happiness he can glean from his remaining days. Also, as always, cancer.

A lot of Antarctic Press's niche publications are essentially ghost books. On the other hand, they're also mostly still really niche pieces that don't have a lot of mainstream collector appeal. The few times that isn't the case, though... Antarctic's furry fandom books were really low print runs after awhile. Furrlough struggled -- and often failed -- to stay in the top 300 books ordered via Diamond, which means quite a few of these books were in the 1200-1500 range for orders placed (and not likely any higher total print runs; Antarctic's foreign distribution was a joke, and these clearly weren't going through newsstands!). Their target audience wasn't necessarily traditional comic collectors, which is probably some of which these are tough in high grades, too. Of course, rare doesn't mean anyone cares... except, for example, Furrlough 47-48 with the Ninjara story for TMNT-verse completionists. These aren't even close to the hardest Antarctic books though!

2.0. But I agree this book presents well. Also, this sort of foreign republication book is always pretty cool and badly underappreciated!

Haha! For undergrounds (and frankly, a lot of indies and otherwise obscure Bronze-Modern stuff), the measure of "toughness" isn't necessarily whether you can find one book you weren't looking for. It's whether you can find one book you are looking for -- or a book you weren't looking for twice.

This book is not getting slabbed. It's a trainwreck. I'm posting it here in part to see it get the PGM savaging it deserves. But also because this forum is pretty widely frequented, and I could use some information about this book. The normal cover of this Dark Horse one-shot was released in 2001, and is nothing that weird (although kind of hard to find in high grades). This puppy... well, it has no cover price and lacks the ISBN and barcode of the normal issue. So I assume it was an advertising freebie or con swag, but I can find zilch info on where it actually came from. I'm hoping that someone dropping in to make fun of its condition can fill me in on the history. Oh, and if someone wants to offer me a 9.0+ copy, well, my PMs are right there... As for this book, if you think it looks like a defect, it's isn't my poor photography skills; it's a defect! The only thing I can say in it's defense is the long arc at front cover top that looks like a tear or really ugly crease is actually.... just a really ugly color-breaking surface scrape through the cover gloss. I guess that's better. Assume the front and back cover fields also have more non-breaking dents than I was able to show here. Because they do.

I don't think the wonky top edge cut will affect the grade; CGC offers technical grades, which aren't intended to reflect eye appeal, and so miscuts and miswraps don't do anything except keep you out of the 9.9 pile that nothing ever gets anyway. Here, though, I see a few issues. The FC UR corner looks a little soft. The FC LL corner looks even worse; you can tell from the back cover that there's a little bit of fanning of that corner. On the back cover, the white dot at LR is probably just inconsistent production inking, but there looks like there's a little bit of color rub along the BC LR spine. I assume the light stripe at bottom-center is either production inking or actually intended to look like that. However, I'm a little concerned with the BC top edge, because it really looks to me like there's some discoloration there (look above "Gum" and thereabouts). It could be a trick of the light in that picture, but it makes me nervous. I'm gonna go 8.5-9.0 here, but it could be higher (if that discoloration is just an illusion, 9.2?) or lower (if that discoloration is water damage, maybe as low as 8.0), depending on the characteristics of the book in hand. Lassie, of course, rates a 10/10 because dogs are good.

My three are all firmly "modern oddities". I collect a lot of weird stuff, and some of it -- even though it's modern era books, often printed by real publishers -- has proven immensely difficult to chase down. I got two of my grail-list pieces over the last year via this board (and picked up another rarity from a lucky hit on Ebay). These aren't classic pieces like the Golden Age stuff some of you have taken home, and they certainly don't have the FMV of popular hot-book keys, but they're harder to find than most of those more familiar books (okay, some of you GA collectors, I don't mean you). EverQuest Online Adventures: The Quest for Darkpaw is my prize book for the year. This is a real chase item. The origins of this promo piece are unclear, but I believe (although I can't prove it yet) that this was offered as a mail-away promo via the console gaming magazine Tips & Tricks, which is better known for a different video game tie-in promo comic. They ran the contest that distributed the Twisted Metal 2 book. Based on my searches, in the last 10 years, there have only been about a half-dozen of the EverQuest Online Adventures book pass through the documented secondary market, so they're likely around the same scarcity tier as the Twisted Metal book, just ... with less collector interest (and value). I strongly suspect that extant copies of this number less than 50. Babylon 5. There's no other title on this little 6-pager with Kaare Andrews art, but the B5 community knows this as The Lost Tales. It is the comic book companion to Bablyon 5: The Lost Tales, a direct-to-DVD special, released in 2007, that was the last original story done for B5... well, so far! This thin book was produced as a tribute to Richard Biggs (Dr. Stephen Franklin) and Andreas Katsulas (G'Kar), who had both passed away before the production of The Lost Tales. Copies were handed out at the 2007 SDCC exclusively to attendees of J. Michael Straczynski's panel (many of which are signed by JMS), but most distributed copies were pack-ins in a "Special Edition" of the DVD sold exclusively through Best Buy in the US (plus another 10-20 copies that were surplus from the "normal" distribution and eventually entered the secondary market). There are no public sales data for the Best Buy Special Edition, but I'd conservatively guess there were never more than 1500-2000 of these, and quite possibly a lot less than that. Plus, survival rates from the DVD release are poor, and B5 collectors closely hold most of the remaining pieces. With the announcement that JMS is about to reboot the Bablyon 5 property, I am amazingly happy to have this one taken care of for my collection. This copy was a DVD pack-in copy (held down by the plastic case clips, yikes!) so it's currently on vacation at a pressing resort for obvious reasons. Shame about that spot of spine trauma near the bottom, but still. Legends of the Dark Crystal / Return to Labyrinth 2006 flipbook. Sorry, don't have a picture handy of this one right now. In 2006, a three-DVD box set of the films Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and Mirrormask was released. The producers of that box set worked out a deal with manga publisher Tokyopop to include a flipbook comic, previewing Tokyopop's upcoming release of manga spinoffs off the first two films. Partway through the box set lifecycle, 2007 happened -- and the first manga actually released. Rather than continue to offer a preview book for something that no longer needed previewing, Tokyopop prepared a 2007 version with a new cover, replacing the Legends of the Dark Crystal preview with a preview of Legends volume 2. I've had the 2007 one for some time, because I happened to own a 2007 copy of that box set. But this year, I was able to track down a copy of the 2006 companion piece. The box set sold well, but there are very few remaining sealed sets (and no way to tell if they have the 2006 or 2007 book), and essentially all unsealed sets have long seen their promotional pack-ins lost. I doubt more than a couple hundred copies, between both versions, survive.

It's actually impressive just how many of the defects were able to press out on this one. I don't think this was a particularly lenient grading, although I might have expected a 7.5 on the back of the top staple wear. The spine wear isn't sufficient to be "frayed spine", and often gets more of a pass than similar wear elsewhere (in part because a certain amount of color loss on the spine fold can often be a consequence of the manufacturing process). Regardless, congratulations. Fantastic book, and definitely a C&P that paid for itself!

Sorry about that. I mostly try to tell people neat facts about the indies they find, rather than crush hopes and dreams. For the record on this book, there is also a newsstand printing. I know the NS prints were only distributed as "A" covers, but I've never held one in hand, so while I believe they lack the 2nd cover entirely, I can't actually confirm that. If that's the case, this would be one of those issues where even CGC ought to distinguish the NS printing (not that I expect there are very many people who would pay to slab this issue).

This book is weird, but that weirdness is owed to the issue in general, not to your copy in particular. All of the direct market copies of [Peter Parker] Spider-Man #98 are like this. The "A" cover copies -- such as this one -- have the orange cover as the outer cover. "B" cover copies have the blue cover as the outer cover. I have no idea why they did this, but your book is as it was intended to be.

Unfortunately, there are very rarely official cover lists from the publishers. You'd think there would be, but... with rare exceptions, nope.

Wow. I'm pretty sure where I live, the dollar boxes don't have SIKTC #1 (even fourth printing) to #9 runs...

Thought that, but first BlizzCon was 2005, so if this was a con freebie, it was a different con.

So, these are 2001 releases, so they're definitely Modern, not Copper, but this is also the everything Dark Horse thread, so, hey, seemed a better fit here than in the random bins of Modern stuff. In 2001, Dark Horse published a 64-page one-shot anthology book as a spinoff to Blizzard's Diablo video game franchise. Obviously, it's a little awkward to cheerlead for Activision/Blizzard overmuch right now, but in 2001 they were still the good guys. I digress... The book's surprisingly good, on the whole. Phil Amara and Dave Land writing, Francisco Ruiz Velasco did the art and cover. Print run was ... not high, but it's tough to determine. It doesn't seem to show up in any of Comichron's records for Previews orders for 2001, but smart money is on 5000 (or possibly fewer) copies. There are a couple 9.8s on census, but this is a tough book in the high grades in general. The combination of an all-black cover with squarebound binding makes nearly all available copies (that aren't just beaters) firmly in the 9.0/9.2 range at best. For the record, no chance at flipping this copy into a 9.8, it's got a little corner trauma and was graded correctly. But speaking of beaters, I've got another copy of this book, except it looks like this: CGC has slabbed one copy of this as the "variant cover" (a 9.0). This copy would be lucky to hit 6.0, with abuse to all the edges and corners, plus a constellation of spine ticks (including one that's frankly a tear more than a tick). But whatever, it's not getting slabbed. I may slab drek, but I don't slab beat drek. On the other hand, I would absolutely like to learn more about this "variant cover". For starters, I don't think that's what this really is (okay, yes, it has a different cover, so that's not wrong). It doesn't have a cover price, or an ISBN, so this was presumably some sort of promotional giveaway (but, for the record, identical inside cover copy / copyright / indicia). Anyone know where this came from? Advertising promo or convention swag seem the most likely choices. Whatever this book actually was, it's a whole lot less common in the secondary market than the already kinda low print-run normal edition. Also, if someone happens to have one of these that stands a reasonable chance of grading out at 9.2+, well, you know where to find me.

As best as I know, for #1: Guillem March cover (the base comic) Frank Quitely cover Francisco Martino cover Riccardo Federici sketch cover (1:25 incentive) Green blank cover Mark Brooks Team / Riccardo Federici cover Scorpion Comics / Rafael Grassiti cover Scorpion Comics / Rafael Grassiti minimal trade dress Scorpion Comics / Rafael Grassiti virgin Frankie's Comics / Gabriele Dell'Otto cover Frankie's Comics / Gabriele Dell'Otto minimal trade dress Frankie's Comics / Gabriele Dell'Otto virgin 616 / Francesco Mattina cover Jolzar / Francesco Mattina minimal trade dress Bird City Comics / Jonboy Meyers cover Bird City Comics / Jonboy Meyers minimal trade dress Comic Mint / John Giang cover State of Comics / Neal Adams cover Sanctum Sanctorum / Mimi Yoon cover Comics Elite / Ryan Brown cover Comics Elite / Ryan Brown minimal trade dress J. Scott Campbell cover J. Scott Campbell minimal trade dress J. Scott Campbell virgin Dynamic Forces / Ken Haeser cover

Yeah, it's a ghost of a book. Great example of the "last issue effect".

2.0. Book presents generally better, but the grade hits for that water damage are going to be significant because it's touched a significant area of the cover -- and, more importantly, because it penetrates the entire book and has compromised the paper integrity on both the front and back cover (as we see from the paper loss). Shame about that, really, because the colors on this copy are really full and rich. I imagine this would outperform its technical grade.

I don't think this is getting a 9.4, even with a press, although a press will improve the appearance of the two significant color-breaking spine ticks (near "No. 1" and near the police drone) and will take care of what might or might not be a broad bend at UR (it's tough to tell, and might just be lighting / camera angles). I'm most worried about those streaks on the back cover. There are a couple that stand out as non-reflective in the wide shot, near the center of the spine. And then what I take to be another one lower down in the second pic. What's going on with these? Are they scratches? Because the overall condition is high on this copy, exactly what these are may make a lot of difference in the final grade.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book goes to 12, but the last three are all pretty elusive. As a bonus, nice newsstand printings. I don't think they're much rarer than the DM copies on this one, but they're definitely tough in presentable condition. Fun fact. Bill & Ted have been published as comics by four different major publishers: DC (1989 Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure one-shot), Marvel (1991 Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey one-shot, Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book 12-issue series), Boom (2016 Bill and Ted Go to Hell 4-issue mini), and Dark Horse (2020 Bill & Ted Are Doomed 4-issue mini).