Qalyar

Adams did more than his share of those weird little promo books. I'm going to guess this one is I Am the Guard, because I think that's probably the most elusive. There are a lot of copies of Mark Steel out there, and Adventures in Leather isn't too hard to chase down either.

It's certainly not as sexy as a lot of these, but once everything that's in-transit arrives, I'll have Black Hole (the Kitchen Sink/Fantagraphics series, not the Disney/Whitman one) complete (1-12), including all subsequent printings (there are 7 total), both the Spanish* (1-12) and German (1-6, double-sized) licensed republications, plus Echo Echo (which is essentially a comic-format "making of" art book for the series). It's not an extremely high-dollar series, but it is a good one. Historically important, won a sack of awards, and even in a few lit-crit courses these days. Someday it'll actually get its film / Amazon / Netflix / whatever adaptation also, I expect. Not everything's slabbed. Eventually. I'm really trying to have the whole thing in 9.6+, but medium-print-run indie books printed with Patented Extra-Scuffable Covers (with black backgrounds, natch) make it slow going. Then all I'll be missing is the ashcan/preview that Burns privately published before Black Hole #1. Not likely to ever get that, sadly. There have only been a couple make it to the secondary market, and I missed the most recent sale by a couple of years. But it doesn't break the run, strictly speaking. *I've also found one mention in an expired listing on a C-tier site that suggests there was a second printing of the Spanish #1. If that exists, I don't have it either, but I strongly suspect that was just an error.

Grading and authentication for action figures and related material is done by Action Figure Authority (AFA) and Collector Archive Services (CAS), neither of which is affiliated with the CGC/CCG family of grading companies. In other words, this isn't the right forum for your request. If you want the final word on the authenticity of this item, you'd need to submit it to one of them. For Star Wars collectibles, there's also an active collectors' forum called Rebel Scum that will help to confirm whether or not this is genuine. You may need to provide additional photos, and card authentication is somewhat difficult without the piece physically in hand. With all that said, I don't believe this is genuine. I suspect this is a modern "reproduction" (that is, fake) card back. Repros of just about any vintage Star Wars card with collector interest (such as this purported Boba Fett Kenner SW 21B) are very, very common. There are a couple of features of your card that make me suspect it is a reproduction, especially the general appearance of the card's catalog number at top left. However, I am very much not an authority on Star Wars card authentication. You should reach out to those who are.

Just wanted to comment that I've got a friend who is a pretty rabid collector of indie / small-press / self-published fantasy books and fanzines. He's heard of Aruba, but has also never seen a copy. Our guess is effectively self published, limited local distribution, and so indeed very rare.

Yep. It isn't comprehensive, but MH does its level best to track the various newsstand editions and similar shenanigans to a better degree that most other sites (mostly so that Chuck can pretend that anything with a newsstand barcode is worth $100... or more). That sometimes makes for a useful research tool, but it'll be a cold day in hell when I pay his newsstand prices. Frankly, very little at MH is worth the prices they set, but I'll admit that I've bought a handful of books there. Stuff worth $8-10 that I paid $20 for because it was obscure and they had copies. Frankly, I'd check MH more often for some of my weird modern quest items -- I'll pay more than FMV near the end of runs sometimes -- except that their grading is also so inconsistent as to be a lottery. At this point, I think the most reasonable explanation for it all is that Chuck is more interested in Mile High as an institution than maximizing the value of Mile High as a business.

Joeypost's opinions count for much more than mine, but these lines would make me hesitant to bother with much on this book. Especially if there's enough rust to already have migration stains to the CF, I think you're going to be capped at about the grade you have even if the wiggly bits get pressed out correctly.

I did always find it a bit ironic that the character named after the sun got a featureless black cover...

That makes sense, honestly. And explains were there are not just quite a few copies available, but fairly nice ones at that.

Obscurity has probably always contributed to this thing not being worth much, but 1950's promo giveaway books are still fun!

Doesn't mean they treat their respective assets the same way, though.

Their real estate division is pretty awful. Their investment management branch is less obviously malicious; many of their purchased companies have done quite well since acquisition.

CGC will not seal loose material in the slab with a book. If you send in the COA, it will probably be discarded. Keep the COA. Assuming you store your slabs in slab-bags, put the COA in that when you get the slab back.

Yeah. I've never been convinced there were as many of these created as the serial numbers suggest, and, regardless, there are very, very few that seem to have survived and made it to market. But now, your own copy is the top of the census!

My apologies. At a minimum, I'll try to remember to include an appropriate number of panicked spinning emoji in future.

Getting a 9.4 on your Batman and Me makes for a really, really nice book. Congrats.

We're just going to have to wait and see for a lot of this. Blackstone does not treat all its acquisitions the same way. Honestly, I don't expect this to be a harbinger of doom. CCG/CGC is worth money because of its reputation as an A-tier authentication and grading company. A heavy-handed approach from Blackstone that compromises that reputation would lose them asset value, and Blackstone hates losing asset value. Hating on Blackstone (and the investment management sector in general) is often deserved, but Blackstone also buys a lot of profitable niche-sector businesses which is mostly leaves alone to do their thing, largely just to pad their assets under management metric. So I don't expect any really significant negative impacts in the short-term. And let's be honest, CCG clearly could use additional resources; a lot of the QA problems we've been seeing lately actually can be fixed by throwing money at the problem. Several of those other investors have at least some background in the sports collectibles industry (especially Michael Rubin, not to be confused with the former Pentagon advisor of the same name). So this doesn't look immediately like vulture capitalism. Now... if we see evidence of cost-cutting for its own sake, or suspicious standards changes, or especially asset stripping (like selling off one or more of the satellite grading divisions), then it's time to run for the exits.

I suppose you could argue that "restoration" is supposed to make a book at least look better, but the after-process pictures are worse than it started! But no. This is restoration and would get a purple label from CGC. My guess is C-3 "cover cleaned". I'd like to think CCS would decline restoration removal on the original state of this book; if they accepted it, they'd almost certainly razor-blade off all the green marker (and the text under it). They'd 100% decline restoration removal on the book as it is now, since that's no longer possible.

Books signed on interior pages get blue labels, all else being equal.

All is not fair in love and war. Especially when one of the participants is operating from a position of power and privilege. That's sort of the point. but also, seriously, the Guardian's article on the situation is as good as any. Ellis played his fame for sexual favors, possibly even bargaining mentorship for sex, while deceiving partners into the status -- and number -- of his active sexual relationships. That at one point numbered over a dozen, simultaneously. There's probably nothing illegal about any of that. People are allowed to be skeevy, manipulative jerks. But the industry, in turn, is allowed to declare that people revealed as skeevy, manipulative jerks ought to have a harder time continuing to publish product.

I'm a believer in separating the artist from the art to some extent, especially when the art in question isn't a one-man production. At the extreme, we can't -- and shouldn't -- just memory-hole everything Harvey Weinstein was involved with, because that would give short shrift to the contributions of hundreds, if not thousands, of writers, actors, editors, and supporting crew. We've got nine issues of Fell, and yeah, Ellis's behavior taints his work to some degree. But it's not fair to Ben Templesmith to sandbag it completely. However. Publishing new material, after the revelations are, erm, revealed? That's an entirely different story. Image is in the right here, whether that was done out of altruism or just the realization that Ellis's responses (and non-responses) have made his wrongdoing even more radioactive than it could have been. It should be a bright-line rule: If you can't treat others with some basic standard of human respect, you don't get to contribute your creative voice to further projects. It may be the only real way to discourage this sort of thing.

If people want to pay actual prices for a book, with just a stock photo, only described as "CGC graded", then... heck, I've got an awful lot of junky copies of awesome books that I should have been slabbing! Alternatively, this is nonsense. Most of the listings go to an "Oops" content missing page, at least for me....

Soft corner at FC LL with some surface color loss. There's a vague outside hope they'd consider this a production defect, but I wouldn't count on it. I bet that's wear, not a bindery tear (the latter are much, much more common on books with thicker covers than I remember this having). Creased corner at FC LR. I'm 75% confident that breaks color from the pictures here. You can actually see that there's a bit of bend to the first few pages from the same trauma. The page bends could be pressed; the color break obviously cannot be. Some other assorted bends. The long one running parallel to the BC spine is the worst offender, and will count more significantly against the grade because of its length. That said, this is likely pressable if you're into that. My thoughts? 8.5-9.0 as is (I think that long spine bend/non-breaking crease thing will be docked harder than you might expect), 9.2-9.4 if pressed.

Announcing your company is ending production (while simultaneously announcing that your company's people are planning to reboot as a new company) is sort of a step further than just printing eleventy-seven variant covers or silly line-crossing stories or renumbering.

Creators capable of making content worth reading shouldn't (and shouldn't need to) shackle themselves to tawdry marketing gimmicks of this caliber.

Did you pull that from a fresh multipack or find it isolated in the wild?