Qalyar

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.

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.