Qalyar

Remaindered books has their covers removed. In theory, those were supposed to be destroyed, but they very frequently were not. By 1942 it was pretty easy to get bulk quantities of remaindered books. Obviously, this was a better deal.

I'm going to go 7.0 here. I think the tears at the spine are a problem, as is what looks like a small tear near the FC LR. Plus some scallop shaped creasing along the bottom edge, both front and back, and the general spine wear best visible from that inside cover shot. Finally, in addition to the other photography tips people have mentioned, please don't photograph good books immediately adjacent to rolls of tape. Precode horror has nothing on how terrifying tape is!

Books like this are tough. The back cover crease is pressable. A lot of the grade here comes down to whether one or both corners are given a pass a manufacturing defects/bindery tears rather than post-manufacturing wear. I'm going to go 8.5 here also, because I think the bottom of the spine, in particular, is going to get graded down because of the apparent paper loss.

Spine roll, ugly FC LL, creases at FC LR, some tearing at both staples. That long crease at BC L plus some corner creases at BC UL. Whatever you want to call the staining/foxing/discoloration, especially at the back cover bottom. I'd say 4.0/4.5 here, which may come down in part to whether that spine defect near the plane's landing gear is a tear (it sure looks like a tear...) or just a really gnarly spine tick.

I'm gonna go 7.5 here. If you submit (and I would), make sure to request the Bethlehem pedigree; this should be a slam-dunk with that store and date stamp and would look fantastic with the pedigree label. Not that it doesn't look fantastic already. Seriously, just a beautiful copy.

The stack of 1940s books that are slabbing virgins is interesting to me, especially Dottie Dripple 1. Harvey Publications took over that series from Magazine Enterprises starting with #8, and most of the Harvey issues are already on the census. But neither of the Magazine Enterprises issues are. That Dottie Dripple 1 was only good for a 4.0, so it certainly wasn't the Mile High copy that sold at Heritage back in 2006. The stupidity of the ASM 299 is really the standout entry for this batch, though. In and of itself, that wouldn't be as bad of a problem, except that CGC clearly never thought this sort of thing could happen when they built the system, because when a single entity is incorrectly given two different identifiers, they don't seem to have any way to merge those records. That's why we have Canadian Editions vs. Canadian Price Variants. Same books, just a change in label philosophy, but they're (apparently permanently) separate entities in the census (and such things play havoc with the registry). This one's even less understandable than the Canadian shenanigans because it was just someone messing up date formats; as an on-and-off programmer, I appreciate how much date formats but that's still not an excuse here.

I believe the general consensus is that these were from multi-packs, possibly themselves distributed in Canada. Later on, they'd explicitly call books (sort of) like this as second editions in the indicia. But there are a couple of weird books like this where the pieces seems mismatched (as I recall, Thundercats is another one. Ho!).

MyBB? I seem to think that was created by Chris B...something, but I don't remember any drama about him, just that software enhancements took forever to get developed and configuration was persnickety.

I've always found the other guys' "bag and sticker" grading option to be... pretty dumb, really. But since no one seems willing or able to produce a case that accommodates treasury-sized books, I guess it's what there is for now...

There is something of a distinction between art collecting and comic collecting insofar as art work (especially at the "fine art" level) is comprised of unique (or very nearly so) works. That's rarely the case with comics. In comic collecting (as with philately, numismatics, and many similar hobbies), some copies have been preserved in a better state than others and that makes the better-preserved items more valuable. I think that there eventually needs to be some better-standardized determination of what processes are considered acceptable conservation to maintain the quality of books that are faced with autocatalytic decay processes (in particular, the nearly inevitable decay of certain types of paper). But I think that comparing comic restoration -- that is to say, processes that turn back the clock on already-accumulated defects -- with art restoration fails to appreciate the differences between the properties. Although I'm pretty opposed to restoration in most cases, I'm in favor of certain conservation techniques, books that are both historically important and likely to degrade without conservatory work (which covers many -- as the years pass, increasingly so -- GA books in particular). However, I believe that the standard for the conservation label should have been the use of fully reversible archival conservation methods. I... do not agree with leaf casting as a "conservation" method. Really, I think CGC's distinction between restoration and conservation is a good idea, but they really needed to do a better job bright-lining the distinctions. To my personal dismay, my opinions on the matter are not taken as edicts by everyone else.

This type of reflective foil cover is really difficult to take reliable, comparable photos of. So, to start with, I wouldn't put much stock in sampling EBay photos. With that all said, I'd chock this up to manufacturing variance. Despite being mass-produced, not all books are identical. Ink wells run low, foil application processes have ... weird stuff ... happen, holograms get mounted upside down. Those aren't variants, and by and large, they're often not even collectible errors, because they're one-offs. In philately, such things are called freaks. Some people collect them, but they aren't afforded any sort of standardized, catalogued recognition; they rarely demand a substantial premium. Now, yes, sometimes there's a problem like that in comic book manufacturing such that it affects enough copies so as to be deemed an unintentionally created, but collectible, variety (or variant, if you will, although not in the "intentionally produced cover" sense of the term). Fantastic Four 110 Green Printing Error, Avengers 10 Yellow Printing Error*, Sandman v2 18 Blue Panels, Venom: Lethal Protector 1 Black. And so forth. * technically, CGC doesn't recognize this one as a separate variety for census purposes and gives these books Qualified labels, but it's pretty widely considered "a thing" I don't think that's what you have. I think you might have a one-off "freak", as it were. Although I'm not even sure exactly how distinctive the difference would be in hand, because photographing this type of cover side-by-side isn't going to give a true indication of the difference; if you want to sell the idea that you have something significant, start by taking images of the two books with identical lighting and positioning (yes, that means one at a time). But the idea that you have discovered some sort of Lethal Protector-esque rarity worthy of specific recognition? Well, I think you have an uphill battle there, especially in the absence of strong evidence that your unusual book (to the extent that one or both of these books even is unusual) is not merely a unique occurrence.

Three issue miniseries, but it was a "Marvel Digital Comics Exclusive", so no physical copies exist. Although if you want the miniseries in print in some format, it was reprinted (in physical form!) in the Marvel Apes: The Evolution Starts Here TPB.

Out of curiosity, can you check the inside back cover? Is it a "Prizes or Cash" sales club advertisement or an ad for MPC model kits?

9.2 as it stands. Pressing will resolve the finger bend at front cover center-right. It will probably also resolve those spine ticks, although there's a chance there's some color break there; it's hard to tell in photographs, especially with the glare off the shiny spine! Optimistically, I'm thinking this is probably a 9.6 after pressing. My lingering areas of concern are: 1) the back cover upper left corner; I see a white dot there, but can't tell whether that's spurious or represents some defect to that corner; and 2) the front cover, bottom left corner which might be passed off as manufacturing with no point deduction or might be considered corner blunting and keep you out of 9.8. I think the chances that one of those two issues will remain (and/or that one of the spine ticks resists pressing) are good enough that I wouldn't expect a 9.8 here. But I've been surprised lots. In any case, nice book.

As to the original slab in questions, I don't think I would crack it. Cracking slabs may make you nervous, but fiddling around with hanging margin pieces makes me nervous.

Oh yeah, do not blame you one bit for not pressing that thing. I'm pretty sure the Force is all that's holding it together.

I remember the before-slab pictures of that travesty of a 35c variant. I think it actually looks ... well, okay, it doesn't look good in the slab, but it looks as good as it's going to get. And that's still an obnoxiously hard book to find. Can't believe you snagged one in the wild. My local HPB... is not the source of such things, shall we say.

Makkari was criminally underused in this film. Even though I liked him well enough, I'd happily sell off half of Kingo's screen time for more Makkari.

At the risk of de-derailing this thread by accidentally responding to the original question ... it depends what you consider a "reason". One of the series I collect pretty aggressively is a low print run indie. In the last two years, I've watched actually-sold prices for 9.8 slabs of #1 go from the $120 range to a recent auction sale well over $300. There's no external reason for this book to double in price. There's no imminent film or Netflix show or the like (it's been optioned forever, in development hell; while I expect an adaptation someday, that's not within the horizon). It's likely that there's simply two or three collectors who have taken interest in the series and so are putting price pressure on the fairly thin supply of high grade copies. Is that a "reason"? Well, not in the same way that "Marvel announces Paste Pot Pete film" would spike the price of Strange Tales 104, anyway.

I don't think I've ever gotten updates when books advance in status, except via the magical power of the F5 key applied to my order listing. I don't mind the long CGC wait times. The books I've got in queue are getting slabbed eventually, and they might as well enjoy a Florida vacation instead of sitting around here in the meantime. The handful of books I've had at CCS since May are killing the drill, though.

Honest appraisal? It's okay. I'd rate it above Iron Man 2 or Thor 2, but below a lot of the more interesting films. Most of the film is a lot different from the pacing of conventional Marvel films, with the threaded timeline and the greater reliance on introspective discussion than just pew pew all the time. That probably bored some fanboys, but I thought it worked well enough. However, that's most of the film. For me, it's the climax where the film falls short. I'm not even going to bother using spoiler tags to say that it opts for a Marvel special effects tentpole combat ending, because everyone probably assumes that for all these films by now. That's disappointing here (even more so than it was for Shang-Chi). But also ...

Depends on the overall grade. Below 8.0/8.5 ish, the owner sign is no longer the controlling issue, so doesn't move the dial. Above that, I would knock it down one grade, and maybe two at the extreme top end (because of area effected; capping the books at 9.4). However, CGC doesn't treat my opinions as gospel for some reason, as the 9.8 proto-Eldon indicates. Still, I think double-signed books above 9.0 ought to take a one tier hit.

To my dismay, I don't have any more information on these than you do. @CDNComix, these are a little more recent than your main area of focus, but if anyone here is familiar with them...

If I remember correctly, the label gets a "MANUFACTURED WITHOUT TOP STAPLE" notation, but I don't believe it's considered a grade-affecting defect. Well, no 9.9 with this, but that's pretty much never an issue anyway.

One of the problems with "keys" is that most of them are "1st appearance of Timmy McGuffin" stories. And I think we all know at this point that character intro stories are lame more often than they are good... even for characters who turn out to be unique and interesting down the line. Comics have a limited amount of space to tell the issue's story while also tossing a new character in, explaining who they are and what they can do, and at least hinting at where they came from. Plus, early installment weirdness plagues a lot of first appearances; whatever your opinion of IH181, the IH181 version of Wolverine is quite a bit different from the character as we understand him now.