Qalyar

Why wouldn't it? It is a post-manufacturing defect caused by mishandling of the book.

The signature on the first thing is Les Denis, who also worked on that Revelations title (and signed both of those at upper left). Golden Realm Unlimited put out a half-dozen books, most of which have variant covers and limited editions and collectors' versions and such. But it was never much of a publisher (one of the people involved later described it as basically self-publication for the people involved). I don't think there's any market for anything they produced, except possibly a very niche audience for the three issues of Tall Tails they put out (which later went through another tiny indie publisher, Vision Comics, then merged with Radio Comix's Furrlough). The bottom line is that this stuff is a relic of its era, and arguably interesting for that, but as far as monetary value? Sadly, no.

Yeah, I would check with IGComicStore. They ought to know if all their store variants were produced this way. I will caution that even if this ends up being something unusual, that doesn't necessarily make it something valuable...

I do think there might be something odd going on with this one. The exterior cover is definitely the IGComicStore trade dress variant (that is indeed what the "trade" refers to; there's also a virgin version). But the sketch cover behind it does look like the Frankies Comics exclusive sketch cover. So, if I'm reading (and seeing) this right, the 3rd page is that monochrome version of the sketch cover, and the 4th page is the unusual material. Does the comic continue normally afterward? I don't know if this is normal, and don't have a reference copy of this available.

I'm not... entirely sure what you're asking here. I suspect, if I'm interpreting what you wrote correctly, that this is some sort of production proof and not an error in the conventional sense. Photos would be immensely helpful.

Probably not my favorite bad movie, but I just rewatched Thirteen Ghosts and enjoyed it quite a bit more than it's 16% Rotten Tomatoes score would suggest.

So, I basically have two separate collections with very, very little overlap. One side is like this. It consists only of widely-collected books. It has a lot of turnover, and no sacred cows. I add to it when I get the opportunity to pick up sweetheart deals. I subtract from it when I get a chance to cash in, or when I want more liquid assets, or when I just want to throw some money at personal amusement because it's freaking 2020 and sometimes you just have to. I'm ... I don't want to say I'm happy with these books. More than anything, I don't really care about these books. My interaction with them is transactional. That's why I'm sad when quite a few contributors here prioritize their collecting goals solely on the monetary value of the books they own. Cash money is good stuff. But... that's not what collecting means to me, I suppose. The other side is my permanent collection. They're titles that personally interest me, for whatever reason, and I almost exclusively collect them in full runs of slabbed high-grade copies (or, at least, that's the goal...). The overwhelming majority of those books are low-interest. That almost always means hunting down high-grade copies of books that no one else wants, and paying for the slabbing myself. The chase is part of the fun. My permanent collection is the opposite of an investment. A substantial fraction of those slabs are probably worth break-even on the slabbing and shipping fees (although in full disclosure there are a few in the several-hundred-dollar range and maybe one or two that would push 1000; I'm not a high roller in this hobby). But it doesn't matter. They're not for sale, now or likely ever. Barring the missing issues, I'm almost always happy with the things I put in my permanent collection. I'll admit, there are a couple pieces that annoy me because I dropped the ball on pre-submission grade assessment (and I'm about to eat one more of those, because I somehow managed to swap my 9.8 contender with my undercopy before packing up my most recent lot...). But as a whole? Yes, I'm quite happy with what I collect.

Tiers are shipped back separately. Don't mix tiers if you don't have to. Also, no matter what their shipping pricing chart suggests, the return boxes hold a maximum of 25 slabs. Therefore, the most cost-effective grading is to submit exact multiples of 25 books. Send 26, and you're going to pay for one box of 25... and one box of one book. Otherwise, there are no volume discounts. Presumably, if you had a truly impressive number of books to slab simultaneously, you could contact CGC directly and see if they'd cut you something special. But I wouldn't even bother making that call for anything short of, say, 1000 slabs (and/or a newly discovered pedigree-candidate collection).

That said, I can't imagine that you'll have much luck finding a high-grade Batman 171 cover that isn't, you know, attached to a high-grade Batman 171 book. I hate devolving this hobby to just financial concerns, but... fiddling with this probably isn't a good investment either. This book exists in volume, despite its top-line price. Below 8.0 (and especially below 7.0), valuations here drop pretty starkly. Let's say that you manage to marry a fantastic cover and earn an 8.0 purple label here (anything above that, not realistic... even assuming that finding an 8.0 cover is realistic, which it isn't). While purple values are best examined on a per-book basis, a hat-pull number might be to suggest you're looking at a book worth 3 blue grades lower. And that means you're looking at prices down in the trenches, where the relative glut of mid-grade copies of this issue keeps values low. Furthermore, frankly, I think the price hit for a married cover book here might be worse than a "normal" purple label. Married covers are, to the extent that they're tolerated by collectors in general, mostly a creature of the Golden Age (in part because quite a few people saved covers specifically, so there are way, way more bookless covers than later eras). Marketability for a married SA book? Ehhh....

I would check with a reliable page listing (or an owner of a confirmed intact copy of whatever issue this is) to get a full page count to see if you're missing an advertising page or the like. If not, and this book's pagination is complete, well, GA production was never a hotbed of consistency.

This. A tiny fragment of paper that might have originally read "File Space" does not establish provenance for this book as a legitimate file copy. Maybe, maybe, if what had been stapled to the cover was still complete, we'd be able to say more. But as it stands, you have a book with quite a few significant defects, plus an added staple holding on a bit of debris. I know that's probably not what you want to hear, but I just don't see any way this book would warrant special dispensation based on what we see.

I think that bend at UR will press out, as it certainly doesn't seem to be color-breaking. But the LL corner is really going to hurt the grade.

This was published by Alternate Concepts, an indie publisher that released occasional material for about 10 years from the late 80s to late 90s. Most of their products were various collectors' guides or checklists, but they also dabbled in sort of fanzine-style publications and, eventually, their own comics (of which the "best" known is probably Legion of Stupid Heroes). Unfortunately, I don't think this -- or anything from Alternate Concepts, honestly -- has any market value to speak of. Still a neat piece of collecting history, though.

There's no magic formula. There's never a magic formula, not for purple labels, not for green labels, not for yellow labels. Not for newsstands or variant covers. So, sure, if you just need napkin-math spitballing... maybe a "minor color touch" purple label is like a 3 or 4 grade effective deduction in value. That probably holds true for books where both blue and purple labels are fairly common, and in the grade range most likely to be encountered. Stuff gets weird for very high grade (let's say 9.2+) purple labels. And anything under, say, 6.0 in a purple is going to be so hard to move as to be meaningless to consider. Even with those restrictions, I bet that guideline gets a lot of values wrong. Past that, more extensive restoration comes down to whether there is a market for it. Personally, I would pay zero dollars for any but the most exceptional trimmed books. Some people out there care more about appearance than structural integrity, and probably don't view trimming as much worse than color touch or cover reinforcement (although fewer these days than there once were). I'm not even going to get into the nonsense of leaf casting or reglossed covers. Or, for that matter, married books, which I mostly think belong in the same bucket as trimmed copies, but which seem moderately more acceptable to some. Obviously, these sorts of copies do sell. Sometimes at huge discounts from blue label prices... and sometimes at smaller discounts from blue label than I think they deserve, because people buy the book's appearance in lieu of buying the book. Green labels are maybe even harder to predict. If I had to guess, I'd bet the most common green labels are books with unauthenticated signatures. So then you have to decide... are you evaluating this as if it were a blue label where someone scribbled on the cover? Or are you evaluating it as a yellow label book but without the relative security of witnessed authentication? Obviously, a lot of creators passed away before the yellow label system. If the book has convincing provenance, maybe that's worth more than a blue label. On the other hand, unwitnessed Stan Lee's on rando mid-grade books should just about be assumed to be forgeries at this point, and so ought to be worth approximately nada. Outside of signatures, the whole point of green labels is books with something uniquely wrong; by their nature, they are going to be hard to set price trends for. You have to consider why the book is green, and then decide how much that hurts your -- and others' -- consideration of the copy.

Off-square slanted books at top and bottom are frequently factory miscuts. I'm more concerned about the right side of the book, which seems wider at top than at bottom, and is likely where damage has been trimmed away. This book looks pretty, but keep in mind that it has been manipulated in order to appear that way. General acceptance of color touch has waxed and waned over the hobby's decades, and that sort of restoration bothers some people more than others (although it's certainly a huge mark against resale value). On the other hand, I would never knowingly own a trimmed book, and I'm far from alone in that respect. And all that assumes that the disclosed work is all the work. In my mind, Hulk 181 is a particularly bad book to invest into a "restored" (and I struggle to use that word in regard to trimming) copy. It's a high dollar book, but at the same time, it is one that is generally available in some quantities on the market. When or if the time comes to resell this, you have to consider that the universe of people willing to spend significant amounts of money on the issue in general, and not just on a low-grade or reader copy... but not willing to spend the money for an unrestored copy... is a very small target audience. Only you can make your collecting decisions for you. But I would run, not walk, from this.

Basically, printers creases happen when the paper itself is creased prior to printing. Often, this means that there was an alignment problem somewhere in the web-fed press, but sometimes (especially on older books), the crease occurred during the production of the paper rolls themselves. Cheap paper is cheap, after all. As for telling printers creases apart from the results of mishandling... Most printers creases (especially caused by improper web feeds) will be horizontal, or nearly so (although there are occasional weird examples caused by more serious printer problems or defective paper stock). Regardless, printers creases happen before the ink is applied; the book is printed on top of the paper defect, rather than later damage that folds the already-printed paper. With a little practice, especially with the book in hand, that's usually fairly easy to distinguish, especially for larger creases. Sometimes it's a little tricky to distinguish between a small printers crease and a small normal crease from photographs only, especially if mostly un-inked paper is affected. But your images do look pretty archetypal for a printers crease. As for CGC, well... in principle, these are pre-production or in-production defects, not mishandling or wear, and so do not count against the technical grade at any reasonable point value (books with a printers crease cannot receive a 9.9+, but since books in general don't get those, it's somewhat academic). That said, books with particularly ugly printers creases, or a whole constellation of them, do sometimes get marked down. Based on a cursory glance at the images, this book looks to have a blunted corner at UR, a color-breaking spine tick in at UL (in the yellow box), and stress around the top staple; I wouldn't expect the printers crease to alter the final grade.

Especially if you count the reprinted material in TPBs, I've read the content of 100% of the issues I own, although very clearly not 100% of the physical copies that I own. Probably down near 10%, or less.

Any of the Crossgen stuff. The main runs were actually not half bad, but the debacle with the end of the publisher cut everything short before ANY plotlines concluded, and probably sealed their fate in terms of future value

Humor there notwithstanding, there are both with-period and without-period versions on legitimate originals. However, the 1940 books have a serif number 1, and the treasury reprint (besides being larger size) have a sans-serif number 1 (or a Roman numeral I, depending on your point of view...). As for value, this is worth about zero. It has the outer cover removed, for one, and is in terrible condition notwithstanding that.

I don't think I have any pictures of it any more, but back in the late 90s or so, I briefly owned a Haunt of Fear #16 (#2) (the 1950 book with the vampire cover, not the 1952 book with the head transplant cover). It was so badly miscut that it wasn't even really rectangular. It was probably a good half-inch narrower at the bottom than at the top, and was miswrapped, off-kilter, to match. I got somewhat more than FMV at the time for it from a guy who apparently really enjoyed the terrible, terrible QA on some of the EC books.

This isn't even close to the worse EC miscut miswrap I've ever seen either.

Card stock covers are more prone to bindery tears at the spine corners than comics with gloss or newsprint covers. But... there's too much damage at the bottom of the spine for this to get the "production defect" pass. I've seen vaguely similar books with no other defects get 9.2-9.4. Potentially another 0.2 off for whatever that thing is under "vaults" and whether it is adjudicated to be a production defect. I'd guess a 9.2 is the most likely outcome here.

One thing to keep in mind is that CGC's "grader notes" system is... not what a lot of people expect. It is explicitly not a comprehensive catalog of the defects the graders detected. It is not an explanation of why the book got the grade it did. They are, literally, just the grader's notes; in the same way that some students might take more notes in their classes, some graders are more verbose. A lot of books, especially in the 9.x range, don't receive any notes at all. Many books with very obvious defects will not have those noted (presumably because they're self-evident to the grader and to us). And so forth. Grader's notes are sometimes useful; I had a book where I'd missed a defect, and the grader's note was sufficient for me to see what went wrong. Likewise, I understand that a truly comprehensive defect index would slow the already-slow system down much, much further (and likely raise costs, which isn't really in anyone's interests). But I would rarely if ever pay for them.

Pirates of Dark Water.

I own one of the books in the OP unironically. Like, acquired it on purpose. In both direct market and newsstand printings, actually. I may have an illness.