Qalyar

Those Kenner Aliens books are actually pretty cool, though. And I don't think there's any other way to get high grade copies, slab or no. Worst packaging I have ever seen on pack-in comics.

I have read the content of every slabbed book I own, whether that's from an undercopy, a TPB, or in a handful of cases, from the pre-slabbed book itself.

I'm not the local turtles expert by far, but there's some cash in that stack of turtles. Not "TMNT 1" cash, sadly, but still nice. Off the top of my head, the #3 reprint (top row, far right; note: multiple printings complicate things), #6 (top row, center, with the triceratops), and especially the #7 reprint (bottom row, blue cover) are all pretty good books to have in the grades these appear to be in.

I've slabbed a lot of books that aren't realistically worth the cost of slabbing because I want slabbed runs of them for personal reasons and am aware of the financial irrationality. That doesn't bother me. On the other hand, I am the, um, "proud" owner of an 8.5 slab of a relatively common modern book worth maybe a couple of bucks at best (Babylon 5: In Valen's Name #1) because I somehow managed to swap my 9.6/9.8 candidate copy for an undercopy with a large and obvious back cover defect. I haven't sent the good one in yet, because I'm still annoyed at myself, and because it's not like there's anything I can do with the other one... But that's still not a 3.0 copy of Alpha Flight 33 or whatever the heck that Batman 567 is.

I couldn't find any examples of graded copies with that defect, so I'm not sure how CGC will treat it, but I can definitely confirm that it's production related, and that there is a nontrivial percentage of the book's run that looks exactly like that.

The contrast between the condition of those books and the, um, condition of those boxes is striking. Godspeed, little plastic comic bags. Your sacrifice was not in vain.

Any book that I think might even sniff being worth more than $500 (and maybe less than that), I'd submit for crossover grading to have upgraded out of the PGX slab. It makes it more likely your book is correctly describes, makes it easier to get the book's fair value on the market, and saves the book from a future with a really really ugly label.

Loved that game.

From a certain point of view, Superman. Went from "genre doesn't exist" to "sold like 800k copies" in, what, a month?

In general, collector interest in foreign reprints is very, very low. I don't think the foil cover gimmick is enough to swing that needle much.

The "limited or non-standard distribution" category: Black Hole (the Disney one, not the Charles Burns one), Little Lulu, Super Goof, etc. (distributed only in Whitman multipacks) Miracleman #15 (vastly limited distrubution compared to #1, among many other reasons it's appealing) There are probably quite a few more cases where the last issue of a mediocre series creeps past #1 due to its tiny, tiny print run.

@Matt G What's the current practice for foreign editions with regard to (Complete) or (Complete with Variants) sets? For example, the Black Hole (Charles Burns) set is intended as a Complete with Variants set and includes the assorted 2nd and 3rd printings of those books. Right now, neither the German nor Spanish editions of this series have been graded (although I've got German issues in queue). When the time comes, can those be included in the existing set, or will they need a parallel set exclusively for foreign editions? Likewise, regarding the Babylon 5 set, the three-issue In Valen's Name mini-series was originally published (serialized over 6 issues) in the UK-published volume 1 of the Babylon 5 Magazine. That feels like a different situation than foreign reprints of books. If those are graded at some point, would they be eligible to be added to the Babylon 5 registry set?

Well, some comics do.

Yeah, it's not a lot more expensive than the rest of the series, but I had to include something on the list that wasn't one of the obvious choices.

Batman Adventures Logan's Run

Just for the record, that wasn't me!

Extra fun fact, there are both direct market and newsstand prints of Street Poet Ray. Unlike most books, you won't be able to tell them apart flipping through a dollar bin because the bar codes are on the back covers. Given what a weird niche item this title was, I suspect that the newsstand prints are genuinely scarce unless there was a warehouse dump at some point. I'm equally certain that no one, anywhere, cares.

Superman vs. Luthor is intended to be the defining conflict between human potential and man's baser natures. Superman is not human; he could do whatever he wants without any real consequence because he's effectively a physical god. But he chooses to be human because humanity has the capability for nobility, and he views that as a greater strength than the ability to fly, shoot eye-lasers, and deflect bullets. Superman represents the hope of what we can become. In contrast, Lex Luthor is a "supervillain" with no superpowers whatsoever. He's just a ruthless representation of mankind's capacity for the strong to prey upon the weak, and the influential to turn people against each other. Superman can't kill Luthor because that's not how humanity grows; we have to reject Luthor's worldview of our own free will to defeat him. It's easy to pigeonhole Superman, but the idea there really is a good one. Unfortunately, it's very much not the idea we've seen in film in the DCEU. Instead, we get a Superman who isn't entirely sure why being good is the right choice, and so ends up inspiring as much fear as he does hope. And that's contrasted by a Lex Luthor who ... is Jesse Eisenberg. DC doesn't struggle because their movies are bad. Marvel put out The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, and Thor: Dark World, after all, but we forgive them the failures, because it is obvious that they understand the concepts behind their characters. They may not always succeed on screen, but we have faith that they will try. DC's movies, by and large, aren't good, but that's not the root cause of the problem. DC struggles because they don't seem to understand why their characters have been so successful for the last half-century or more. There's no thematic control. No one to say, hey, look, Superman is a character about hope. Wonder Woman tells us that truth and love are powerful weapons. Batman reminds us that when we strike back at the people who have wronged us, it takes discipline not to become them. Instead we get a distant and alien Superman, a brooding and violent Batman, and... a pretty good Wonder Woman for one movie, anyway, and then suddenly not in the second film. The value of DC properties will pick up if they can start having their characters make sense and hew closer to the concepts that made them great in the first place. Oh, and having at least a couple movies that aren't would be nice, too.

Yeah, I never understood why they thought this was a good idea. Street Poet Ray was a very "B&W indie" B&W indie, with two issues published by Blackthorne in the late '80s. Blackthorne was a hit or miss indie house; in my social circle, they're best known for having done a bunch of Battletech comics in the '80s. For everyone else, um, you probably know them as the publishers of blatant TMNT spoof/knockoff Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos. In any case, Street Poet Ray was... at least in my opinion, a long way from their best work. Marvel apparently decided that they just had to get in on that sweet B&W indie pie, so they picked this to license (I assume because it was cheap to do so), and more or less just let Michael Redmond and Junko Hosizawa keep doing the same thing they were doing at Blackthorne, only with a bigger-name publisher's icon on the covers. The rumor has always been that this was one of Marvel's all-time worst-selling books. I have no reason to doubt that. For my part, I just find it largely incomprehensible, both in terms of content and business decision-making. Normally, I'd say that weird stuff like this is probably hard to find in high grade, but I promise that most copies weren't read more than once, so that might be an exception.

1991 Marvel made a lot of dubious decisions. My only real surprise is that this wasn't foisted off on the Epic imprint with the rest of the irredeemables (Car Warriors, Captain Confederacy, Hollywood Superstars, Samurai Cat...). But then again, there's Suburban Jersey Ninja She-Devils that year. And NFL Superpro, so....

Dogwelder?

As far as the Star stuff goes, I'd take Care Bears over Heathcliff. Both runs are dollar fodder right now, but Care Bears has kept more active media development; if the franchise ever attracts its equivalent of Lauren Faust, I think it could become relevant again someday. Heathcliff... well... not so much. Neither Heathcliff cartoon series was very interesting, and the 1986 film was literally just a compilation of episodes from the second cartoon, smooshed together and given a theatrical release. Efforts to produce an actual film around 2010 went nowhere. The individual comic strips are still being written by the nephew of the original creator, but they tend towards weirdness. I can't imagine anyone jumping on the franchise. That Sweet XVI is pretty terrible, though. If it was more than six issues (plus a special), I'd probably give it the crown. I'm not a fan of Barbara Slate's art in general, but she sure phoned it in for that run. Not sure I blame her...

56 issues of Heathcliff plus 10 more of Heathcliff's Funhouse, and I suspect the whole thing would be dollar box fodder for at least some dealers. Also, the entire Razorline imprint (Ectokid, Hokum & Hex, Hyperkind, Saint Sinner). That's another 30ish books of total junk.

Not really relevant to Wolverine... but Walking Dead 157 has a variant cover that went to a second printing. They did the barcode correctly: 15722. So there's at least one of them.

Obviously, other people do not share that opinion about NFTs, or they wouldn't be tossing around millions of dollars. But that's pretty much my take on the whole thing. NFTs allow you to own a cryptographically secure statement of ownership, which can be bought and sold, but which don't otherwise resemble traditional object ownership in many (if any) other ways.