Qalyar

Well, the flip side is that doing conventions would have likely been worse, because it takes staff out of the Florida facility for not only the convention itself but also the travel time, and provides an extra influx of submissions. Suspending convention appearances was the right choice; suspending in-house signings would be as well.

Honestly, I don't think a submissions freeze is the right choice now; it may have been earlier. They are slowly making progress on TATs. Whatever this new "beta" process they're testing that sometimes results in fast-turnaround shipments out of order is... promising, even if it's not very transparent to the end users and frustrating to people who didn't get selected. On the other hand, I do think they should suspend in-house signing events. I know they won't, because those are fundamentally an opportunity for CGC to roll around in money. But they're disruptive to the scheduling process; they demand that books be fast-tracked through pressing and grading at the expense of the rest of the process, because the signer's physical presence places a hard-stop deadline. And that's a problem right now. It's obvious there are growing pains in the process, both in terms of TAT and QA. Having a constant cycle of Very Special Submissions that require they drop everything else to attend to is... not helping.

And potentially a purple label...

I could even see a 3.5. CGC strongly penalizes "large" defects, and I think both the tape pull at front left and the tape pull in the yellow box on the back are big enough to earn extra hits. Tape sucks.

Just by way of clarification: does this book have 1 factory staple plus one added one, or is the interloper the only staple at all? Regardless, I'm with a lot of others; I don't think there's a good path to a blue label here. Personally, I'd probably leave the book slabbed and sell it as it stands; weird situations like this are tough sells on raw books, because buyers rightly wonder whether any other funny business is going undisclosed or undetected.

"Do not bend" has even less currency with my local USPS than "fragile". If their delivery guy can fit it in the little.box, then by god, it is going in the box, even if it requires postal origami to do so.

Ah yes, the "even Danny freaking Dupcek gets 100% positive because the Ebay feedback system is fundamentally broken" feedback?

For what it's worth, I secure bags pretty aggressively, but I use blue painter's tape, which peels off without drama. I will agree that Dante would have designated a place in Inferno for people who use like two rolls of clear packing tape on each comic.

Must be nice, haha. I try not to tell shippers how to ship. Sometimes I regret not having done so, but the lack of care some shipments have demonstrated sort of suggests that it wouldn't have done much good anyway. In my experience, the worst shippers in this regard are ones that are primary book deals rather than comic dealers, but they're hardly alone. Now, to be fair, I've never had anything particularly valuable damaged through poor shipping... although having to buy $5 or $10 books repeatedly sure makes them feel like a lot less of budget slots all of a sudden. In fact, in some ways, that's worse, because trying to recoup costs on a $10 purchase is hardly ever going to actually end up being worth it. Eventually, I'll be taking my third (or in one case, fourth) swing at a couple of those books. It's ... frustrating. In part, that's because the quest for completion is a helluva drug, but it shouldn't be this hard to get nice copies to me intact, you know?

Right? I've had a couple of terminally underpacked items arrive intact, which I assume only feeds the willingness of shippers to send items out into the world unprotected. But I've had more arrive mangled than miraculous. Notably including a newsstand variant of a book no one else cares about, which was mailed to me, unsupported, in a manilla envelope. As usual with this sort of thing, the seller's response was to shrug it off. "That book isn't worth anything, so condition doesn't matter anyway." I continue to disbelieve the number of times I've been told that. It's even sadder when people treat items that do have a significant market value in the same way.

That's a different problem, but I was under the impression this tear was pre-existing and the question was just whether CGC should have folded it back down prior to slabbing for aesthetic purposes.

And people complain about CGC's TATs!

This one isn't really a QA problem. Longstanding slabbing policy has been to not fold down tears and flaps and the like if there's any realistic chance of losing the fragment by doing so. With a piece that small, and those page edges kinda beige... I wouldn't have expected them to risk fragmentation for the sake of appearance.

For those curious about items like this, there were also 3 issues distributed by Lionel Play World. They are not common books.

Scarcity is useful, even divorced from collector demand. If you happen to want to add some weird book to your collection that no one else seems to want, different strategies are required if there were 20000 copies produced, or 200 copies, or 20 copies.

Never seen one of these bagged, much less a full set. And I wouldn't sweat the spine tics and such too much, the only copies I remember seeing were utter dogs.

Yes. I have several few odd foreign republications in slabs.

Correct. This is one of the reprint editions. Star Wars reprints are a bag of cats, but no actual "35 cent variant" books have diamond logos

I'm not a fan of restoration for its own sake, especially starting with books that are fundamentally sound. But let's be honest, the copy you had was a casualty, past the point of any realistic conservation; left alone, this book was probably doomed to deteriorate away. Instead, it gets to hang on your wall. Restoration techniques can be used for evil, but you should be happy with and proud of the work you did with this book.

These are reprints by the publisher. They're not really any different than any other reprint edition of any other book over the decades. Yes, CGC ed their identification of one copy of the UF4 reprint, and yes, that slab will be a problem forever, but in general there's no real concern with these books. The people who are creating straight-up fabrications of out-of-copyright (well, usually...) books are a bigger problem. One such creator advertises here periodically, and I'm a strong believer than CGC should amend their forum TOS to ban advertising of what are, ethically if not legally, counterfeit comics.

Yeah, there are a couple of 6.5 Universal copies of Nelvana, but the only graded Triumph-Adventure 1 is a 4.0 Restored. I think we'd see some really phenomenal sales if something like an 8.0 Nelvana or 6.0 Universal Triumph-Adventure 1 were -- somehow -- ever discovered.

Pretty sure that's like half the swipes of the ASM300 cover. Which has always confused me because I guess I'm the only person out there who thinks the ASM300 cover is ugly, haha.

I figured that neither Transmet nor Invisibles could rightly be considered "less heralded".

Other strong contenders are El Sorprendente Hombre Araña 128 (the Gwen Stacy "wedding" issue), and the top-end titles of the Canadian Whites, such as Triumph-Adventure Comics #1 and the Nelvana of the Northern Lights #nn one-shot.

I've never been much of a GA collector, but at one point I picked up a large mixed-era collection, in part because it's owner kept very detailed notes about what he owned and I appreciated the chance to do less work processing a bunch of boxes. To my surprise, though, his notes were wrong about one book. What he had listed as the 1953 Three Stooges #1 (St. Johns) was actually the much rarer 1949 Three Stooges #1 (Jubilee). It was a solid midgrade copy, probably around a 6.0. I sold it a couple years later, and it definitely went in the financial win column, although I absolutely considered holding onto it as a neat rarity. It comes up for sale more these days than it used to, but it's still a tough book. I hope the copy I had is still in a good home.