Qalyar

Not comics, but sold out of Magic: the Gathering in part to pay bills and in part because my playgroup was pretty sure that the Urza's Block nonsense was a sign that the game was on it's death spiral like so much of the TCG industry. Got several thousand dollars for my collection at the time. Current market price for what I owned would be north of a quarter-million. Hindsight, thou art a .

I slab anything that fits within the "runs" of stuff I decide I want to slab. Accordingly, I've got a handful of encapsulated 2nd and 3rd printings. The books in questions almost certainly weren't worth the slabbing fees from a strictly financial standpoint, but I wanted to let them know that I don't think any less of them just because they were printed later. They're still good books. Fair disclosure: Everyone should collect how they want. Few people should collect how I want.

Well, admittedly, Counterpoint has done just that, but I, shall we say, don't take them very seriously as a publisher, nor their "books" as collectibles.

I've slabbed lots of stuff you "shouldn't" slab, but I don't think anything good would come of slabbing this. On top of everything already said, I don't think this book will come back a 9.8 due to the partial reader's crease at FC BL. Squarebound books are hard.

for a dollar!

I don't expect this will come back higher than a 5.5 because of the lower front cover spine, the pen marks, and the UR FC. But I'd press it anyway, because half-points are a big deal financially here and because I do think it'll help the presentation quite a bit. Besides, you're upgrading the slab out of Brand X anyway, and the costs of pressing are trivial compared to the book's value. I don't see any realistic chance of ending up below the current grade, so it's all net positives (and that's even from the standpoint of someone who is not the world's biggest fan of "press everything!").

Crystal clear!

I also think this will end up 6.5/7.0. Whether it's production (which I think it is) or not, I don't think the bent staple is going to be a problem, so long as the cover and CF are secure at that staple. As for whether it's "worth" it to submit this comic for grading, I have no idea how much money you're into this book for, but even a 6.5 or 7.0 ASM50 is a solid four-digit book. I would slab this were it my copy, but your collecting goals may vary.

I had (and... probably still have, somewhere) more than few copies of Fish Police, although at least I was only into them for cover price. To be fair, there was a moment when I could have cashed them out for a fairly crazy profit. So I guess that's less of a speculation fail than a timing fail. If the TV adaptation hadn't been terrible...

What a beautiful pair of books.

That's well beyond the threshold that would see me sending it back.

Also, the black covers on 33/34 and the white cover on 35 ought to be fun times to find in grade.

I'm having a hard time finding what you've identified as a printer's crease in this image. I'm concerned that you've described it as "run[ning] the length of the front cover" (emphasis mine) because printer's creases are almost always horizontal, or nearly so. I've nearly convinced myself that the issue in question is near the right side of the book, passing through the tip of the title W and Silver Samurai's left elbow, terminating to the left of his left foot. If that's actually a crease and not the vagaries of imaging, then I'm pretty sure it's a defect and not a printer's crease, and the overall grade is going to be quite a bit lower than 7.0.

Not arguing whether or not this is "worth" cleaning up and/or slabbing, but please don't forget to account for shipping costs when evaluating books on purely financial grounds.

Batman #66 (September 1951; the Joker boner issue) gets a pass. The first uses of boner in its modern sense weren't until right about the same time that comic came out. So at the time it hit the newsstands, people would almost certainly still have read it as it was intended. Now... if the writers were still using it that way ten years later, well...

What always gets me about the WANK one is when it was published. 1990. Although chiefly British for awhile, that word has meant that since the early 1900s. They... they had to know, right?

If someone collects mostly sci-fi titles, can they have their comic ashes sent into space instead? In all seriousness, I wouldn't imagine most people would even have something set up to notify CGC upon their death. And, at least currently, their capacity to cancel orders is minimal anyway. The overwhelmingly likely outcome is that, eventually, the graded books will be sent to the deceased collector's address, just as if they were still alive. I suppose if you have particularly valuable stuff in queue, it's not a terrible idea to keep a note of that with your collection, so that -- if it becomes necessary -- whoever ends up taking stock will be aware that there are still inbound assets.

The actual answer is probably complicated, and likely depends on state law to determine whether these would be considered misdeliveries or unsolicited goods. My napkin-math guess is that most states would view these switched deliveries as unsolicited goods (which recipients have no obligation to return) because the packages were addressed correctly with regard to the address and addressee who received them (rather than misdelivered goods, where recipients do have an obligation to attempt to notify the shipper for recollection under most state laws). However, the proper owners of the books involved would have causes of action against CGC that almost certainly wouldn't be exempted by the rights waiver in the submission process. It sounds like it won't come to that, which is good. The best resolution of this debacle is for everyone to get their own stuff back, and for some guy in CGC shipping to be tied to the mast and flogged.

It occurs to me that, especially in the era of internet sales listings, this is the fundamental difference between rarity and scarcity, where rarity is a measure of how many physical copies of a book were produced (or, perhaps, still exist), and scarcity is a measure of how available a book is on the overall marketplace. If there were very few copies of a book produced, but (because no one really cares to hold onto them) a copy comes up for sale on some venue every 3-6 months, that book is rare, but it is not particularly scarce. On the other hand, there are also books with much higher production runs but that simply don't appear for sale (either due to black hole collection acquisition or a total lack of perceived value); such books may not be rare, but they are absolutely scarce. Rarity, then, is mostly of academic interest. Scarcity represents the expected amount of time necessary to locate a copy. I feel that the Gerber system was an effort to measure rarity, and the tracking system MCS is attempting is an effort to measure scarcity. Neither one necessarily tracks value to any significant degree, of course. I own several books that you'd be hard-pressed to find for sale anywhere in the next year but that have effectively nil collector interest or value (and there are a couple of unloved convention exclusive variants that I want to add to my collection but have never even seen!). As an aside, that pence copy of Battle is a sweet book.

Obviously, Joe Mad should illustrate a comic book adaptation of The Winds of Winter, because the world needs something even less likely to release than Half-Life 3.

Great piece, there. Rock Comics was distributed almost exclusively in the NYC area, and -- as this copy demonstrates -- was almost always folded in half to fit on newsstand shelves. In all, estimates are that it sold about 10,000 copies. Obviously, preservation rates for oversized newsprint aren't as good as for traditional comics, but it's not exactly rare. This was the only issue of Rock Comics, although Ken Landgraf's Langraphics would go on to publish five issues of Starfighters, which is pretty much the same sort of thing, only sci-fi.

The original reason that CGC argued for reholdering (other than the fact that reholdering is a revenue stream) is that 7-10 years is probably the timeframe for saturation of the micro chamber papers. YMMV as to whether that's actually an archival concern. Maybe for books where outgassing / page deterioration is a significant concern? For most books, I really don't think that's a significant issue. Micro chamber paper aside, for the current cases at least, the inner well is PETG, and that's pretty much a best-in-class long-term archival plastic.

I don't see any reason why CGC's slabs are unsuitable for long term storage. Obviously, they aren't a mystic talisman against poor storage conditions, but nothing else is, either.

It's not strictly a FF product -- not exactly -- but with this level of completion as a goal, I'd want to pick up the 1967 Topps parody Fantastic Fear too, just on principle.