Qalyar

Last story arc of the 1970s Godzilla, from #17 through #24. Godzilla #18, in particular, is the "miniaturized Godzilla in the sewers" issue.

CGC awards technical grades, which by definition, are not intended as a measure of visual appeal. So, yes, front cover defects are (generally, anyway) weighted exactly the same as back cover defects. But of course, they have different impact in terms of visual appeal.

I always try for exactly 25 because that's the most efficient for return shipping costs, although occasionally circumstances require a smaller batch.

The Count Duckula 1 might not be the flashiest book, but it's a surprisingly tough one to find in nice shape. Doubly so the newsstand prints like you've got here.

For a book like Sandman, where there are some single issues that have FMV way, way above the price of an arbitrarily chosen issue, I don't think full runs make a lot of sense to sell. A lot of people these days cherry-pick keys, and really do not care -- unfortunately -- about #33 or #58 or #74. For the same reason, really long runs are probably harder to move; plus, with long runs, you can really only sell the full thing to someone who wants to be a run collector but hasn't started yet. If they're just filling in holes, it doesn't make sense to buy the whole thing. That calculus might be different for lower-demand books with shorter runs, especially if the FMV per book is uniform-ish. Especially if they're low enough print run / availability to make finding them individually annoying. That said, I'm not coming up with a good example of a 6-9 issue series with a low print run, without any standout keys, that's not hot enough to break apart but hot enough that someone might actually want to buy. I'm sure that's out there, though. Somewhere.

Assuming the staples really are rusty, and it's not just an optical illusion or some such, I'd assume it didn't have rusty staples when it was graded. Improper storage can make books end up that way. The easiest ways to rust the staples on your 9.8 slabs are to store them in fire-proofed safes, or expose them to the outgassing from pyrite-contaminated drywall. Obviously, if you've got a book damaged in that manner, there's no way to turn back the clock. You can't un-rust a staple, or replace staples, without earning a non-Universal label. And a straight regrade won't come back 9.8. That aside, I'd say that if you have a book like that, you have an obligation to disclose the situation if you try to sell it. Sorry for the bad news. All that said, some pics might help, just to be sure that what you're seeing really is staple rust...

Taken on face value, I suspect this is a problem from manufacturing... but I also wouldn't be surprised if a wavy "otherwise 9.8" book came back 9.6.

I don't think I ever realized how many black covers are in that run. Those are some beautiful books in this thread, including the OP's. Congrats!

Not bad at all!

Nice selection of books there, showing off some pretty big names in underground (and underground adjacent) work. Conspiracy Capers is mostly interesting for its historical context. It was intended to help fund the defense of the Chicago Seven, which meant some unusually high profile people were involved in the production of this one -- including influential Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver and film director Susan Sontag! Two of these books have more than one...let's say variety here. Dan O'Neill's Comics #1 has two variants from the same print run, generally known as the "red ink" and "no red ink" versions (based on the inside front cover), although there are outside cover differences too. They're probably about equal rarity. Yours is the "no red ink" one. Meanwhile, Kitchen's Mom's Homemade Comics 1 went to three printings (although 2nd and 3rd are identical, so it's really first/not-first at this point). I'm happy to say, yours is a 1st printing (49 cents vs. 50 cents). That's the book that started Kitchen's rise to influence that eventually resulted in the 30 year history of Kitchen Sink Press. It's also still really funny.

Not sure which issue has that panel, but Chaykin's whole run on Wolverine (for the Death of Wolverine arc) stars Weapon T-ReX and his tiny arms.

Howard Chaykin's take on Wolverine belongs here, too, I think. Well, one of these is Chaykin's Wolverine, anyway. Tough to tell them apart...

I wasn't gonna bother with Liefeld for this thread, mostly because there's no evidence that what he draws are actually in any sense people.

Of course, that shoulder appears to be attached to the middle of Spidey's pec, so I think we can only award partial credit there.

My problem was never whether he broke the chains with his arms or through ridiculous power breathing. It's that chains don't break that way. They break at the weakest link, not explode into shrapnel. I know, I know, Superman's been breaking chains that way since he was created, but it's still dumb. Not as dumb as his Superhunch, though. Still, I think Spiderman draws the short stick on anatomy more often than ol' Supes does. Go ahead, find recognizable body parts in this one, I dare you. I'm not a big fan of Francisco Herrera in general, but he knows better than this...

I've always been so busy mocking this cover for its crimes against physics, I never noticed the anatomical travesty. That's what they mean by "win/win", right?

Speaking of covers with optical-illusion anatomy, Milgrom claims that Luke Cage and the Hulk didn't exchange their right arms for this cover. But it is pretty easy to see it that way.

"Of course I know how legs work, fellow humans. Why do you ask?" -Amy Reeder, I assume, based on this cover...

I'm at almost 6 months of "Received at CCS", so I'm pretty convinced their pressing division is not "all clear". Or likely to get repeat business from me, especially since I press very few of my books.

My biggest hope for their new workflow process is that it will provide better internal tracking for chain-of-custody. That way, if something goes wrong, they know where to address the problem. Especially with regards to the encapsulation crew. Although there have been grading and labeling errors (there are always some), encapsulation is where I think most of the physical damage is happening, and that needs to stop, like yesterday. Also, I have no idea what their current workflow is for QA, but whoever is supervisor of that team really ought to be sacked at this point. There are things that make QA more difficult than it sounds like it should be on paper, but there are way, way too many things getting past QA that really shouldn't. If the new process is speedier, too, good on 'em, but TATs aren't -- in my mind -- the most important target for improvement right now.

There have been some recent shipments with unusually fast turnarounds. Based on a few comments from CGC personnel, the general belief is that those shipments were selected into a pilot program testing a faster turnaround process. Everything else should still be proceeding apace normally.

That Millie the Model might be the current contender for the first "collector's item" cover (January 1960). The L Miller Mystic #20 was probably a 1962 release. I see a lot of these aren't #1s. Sigh. I'm gonna have to figure out a faster way to search through the 50s books again, haha...

I stand corrected in a sense. I didn't browse through the '40s books, so this 1942 issue didn't show up in my list.

I had a conference call I shouldn't have ever been asked to attend, so decided to put that time to use. I pulled up GCD's cover images of all #1 issues from 1950 to 1959 to check for "collector's issue" text or the like. It's possible I may have missed a book or two. There were way more of these than I expected (north of 1000...), and despite a handful of really great covers, a lot of them were eye-crossingly horrible. There's also a chance that something other than a #1 was marketed this way. After all, the Dell Frankenstein and Dracula "collector's issues" from 1966 are both technically #2s (as they are terrible superhero reboots of previous horror books). If someone else wants to do a broader search through '50s covers, they're welcome to it... That said, I came up with exactly zero books that marketed themselves as collector's issues, collector's items, or the like. However, Katy Keene Pinup Parade #1 (Archie, 1955) gets an honorable mention for including "A big parade of pin-ups! Pin-ups! For your pin-up collection", which appears to be the first time that a comic book cover explicitly referred to collecting anything comic-related.