Qalyar

Several things keep the price of Earthworm Jim high. The good ones: Memorable character with a fan base that fondly remembers the games (which means crossover collectible appeal). Unique and frankly pretty fantastic art style to the books. Available supply seems low (I don't think the Marvel Absurd books had huge print runs). Shockingly elusive in high grade. The bad thing: Earthworm Jim creator Doug TenNapel is, along with Cyberfrog's Ethan van Sciver, one of the main voices of the anti-diversity "Comicsgate" movement. This has earned him a... certain following, along with renewed interest in his books (and van Sciver's).

"you can't get away choose the type of your death" Indian Spiderman is hardcore.

Short answer: yes. Long answer: The only one I'm personally aware of is Menstrupedia Comic, an 88-page square bound educational comic (crowdfunded, and then sponsored in part by Stayfree), targeted at 9 year old girls in an effort to break south Asian cultural taboos about menstruation that often interfere with proper medical care. It has been printed in quite a few languages. I know that English, Chinese, Hindi, Telugu, and Nepali are among them. Likely others. That... is almost certainly not what you actually meant, but it's the best I can do off the top of my head.

That's actually quite elegant. It should be easy to implement, and allows Brian to kick the can down the road on a point system revision that, to be honest, is probably both a more complicated problem and a more complicated solution.

I mean, beat to copies of the 35 cent variant are still copies of the 35 cent variant...

Hopefully I'm not going to miss anything. Odds that I missed a random store variant or something are middling-fair here. Ultimate Fantastic Four #21-23, #30-32. UFF 20 has a sort of cameo intro to the Zombies story at the very end, and sometimes gets listed with the others for that reason. Your mileage may vary. #21 has a variant cover. #30 has two variant covers, one by Arthur Suydam and a 1:30 retailer incentive by Greg Land. #31 has a 1:15 variant cover by Suydam. #32 has a variant cover by Suydam. Black Panther (2005 series) #27-30. Marvel Zombies (2005) #1-5 #1 went all the way to a fourth printing; all four have unique covers. #3-5 all have unique second printing covers. Marvel Zombies vs. The Army of Darkness (2007) #1-5 #1 has a second printing cover, and a 3000-copy Dynamic Forces variant. #3 has a 3000-copy variant cover. Marvel Zombies: Dead Days (2007) one-shot Marvel Zombies: The Book of Angels, Demons, and Various Monstrosities (2007) one-shot Marvel Spotlight: Marvel Zombies (2007) one-shot Marvel Zombies 2 (2008) #1-5 Marvel Zombies 3 (2008) #1-4 #1 had a variant cover, plus a new cover for the 2nd printing Marvel Zombies 4 (2009) #1-4 #1, 3, and 4 all have ratio retailer incentive variants (1:20 for #1, 1:10 for the other two). Marvel Zombies Return (2009) #1-5 #1 has a 1:50 ratio variant plus a 2nd printing. #2 and 3 both have second printing covers. Marvel Spotlight: Marvel Zombies Return (2009) one-shot Marvel Zombies: Evil Evolution (2009) one-shot Marvel Zombies (Marvel's Greatest Comics) (2010) #1. Reprints MZ 1. Marvel Zombies 5 #1-5 (2010) #2, #3, and #5 all have ratio variants. Marvel Zombies Supreme (2011) #1-5 #1 has a 1:25 incentive variant Marvel Zombies: Christmas Carol (2011) #1-5. You may or may not view this as part of the Marvel Zombies line, although it does have the branding. Marvel Zombies Destroy (2012) #1-5 Marvel Zombies Halloween (2012) one-shot Age of Ultron vs. Marvel Zombies (2015) #1-4 Hoo boy. #1 has a 1:15 incentive (Nathan Fox), a 1:25 incentive (Rock-He Kim), a mostly-white cover (Pat Broderick) that I believe was a different 1:15 incentive, a Skottie Young variant, and a blank cover. #2 has a 1:10 incentive variant #3 has a 1:25 incentive variant True Believers: Marvel Zombies (2015) #1. Reprints MZ 1. Marvel Zombies Resurrection (2019) one-shot. This said it's the first issue of a new series, but that didn't happen; see also the actual series of the same name below. Um, good luck. Variant cover by Jung-Geun Yoon, variant cover by Nick Bradshaw, 1:50 incentive variant by Greg Land, 1:200 (!) incentive virgin of the Yoon cover, and a 1:500 (!!!!) incentive virgin of the Land cover. Also store variants: Comics Elite (regular and virgin), Scorpion Comics (regular and virgin), Unknown Comics (regular and virgin). Marvel Zombies Resurrection (2020) #1-4 #1 has a ton. Logan Lubera, Rian Gonzales, Stephanie Hans, Greg Land, Mike Mayhew (regular and virgin), Peach Momoko, Patrick Zircher, Diamond Retailer Summit variant (which, unlike many of these, isn't rare). Also store exclusives: ComicXposure (normal, virgin), Unknown Comics (normal, green, sketch, virgin). #2 has two variant covers (Greg Land, Damian Scott) plus a 1:100 incentive virgin variant of the standard Inhyuk Lee cover. #3 has two variant covers (Philip Tan, Leinil Francis Yu) plus a 1:100 incentive virgin variant of the standard Inhyuk Lee cover. #4 has two variant covers (Skan, Ivan Shavrin) plus a 1:100 incentive virgin variant of the standard Inhyuk Lee cover. Marvel Tales: Original Marvel Zombies (2020) one-shot. This a 104 page book that reprints UFF 21-23 + MZ 1. Do you consider this a giant-sized reprint book or a thin TPB? Up to you! There's a 1:50 incentive virgin cover. I didn't include Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth (or its variants or sequels), although Headpool is technically a Marvel Zombies spinoff character. If you're being really comprehensive, maybe also include Ultimate Civil War: Spider-Ham #1 (although that's technically a different Marvel Zombie universe than the "real" Marvel Zombie universe). There's also the Zombies Assemble and Zombies Assemble 2 minis, English adaptations of a manga story which is thematically similar, but also technically disjunct from the Marvel Zombies line. If you're into really deep-dive variant collecting, an awful lot of these had newsstand distribution with distinguishable bar codes (I know the UFF issues do, Dead Days, and Christmas Carol; probably most of the rest up through 2011 or maybe 2012). So, which books are the tough ones? All of the standard covers are reasonably obtained raw for a few dollars. UFF 21 is probably the most expensive of them, but even that's out there for under $20 for reasonably nice copies. CGC 9.8 books are a (zombie) horse of an entirely different color. UFF 21 and MZ 1 are crawling their way toward being $1000 books, if not there already, although some of that may be a bump from the What If... episode; we'll see if those prices stick (personally, I do not think that available supply is tight enough to warrant those values). As for the variants, well, most of them aren't too hard. This line has been really popular, so even the 1:50 incentives aren't too bad, at least raw. CGC 9.8 copies... well, it's finding some of them that's the challenge. Quite a few seem to go for the $50-100 "default" range for graded books that someone might, someday, buy. But not all of them. Marvel Zombies Resurrection has the biggest exceptions to that. The two high-quantity incentive virgin variants of the 2019 book are very elusive (raw, graded, whatever), especially the 1:500. The 1:100 virgins from the 2020 title are a lot more widely available, but are running $50-100 raw, so there's that. Some of the store variants don't trade in high volumes, so are tougher to quantify.

Literally everything Amphoman.

With the closest thing to an exception being the final issue, 91, which actually has several pages of content added to what was originally published in NTT 31 (although that's mostly just Nightwing giving a recap of the plot, so YMMV). Meanwhile, don't forget the NTT anti-drug campaign promos! There's three of those, two of which exist as both giveaways and $1.00 cover price books. As far as I know, the "IBM" one only exists as a freebie, but I've always wondered...

At one point, I was picking up cheap Classics Illustrated to try to assemble a set of all printings, with all the fun of HRNs and whatnot, well before there were easily-acquired (probably?) complete indexes. Realized along the way that was madness and sold the lot off for a little better than break even. No regrets.

Is that a tear on the back cover, bottom edge, right of center? Or a crease? Or just dirt? I'd say 6.0 or 6.5, in part depending on what's going on there. I don't see anything that immediately makes me think this was trimmed. It's certainly not the most trapezoidal Marvel book of this era I've ever seen.

Those are pretty fantastic. Know if there were any others besides these two?

Oof. That "9.4" WWBN is a dog. Pun intended.

Agree to removal from list. Oppose the creation of a standing rule for this situation, for exactly the cautionary reasons stated by others. There are more than a few serial fraudsters on the HoS, and fraudsters gonna fraud. The community can address these sorts of uncommon events on a case by case basis.

Nope, the big draw for some multipacks is the existence of multipack-exclusive variants. Here, not so much.

Oh, agreed, and that's what makes the best Superman stories legitimately interesting. But I don't think anyone would argue that all the Superman stories have been good...

The fact that Superman is ostensibly weak against magic, but that there's a (probably accurate) belief that Superman would still win effectively instantly against one of the premier spellcasters in comics... is sort of iconic of the problems with the Superman character. Heck, I don't think there's any question about the outcome of Superman vs. the Absorbing Man (with a piece of kryptonite, and even assuming a version of Supes that isn't just kryptonite-immune) either.

Yep, Black Cat, too. Frankly, this sort of shade-of-gray character is something DC is generally more comfortable with than Marvel.

Yeah, I'd say early-arc Gambit, definitely. Some iterations of Catwoman. And the Italian comic book character Diabolik (at least when he leans more heroic).

I largely prefer positive employee reinforcement, but if they want to go for "QC techs missing obvious label errors get the cattle prod", I mean... error rate reduction is error rate reduction.

Which is why QC needs more employees, or better auditing, or a raise, or something. And why CGC needs to establish a policy wherein they notate the certification records (as in, what you get from the cert number lookup) for slabs that are known to have defective labeling.

I actually suspect that's a scanner artifact. The cover has a crease there (one that's intended, not in the defect sense) and a fairly glossy cover, and that affords a lot of potential for the very bright scanning light to reflect off the edges of that crease and appear as a white line in the scan. Now, if it looks like that in hand, under normal illumination, that's something entirely different.

Should have been B-1 purple. Grade date on this was June of last year, so this was part of the same era as Dylan's shenanigans.

Yeah, it's always hard to search for defects in photos, doubly so through plastic, and triply so with a foil cover like this. That said, the indentation about the V in Venom is pretty obvious, and there may be some color lift / scuffing in the red foil area inside the curve of Venom's left claws as well. I also agree there's something a bit wonky with the LRFC corner. I think what looks like discoloration around the bottom staple on the BC is just reflections off the case, however.

I'm concerned that there's actually quite a bit of color lift -- in the N in Noir, between the S and P of Spider, sort of all around the E and R of Spider, and on Spider-Man's lower torso and right leg. I know that's sort of an occupational hazard of some recent high-gloss covers, but I don't have a lot of experience with how CGC grades affected books. Taking a wild stab at this, I suspect the penalty will be harsher due to the area of the cover affected; CGC weights most types of defects more heavily when their size is larger (even if their severity is not). So I'm going to deviate from my (probably wiser) colleagues here and say 9.2, but with a lower confidence than I try to have in my predictions.

Honestly, my problem isn't that CGC makes occasional mistakes. There are humans involved. Mistakes will occur. I don't consider acknowledging that to be apologetic. My problem -- because there's an obvious solution -- is that CGC doesn't do anything about known-defective labels in the wild. There's no question about this book. CGC screwed up. But here's the deal. They already have a mechanic available to deal with that: the certification lookup system. When a book is identified as a clear QA failure -- I'm not talking about a scratched case or encapsulated debris or a questionable grade, but obvious, unquestionable mistakes in labeling -- the certification has text amended to it that indicates it is a Known Mislabeled book. That doesn't get the book out of circulation, of course. But neither does CGC's requests that people send in books that are mislabeled in their favor (sure, that's the ethical choice but I bet it doesn't happen often). What it does do is gives a way for buyers to become aware of the error. To be really effective, it would require the collecting community get in the habit of checking certifications on CGC books before acquiring them, but, hey, that's not a bad habit anyway, and it's one that can absolutely be taught. The tools are available, the manpower required is minimal, and the benefit is substantial. But... it hasn't happened, and that makes me sad.