Qalyar

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.

Is there one, specifically? I know that the community has assembled a list of DCU variants, price variants of various types, CDN/UK/AUS printings, and so forth. In particular, I'm curious about any physically distinguishable ... printings/editions/variants/what-have-you. Even if the distinguishing characteristic is pretty small. Actual cover changes. Price variants. Indicia text changes. Hell, different barcode numbers are fair game.

I think I'd go 8.0 here. There's a couple of spine ticks near the top staple that are big enough they may have graduated to "creases", plus that impact divot under the D in Dracula. It may just be the image and my brain working, but feel like the top right corner has a bit of a non-color-breaking wide bend also. Also, a little softness to the corners, especially at bottom, and that bad ding on the back cover spine near the bottom. My big question is about that half-circle of non-red in the Topps logo. Is that a printing defect (which won't count against grade here) or a surface scuff that removed ink (which very much would)?

I'm going to say 1.8U here, with a label notation regarding the staple. Let's run with that for argument's sake. A 1.8 slab of the Star Wars #4 35 cent variant (which this does appear to be, rather than a reprint or other shenanigans) would be the new bottom-of-census copy, so it's tough to make definitive claims about market value. However, based on the value drop-off from higher grades, GoCollect guestimates a 1.8 would be worth about $160. That's probably enough money to make slab-and-flip marginally worthwhile anyway, but I suspect this will outperform the estimate. The 35 centers don't come up all that often, and recent sales have been, um, pretty good. So far this year, there has been a 5.0 go for $650 and a 7.5 for $1500. Both of those sales were above the computed FMV and the 7.5 was especially above even long-term trends. I wouldn't be extremely surprised if this book could squeeze out a $200 offer against a $225 or 250 advertised BIN. The math is a little tighter if this only comes back 1.5, but I'd probably still take the gamble here.

This is First Edition #86, as the indicia says. First Edition was the preview and advertising publication of First Publishing. This one came out in October 1989, previewing their December releases. As for value, maybe a couple bucks? First Edition isn't real common on the market, and trying to assemble a complete run would require the gods' own patience, but there's approximately nil interest in any of them. The fact that First Publishing printed very, very little with current market interest at all pretty much dooms their house organ to further obscurity. Despite the title of the advertised poster, this has absolutely no relationship to the ultra-rare Vootie APA fanzine. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It's an interesting piece of industry history, regardless.

Heck, I'm a couple years into searching for certain books that ARE moderns!

I can't wait to see what label shenanigans my German reprints of Black Hole (the Charles Burns indie, not the Disney film adaptation) get. The 12-issue US run was reprinted as 6 double sized issues in German by Reprodukt. My submission that includes 1-4 just moved to SFG (5 and 6 will be months later, as they required pressing to attempt correction of a defect caused by poor original distributor shipping). Obviously, label info is likely to change once they're actually graded. But right now, in SFG, the status for them lists: "Black Hole 1 3/95 Kitchen Sink Press". NOPE! That would be the correct label for the original US #1. "Black Hole 2 5/80 Whitman". HAHA NOPE! That's the series based on the Disney film. "Germany Black Hole 3 2000 Randlecourt Printers". We were doing so well, until the printer. Randlecourt was a mid-60s British reprint publisher, probably associated with Thorpe & Porter, best known for their two issues of Batman Album with a gloriously mis-colored Batman costume (bright red with a yellow cowl). "Germany Black Hole 4 2002 Reese Publishing Co.". Sigh. Also correct until the publisher. Reese was primarily a 60s-70s men's magazine publisher, best known for Man's Book and Real Combat Stories. Four books. Four different wrong ways to list them during SFG. I'll revisit this once we see what the grading lottery does with them...

Can confirm. I'm very much not in New York, and just had a Registered Mail delivery this week with no signature confirmation.

It's certainly a consideration for flip books, but for PC comics that I want slabbed? It's not like they're going to get any more slabbed sitting in a box in my house than they are sitting in CGC's receiving department.

For the record, it's unfortunately impossible to get a GSX1 signed by the entire writing team. Although Claremont, Thomas, and Fite are still alive and active to varying degrees (I don't believe Linda Fite has done convention appearances since circa 2001), Arnold Drake passed in 2007.

This list is not comprehensive. I am not responsible for errors, although I hope I haven't made any. A few of these credits aren't the obvious ones; the big example there is that he has a writer credit for Giant-Size X-Men #1. Obviously, he's not Chris Claremont! However, he was the writer for the 5-page Cyclops that followed the main one (and before the Iceman story by Arnold Drake, and the Jean Grey story by Linda Fite). Dark Horse: Kings of the Night #2 DC All-Star Squadron #1-3, 6-8, 40, 54-56 Arak Son of Thunder #1-3, 6-7, 47 Atari Force #1-4 Batman #336-338, 340 Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! #5 DC Comics Presents #31-34, 41, 48; Annual 3 Infinity, Inc. #1-23, 31, 46-53; Annual 1 Justice League of America #207-209 Legion of Super-Heroes #279 Secret Origins #9, 20 Shazam: The New Beginning #2, 4 World's Finest Comics #271 Dynamite The Adventures of Red Sonja #1-3 First Elric: Sailor on the Seas of Fate #2, 4, 7 Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf #1-5 Marvel Amazing Spider-Man #101-104 Avengers #35-104, 132, 350; Annual 1, 2, 19-20, 22-23 Avengers West Coast #73, 80-82, 87-88, 101 Captain America #168, 215-217 Captain Marvel #17-21 The Cat #1 Chamber of Darkness #2-7 Conan Saga #1, 4, 29, 42, 47, 50 Conan the Barbarian #1-26, 32, 49, 58-59, 64, 70-71, 94-95, 97-99, 101-104, 106, 111, 114, 240-262 Daredevil #51-69, 71 Doc Savage #1 Doctor Strange #169-178, 180-183 Dracula Lives #1-3 Fantastic Four #119, 126-133, 136-137, 156-179, 181, 303 Ghost Rider #1 [the 1967 character on a horse, not the guy on the motorcycle with his head on fire...] Giant-Size Avengers #1, 3, 5 Giant-Size Captain Marvel #1 Giant-Size X-Men #1-3 Haunt of Horror #1 The Incredible Hulk #105-106, 120-147, 153, 158, 173-178 The Invaders #1-23, 25-28,32-36, 38-40; Annual 1 Iron Man #44, 47 Kid Colt Outlaw #127, 136 Kull and the Barbarians #1-3 Kull, the Conqueror #2-3, 8 Kull, the Destroyer #11 Marvel Two-in-One #11 Modeling with Millie #44 Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #4, 6 Not Brand Echh #1-3 Patsy and Hedy #104-105 The Rawhide Kid #67, 91 Red Sonja #1-15 The Savage Sword of Conan #1-60, 83, 102, 219-220; Special 1 Savage Tales #1-5 Sgt. Fury #29-41, 44 Star Wars #1-10 Strange Tales #143-144, 150, 153-154, 158-159 Sub-Mariner #1-39 Tales of Suspense #73, 87 Tales to Astonish #82, 93-98 Thor #273-275, 277-278, 280, 283-289, 291-294, 299, 472,-473, 476, 480-482, 484, 486, 488 Two-Gun Kid #88, 113 Warlock #2, 6 The X-Men #20-44, 55-64, 66, 71-92

It might be due to the weirdness of these books, which are assembled from remaindered copies of other books?

Zero consistency. In principle, there are four 32-page remaindered comics rebound into each [Title] Double Double Comics, with no shortage of title options: Action, Adventure, Batman, Detective, Jimmy Olsen, Justice League of America, Lois Lane, Strange Adventures, Superboy, Superman, and World's Finest. If someone eventually turns up something not on that list, I wouldn't exactly be surprised. They probably did start out using remaindered comics that matched the collection title (that is, putting Batman issues in Batman Double Double Comics). But if they ran out, or had too many of something else, or were lazy and grabbed whatever was on top of the stack, something different would go in. Basically, for any given title, there's not only no guarantee of what issues are inside, but there's no guarantee of titles either. In fact, I know there are at least a couple of known Double Doubles where a stripped Marvel comic got mixed into the DC stack and bound in. The internet also says that at least one has been discovered that only had three comics, instead of four; I guess the stack ran short! There might be some configurations that are more common and represent what these were "supposed" to contain. Maybe. But trying to figure that out is a job only for poets and madmen. Assume it's essentially random. EDIT: 1967 to 1969/1970 is the general time period on these.

I've bought quite a few books on ebay for the purpose of slabbing. Results have been mixed. I curate pretty hard before buying and then again before submitting for grading. So I've had a pretty good net win rate of 9.8s (and nearly everything else that's gone from ebay to me to CGC has been 9.6s except when I knew otherwise ahead of time), but I've also gotten a lovely stack of books that just aren't slabbable... ...because this. Holy , this. I've gotten a book placed inside a Gemini mailer with no bag or board. I've gotten books in bubble mailers with no stiffeners at all. Just last week, I got a book that was bagged so carelessly that the outside bottom corner was wadded up into a pile inside in the bag. Luckily, most of what I've been picking up lately have been objectively inexpensive books (even if some of them aren't available in infinite quantities...). Getting the mangled remains of a big dollar book is more painful than getting the mangled remains of a ten dollar book, but it's still really, really frustrating.

His nomination was for set design. I'm not sure how much of a team effort that was, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Specifically, it was a nomination for a Suncoast Regional Emmy for set design. Regional Emmys are awards for productions that do not reach at least 50% of the US domestic audience. In this case, that means television that airs in Florida; parts of Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia; and/or Puerto Rico. That's not to belittle the accomplishment of winners (or, here, even nominees) of the regional awards, but it isn't quite the same depth of competition. As far as the presenting organizations are concerned, even the regional awards are Emmys, and the regional competitors are Emmy Nominees and Emmy Winners, as appropriate. But that's almost certainly not what most people expect it means.

These low-to-zero red/magenta FH books are weirdly frequent, such as you can call FH stuff frequent. I'm pretty sure FH did color control exactly the same way I deal with my printer. Magenta ink low? Eh. Magenta's a dumb color anyway, just keep printing. Anyway, the books definitely look better when they actually used ALL the ink colors. So there's no need to even auction these yellowy-orangeish copies off. Just send them to me.