Qalyar

Never known why it is this way, but can confirm. It's quite a chase item. Ironically, none of the Innovation comics are particularly valuable or hard to find (asking price for Annual 1 tends to be $10-20, but that's about the only one with any sort of price tag). But this TPB? Yikes. I suspect that the print run was VERY small. Plus, crossover fans -- non-comic collectors interested in LiS stuff -- are always going to prefer a book to a stack of floppies. Add in that this compilation is the only way to actually read the whole story? Easy recipe to have demand outstrip supply. From a collector standpoint, I've only ever seen a handful of these and almost all of them were just beat to heck. I don't know if Bubblehead hired random eBay sellers to pack their books for distribution, or if a lot of these have just been really well-loved since. Maybe both.

So, I'm not familiar with the two Creepshows, but I can discuss the "prop replica" Vampires #14 ("Vampires Everywhere") and #42 ("Destroy all Vampires"). These actually were published and sold commercially, by a company called Bottleneck Gallery. Rico Renzi (who people may know best from Spider-Gwen among a very large volume of work) did the artwork and coloring based on the original film props. They were sold through the Bottleneck website for $10 each or $15 per set (although they are long since sold out). I don't see any reason why CGC wouldn't grade these. They're real comic books created as replicas of fake comic books, but the end result isn't any different from other indie books or store exclusives, really. However, I would contact CGC ahead of time to make sure the details are all worked out. You want the slab to say Bottleneck Gallery as the publisher, for example, not Blackthorne Publishing.

Do we know what happened to that book after the scheme was exposed, out of curiosity?

To respond to my own question in part, it looks like the Rising Stars newsstands go quite a bit past 11. I should have pics of a #15 to share here next week ish. My collection is still short a bunch of issues, but this means we're just down to #16-21 as open questions about whether newsstand versions exist. Also, #15 gets us all the way to July 2001, which means I need to go back to watching for hypothetical Midnight Nation newsstands. By that date, all the way through issue 8 (of 12) were released.

If the encapsulation techs are also responsible for QA, that's a different kind of problem. Rule number... okay, it's not rule number one, but it's a rule. No one should ever do quality control on their own work product. Ever. In any industry.

The stuff that's not destined for my permanent personal collection gets "used" exactly as often as I sell a piece out of it, or add a piece to it. I have no emotional attachment to it, so I don't revisit that stuff except transactionally. That's what it's here for. Until it's sold, and then it's somewhere else. On the other hand, I rearrange my slabbed personal collection as I get new books or decide I have a better place to store them or arrange them or just want to remind myself what I own. I probably have at least some interaction with my PC weekly, at the least. More if you count looking over at the shelves and being mostly happy with how some of the projects are progressing. As time permits, I fiddle around with descriptions in the Registry. Which reminds me that I need to spend a day or two getting more images loaded. That'll be a good excuse to look at some books! I own quite a bit that's not in my Registry, also, because I tend to only Registry up a set when I'm getting fairly close to completion. Low percentages bother me, okay? It's a big part of why I don't collect any of the main title runs. For nearly everything in my slabbed collection, I also own either a set of reader copies or a TPB, and those get quite a bit of love; I probably read through the bulk of the collection once or twice a year. The same goes for the stuff I own only in collected form. Generally speaking, I'm not interested in "collecting" TPBs; those are for reading, and so I read them. Ironically, for everyone who talks about slabbed books being "entombed", the non-slabbed part of my PC gets much less love. Those books are checked off a cheklist, then bagged, boarded, and boxed, and... that's pretty much their existence. Sorry, little comics, I really do still care about you... Otherwise... I bump my WTB thread with misguided, futile optimism every couple of weeks or so. Does that count?

A certain amount of QC failures are reasonable. The Daredevil 168 in a 158 label is an example of an error that would be surprisingly hard to catch. QA almost certainly looks at literally hundreds of books a day, 99% of which match the slab label correctly. That makes this sort of off-by-one labeling mistake tough to catch because the human brain has a tendency to "assume" things are correct. That's the science behind those "find the error in the sentence" where they leave out a word, but people often just read it like it was there. On the other hand, the WCA/ASM swapped labels? That means QA wasn't really trying. And while I'd say that the corner damage and crunched books from slab mis-alignment might be hard to notice if you weren't specifically looking for them, it's a big enough problem -- with irreversible enough consequences -- that the QA staff should be trained explicitly to look for them. If that makes books take an extra day or two to clear QA before shipping, well, it's not like that's going to be a significant increase to the current TATs...

This is such a weird book, too. Rising Stars #1 shipped to direct markets with 4 different covers that form a complete image placed side-to-side (in order from left to right: "children playing", "posing", "battle scene", "funeral"). All these books have an August 1999 cover date. In October 1999 (the same time #2 launched), Top Cow released a 2nd printing of Rising Stars #1, using only the "battle scene" cover, but with the orange background and gold logo replaced with this teal background and black logo, and with the October date in the issue box. At the same time, they released the comic to newsstands, also using the 2nd printing cover design. As far as I know, the only Rising Stars #1 newsstands are "2nd printings" (despite there not actually being a 1st printing). I have zero clue how CGC would handle this, and I'm in no hurry to find out, because they've made a terrible mess of #1's million versions to begin with. Also, regarding Rising Stars newsstands, I'm pretty interested in figuring out what the last newsstand issue of the run was. I can confirm -- but do not own myself -- that #11 (November 2000) exists as a newsstand. I'm 99% certain that #22-24 do not exist in newsstands (there was a long delay after #21 because of a legal disagreement between JMS and Top Cow). Rising Stars #21 was a January 2003 book, so there's certainly a possibility they were still doing newsstand distribution then, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'd pulled that plug earlier. JMS's other series, Midnight Nation, launched in October 2000, and as far as I know never had newsstand distribution. That sort of suggests that Top Cow was winding things down already by the time Rising Stars #11 shipped to newsstands. Does anyone have a Rising Stars #12+ in newsstand?

I feel like this sort of thing likely represents a single encapsulation tech making a consistent mistake due to a mechanical issue or inadequate training. That's an explanation, not an excuse of course. The reality of human operated anything is that such situations aren't completely avoidable. The concern remains twofold. Not that an event like this could happen, but rather: 1) that QA missed multiple instances of post-grading damage and 2) that there's not a lot to convince us that the problems are being corrected. Obviously, I don't expect CGC to rake an employee over the coals publicly. That's neither necessary nor appropriate. But some sort of announcement -- even (as is realistic) one that doesn't directly admit previous faults -- might help. Proudly announce an "updated QA process" or something like that (assuming that steps to mitigate these problems and QA misses are actually implemented).

It's tough to know for certain, because of confirmation bias. Also, if the volume of submissions has spiked recently, but the percentage of QA failures has remained constant, then the number of slabbing problems entering the community at one time will also spike in terms of raw numbers. I do think that's a lot of what we're seeing here, but... ...this also isn't an apologia for CGC QA. It's one thing to hold error rates constant, but my biggest concern is the type and severity of errors. I'm not deeply distraught over a scuffed case or a missing artist or first-appearance note. I'm more concerned, but not extremely dismayed, over typographical errors like that 158/168 book; that should be caught by QA, but is admittedly the type of error that I can see occasionally evading human detection. But some of these mechanical failures of the slabbing process -- unsealed inner wells, books caught in the slab, corners mangled -- shouldn't ever happen, or if they do, shouldn't evade QA and shouldn't be repeated (because there had better be an immediate performance intervention).

Hey, now. I'm pretty sure kidneys follow the same rules as wishes. No kidneying for more kidneys.

First Edition almost certainly won't have "preview" appearances of either of the First Publishing A-list characters (such as First had A-list characters). Dreadstar debuted in Epic Illustrated #3, and Grimjack's first appearance was in Starslayer #10; both predate the existence of First Publishing in its entirety. Heck, even Badger started with Badger #1 from Capital Comics, not with First. It is possible that the single-digit issues of First Edition might have an "appearance" of Reuben Flagg prior to American Flagg #1 or of Jon Sable prior to Jon Sable Freelance #1. The question, of course, is whether anyone would care. Both American Flagg #1 and Jon Sable Freelance #1 probably have a FMV of $5-10 for high grade raws, but I can't imagine they have much liquidity at that or any price. So I struggle to think that their advertising preview would do much better. The October 1986 issue might also have a feature about their upcoming publication of the TMNT TPB. If so, that's probably of some interest to the TMNT completionists, as many of them tend to enjoy the really obscure turtles ephemera. If First had ever published anything anyone read, it might be a different story...

These are Chinese and -- I think -- are from mainland China in the '80s. Unfortunately, I don't have answers to most of your questions. In particular, I have no idea if they are localizations of existing US works, or if they're entirely novel. I do know that the bottom two books pictured (with the white background) are part of a series that includes at least four more. I don't know if the top comic is part of that series or a different one, although they're similar enough to imply they're from the same publisher at the least. I know there were also some TMNT comics released in Taiwan alongside the first TMNT film, but I'm 100% sure these aren't those. There are also Japanese manga adaptations of the Turtles, but they're also more recent (and these are not Japanese).

So... this. Some more. I don't have a very high opinion of that J-Monty article. He takes on faith that well-used chart of direct market/newsstand ratios, and, stepping into my hat as a professional data analyst, I think that chart is misleading at best. Always have. Also, anyone who takes Mile High Comics' conclusions about newsstand printings at face value is misinformed, crazy, or named Chuck Rozanski. The same goes for anyone who takes PGX seriously as a grading company (except they're probably just misinformed or crazy, I bet even Chuck knows PGX is amateur hour). I think a great majority of newsstand printings on the market are badly overvalued relative to their actual rarity. I think some are undervalued. I think the entire field -- like a lot of comics collecting fields -- is poorly described, poorly catalogued, and frequently preys upon insufficiently educated collectors. I did my time in philately before taking comic collecting more seriously, and I've dabbled in numismatics and rare books. In every one of those other collecting fields, very small differences in printings are recognized as significant. How they affect value depends on a lot of factors. But there are stamps that differ in prices by thousands of dollars because they were, basically, distributed by a different method (sheet vs. coil, especially some of the early US coils) or because they were printed on different paper -- and maybe not even a visibly different paper (watermarks, this means you!). Coins minted at different facilities (essentially, different printers) differ by a single letter but are considered entirely separate collectible entities with entirely disjunct pricing. The rare book folks, well... they tend to be obsessed mostly with distinguishing which copies of a book were the earliest physically printed; there's an ongoing discussion here about whether some of the UK price variants might have actually been the first-off-the-press copies rather than the domestic ones, and that would be serious business for many book collectors. Comic collecting? Um, well... So far, frankly, most people don't take any of that seriously. We have no comprehensive catalogs, no standardized numbering system for variants and whatnot. Heck, we can even drum up a good old fashioned forum argument over what, exactly, counts as a printing vs. an edition vs. a variant, and whether or not specific books are or are not "reprints". And that's not even considering the licensed foreign translations of domestic books. Whee! When I collect a series that is printed for both newsstand distribution and the direct market, I try to collect both. I also try to collect subsequent printings, and where feasible foreign editions. Yes, I often pay more for high-grade newsstands than the equivalent FMV for the comic in general. No, I won't pay the stupid multipliers that some people engage in; I have never, ever, bought a newsstand book from Mile High. My personal collection focuses mostly on small-run titles, and I enjoy the chase of running them to the most comprehensive sense of "completion" I can muster. Not everyone does. And that's fine. Yes, I wish CGC would respect the difference, just like they do for subsequent printings, but the only thing that bothers me about it all is that we have more than a few people here who seem to believe that's it is some sort of moral failing to treat newsstand and direct market books as separately collectible. We're supposed to collect what we want, right?

My guess? I bet the Rawhide Kid himself was drawn and inked separately, and composited onto the background for printing. Since the building artwork seems fluid and continuous and the formerly-invisible background woman matches the other bystanders in style and professionalism, I'm reasonably certain it wasn't amended locally. The Kid himself, though... Perhaps La Prensa decided that it was unfair to that background character that she didn't appear on the cover. Perhaps they weren't sure how to composite the Rawhide Kid overlay onto the background, since any position would conceal a character. Perhaps the Rawhide Kid overlay they received was damaged in transit. Regardless, his right leg was clearly re-cut by a well-meaning, presumably local, comic artist whose skills weren't quite up to the level of Kirby and Ayers. No shame in that, really. As an interesting aside, the La Prensa artist also apparently decided that front cover Rawhide Kid needed his hair recolored blond. I wonder if that decision was an effort to make the cover characters more uniform in appearance, since Aguila Blanca was a composite of several Western series, and Kid Colt has blond hair.

Right, but Aguila Blanca 61 and Wyatt Earp 27 do both claim to be Feb 1960, so... The problem here isn't that the publishers played it loose with their printed dates; that's not really a secret. The problem is that I don't currently trust that CGC is faithfully transcribing the printed dates (accurate or otherwise) from foreign editions, when they're already inventing their own standards for foreign book titles and issues numbers.

It's tough to nail down details for some of these La Presna books, and I can't exactly drive over to my corner comic shop to examine a copy. Complicating things, what constitutes a publication date for these '50s-'60s Western books is sometimes a bag of cats all by itself. I don't have access to this issue (at least on short notice), either as a physical copy or a digitized one, but I can provide information about other books in the series and make some conclusions. Aguila Blanca 58, La Presna's edition of Wild Western 47 (with the classic fire cover), doesn't tell us much. The original book was published in January 1956, but the La Presna edition has a November 30, 1959 publication date. With over a three year gap, this is clearly closer to a "reprint in a foreign language" than an effort to publish a translated book simultaneously. Aguila Blanca 61 is the La Prensa edition of Wyatt Earp 27, a book that is the subject of some controversy because there's a credible claim that the front cover Earp is an uncredited piece by Kirby (the rest of the cover is Ayers's work). WE 27 has a publication date of February 1960. AB 61 gives a February 29, 1960 publication date. So, how did they turn this translation around in the same publication month? Well... they may not actually have. Let's look at Aguila Blanca 69. This is the La Prensa edition of Kid Colt Outlaw 91, specifically the the "Death of Kid Colt" issue. KCO 91 has an official publication date of July 1960, which is the date that CGC labels on the slab. But that's not even remotely like when this book went on sale. Comics being distributed ahead of their publication date is nothing new, but some of these Westerns made an art form out of it. KCO 91, specifically, is reliably known to have been distributed all the way back in Februrary of 1960, or some five months before the indicia's date. These sort of date shenanigans make the whole process more complicated; it's easy to imagine that La Prensa could have gotten the material to print their edition shortly after the English ones were printed, and still have time to translate the text and re-mat the pages in time to get their book out contemporaneously with the English book's printed publication date. Did they? Well, there's no way to know what the street date on AB 69 was, but what they printed says they took a lot longer: AB 69 has a printed publication date of October 31, 1960. You'll note that La Prensa likes to gives suspiciously specific publication dates, and they're always the last day of a month. These are almost certainly a legal fiction, just like the Timely/Atlas/Marvel publication dates often deviate from the street-date reality. As I said, I don't have an Aguila Blanca 67 to look at, but it's entirely possible that it shares the same printed publication month as Rawhide Kid 17, just like Aguila Blanca 61 / Wyatt Earp 27. It's also possible that CGC opted for the US publication date to go with the US title on the label. And when either comic book was actually distributed is likely a whole different reality than the "official" printed values.

Setting aside whether it's a net positive to attempt to label this way, it is admittedly mostly effective for ASM 300. As far as I know, all the foreign comics that use or adapt (frequently replacing the repeating "300" background with a repeating "VENOM") the ASM 300 cover actually do contain the ASM 300 comic. If you care about the contents of ASM 300, there is at least one foreign book that reprints ASM 300 with what I'm fairly sure is an original cover. That would be Die Spinne #163, a German-language adaptation published by Condor Verlag.

I can't speak to other collectors. I know that for my personal collection, my goal is high grade slabbed copies of everything associated with a series. Frankly, the only reason I haven't submitted more weird foreign books is that it's tough finding them in grade (and that's despite most of my interests being 80s-00s books rather than the 70s stuff up thread). More people might if the indexing was better and the labeling made sense.

If it's a purely cover-based system, then L'Incroyable Hulk has a different set of problems. Under that "rule": L'Incroyable Hulk #5 would be labeled as The Incredible Hulk #111 (book actually contains IH 111 and IH 112) L'Incroyable Hulk #6 would be labeled as The Incredible Hulk #113 (book actually contains IH 113 and IH 114) L'Incroyable Hulk #7 would be labeled as The Incredible Hulk #115 (book actually contains IH 115 and IH 116) L'Incroyable Hulk #8 would be labeled as The Incredible Hulk #112 (book actually contains IH 117 and IH 118) This would result in a book being given a number that is out of sequence for the publication and represents material not actually present in its contents. And then the interior panel used as the cover for L'Incroyable Hulk #40 would, following that logic, get a L'Incroyable Hulk (old-style) label instead of an Incredible Hulk label, making it impossible to know that it is part of the same publication series as the other books (and making it pretty much impossible to deal with in the registry, but that's hardly the critical issue here). There are other books in the series with similar problems. There is a long run, starting with L'Incroyable Hulk #50, where the covers are desychronized from their contents. Here's part of that sequence: L'Incroyable Hulk #50. Cover from IH 187, contents from IH 191. L'Incroyable Hulk #51. Cover from IH 191, contents from IH 192. L'Incroyable Hulk #52. Original cover (I believe from an interior panel of IH 193), contents from IH 193. L'Incroyable Hulk #53. Cover from IH 193, contents from IH 194. L'Incroyable Hulk #54. Cover from IH 195, contents from IH 195. Hey, they matched one! Maybe they'll keep this up. L'Incroyable Hulk #55. Cover from IH 192, contents from IH 196. Nope. It got worse. L'Incroyable Hulk #56. Cover from IH 194, contents from IH 197. L'Incroyable Hulk #57. Cover from IH 198, contents from IH 198. They matched again, but... L'Incroyable Hulk #58. Cover from IH 196, contents from IH 199. Of course. L'Incroyable Hulk #59. Cover from IH 199, contents from IH 200. If they were given labels based on their US IH cover number, this run would be ordered: 50, 51, 55, 53, 56, 54, 58, 57, 59. With 52 being given a totally different label. Of the US-labeled books, only two of these (54 = IH195 and 57 = 198) would actually contain the material described on the label. That's nonsensical. People do not collect anything this way. They will not submit these books this way. Besides being obtuse and confusing, it almost guarantees slabbing errors down the line.

Well, as I've said before, I think our understanding of what constitutes conservation now versus 50 years from now will, by necessity, be different.

Why? There's nothing magical about a staple from 1938. The goal of archival conservation is not necessarily keeping a comic book (or document, or artwork, or whatever) in exactly the state it was in when it was produced. The goal is ensuring its preservation and stability over the long term. When done appropriately, it's absolutely a conservation process. Once a staple begins to degrade, that process is irreversible. And rusty staples damage paper beyond just the staining. The same processes that result in rust migration can also catalyze the oxidative decay of paper. Besides, from the conservator's standpoint, what you want to preserve is the artistic and cultural value of the comic book pages, not the twisty little bit of metal that holds them together. Obviously, any time you're removing the staples from a comic book, you risk opening the door to quite a few other shenanigans that aren't so much responsible conservation practices. But that's true of everything, really. Responsible professional archival conservators will keep and provide detailed records as to the work done, and I would want that provenance for any especially high-value "conserved" book.

This is a little long. Sorry for TLDR lovers. I have a lot of problems with the "label foreign slabs with the US comic title/issue". Let's look at a key book to see why: The Incredible Hulk 181. The US version of IH181 has the iconic "and now the Wolverine" cover with Wolverine battling the Hulk. It contains an 18 page story, plus some ads, a publisher's promo advertisement for The Defenders, a letters page, and the in-house column Bullpen Bulletins. No foreign editions cotnain this content precisely. Letters pages, advertising, and so forth are not translated for international publications. But let's set that aside and follow just the 18-page IH181 story. L'Incroyable Hulk #40 (Editions Héritage, 1974) contains the French Canadian version of the IH181 story. However, it has a new cover (with Hulk getting punched in the face by a blond-haired shirtless white guy who is maybe supposed to be Wolverine, but has no claws, so...). However, this is a 36 page book. In addition to the IH181 story, it contains three additional comic stories. The first originally appears in Astonishing #56 (1956) and was previously reprinted in Beware #2 (1973); the second, originally from Menace #1 (1953), then again in Crypt of Shadows #2 (1973); and the last, originally from Adventures into Terror #17 (1953), reprinted in Crypt of Shadows #5 (1973). L'Uomo Ragno #193 (Editoriale Corno, 1977) contains the Italian version of the IH181 story. This is a 52 page book that reprints more than one US publication in its entirety. In fact, the cover is from Amazing Spider-Man #152 (1976), and the first 18 pages of this book reprint that issue. The next 18 pages are the IH181 story. Finally, it contains the second half of the story from Daredevil #127 (1975) -- the first 9 pages appeared in L'Uomo Ragno #192. I shudder to imagine how this would get labeled. Gamma: la bombe qui a créé Hulk #11 (Arédit-Artima, 1980) is a French book, with the most unwieldy title ever (in English, that would be: Gamma: the Bomb that Created Hulk). It uses a modified version of the IH179 cover. This 68-pager reprints the first two and last two pages from Defenders #50 (1977) and then the entirety of IH179, IH180, and IH181, followed by the Kraggoom story from Journey into Mystery #78 (1962). Hulk #8 (Atlantic Forlag, 1980) is a Norwegian comic. This is a 52 page book that, like the French book, uses the IH179 cover (albeit with extensive modification). This reprints IH179, IH180, and IH181, but in order to fit them (plus advertisements) into 52 pages, one page was cut from both IH179 and IH181, and four pages were dropped from IH180. I could go on, but let's consider these. Which, if any, of these books "should" be labeled IH181? None of these four books use the IH181 cover. None of them contain exclusively material from IH181. I think it's safe to say that no one cares about the reprint filler in L'Incroyable Hulk #40, so that one has the most reasonable claim to "being" IH181. But there are two and a half books in L'Uomo Ragno #193, and three and a half books in Gamma: la bombe qui a créé Hulk #11. The Italian one is particularly problematic to label like a US publication, because it has an ASM cover and leads with an ASM story, but the American collector's interest is probably going to be from the IH181 content. Finally, the Norwegian Hulk #8 doesn't actually reprint any US publication's story in its entirety, opting to edit down all three reprinted books for length. If you label these like US publications, which issue number do they get? Given the discussion about label dates, it's probably worth noting that L'Incroyable Hulk #40 has a November 1974 publication date, the same as the US IH181. Much more so than the others I listed, this is a contemporaneously published licensed foreign edition, rather than a reprint book. What does that mean for label purposes, well... Leaving IH181 aside for the moment, let's consider more of L'Incroyable Hulk's run. The first issue, L'Incroyable Hulk #1, is a 24 page book containing a French Canadian translation of IH106, plus the first two pages from ASM58 in black and white. ASM58 was serialized over the first 7 issues, for ... reasons. But I think it's not entirely inappropriate to simply say that L'Incroyable Hulk #1 is the French Canadian edition of IH106. That one-to-one relationship doesn't last long, though. By issue #5, Editions Héritage had kicked the book up to 52 pages, double-printing Hulk stories (IH111 and IH112 in that issue, for example). Over the run, they went back and forth between printing two Hulk issues per issue of L'Incroyable Hulk or just one (padded out with material from '50s or '60s Marvel sci-fi / horror / suspense or Western titles). After #67 (which contains both IH208 and IH209), Editions Héritage even made the double-issue thing explicit for awhile, giving their books double issue numbers on the cover and advertising them as "Format Double". This continued from L'Incroyable Hulk #68/69 (IH210, IH211, plus some filler from Kid Colt Outlaw) until L'Incroyable Hulk #158/159 (containing IH299 and the first half of IH300, but no other filler). After that, they dropped back to 36 page books that printed (usually) one Hulk story plus part of some other, seemingly random, current Marvel book. L'Incroyable Hulk #160 contains the second half of IH300 plus part of Thor #339... all the way through the final issue, L'Incroyable Hulk #188, containing IH328 and half of Marvel Team-Up #74. You could ignore the filler content. In doing so, you could label L'Incroyable Hulk #1 as The Incredible Hulk #106 (French Canadian Edition). That's not... entirely wrong. But then what do you do with L'Incroyable Hulk #5? Is it IH111 or IH112? If you just pick the first one of the double issues, you do L'Incroyable Hulk #8 quite the disservice, because it contains IH117... but also the Sub-Mariner appearance in IH118 (and, to confuse things, uses the cover of IH112). Would L'Incroyable Hulk #160 be labeled as IH300, when it literally contains only the second half of that book?? Also, the labeling needs to be consistent across the entire run so that it is possible to slab and collect the full run of 142 issues (which is less than 188 because of the double-numbered issues), so it's not appropriate to give Incredible Hulk labels for single-Hulk-issue books and L'Incroyable Hulk labels for double-Hulks (plus that's simply dumb). There are other problems, too. But you don't really have to dig very deep to see that a lot of these foreign books don't have a single, clean US publication equivalent. So they shouldn't be labeled that way.

Does it have to be my kidney?

Hmm. Nice resource, although ideally I'd love a list that indicates the distinguishing features on the Walmart exclusives, especially when they're not otherwise obvious.