Qalyar

I forgot about that one. But technically I was still correct because it's not a DC book (iirc, published by Warner Brothers).

There are quite a few of these DC Atari pack-ins. The three Swordquest issues, five (?) issues of Atari Force, and a Centipede one-off, that I know of. None of them are easy to find, and condition is frequently horrible.

He may threaten to get lawyers involved. After all, he already threatened to get lawyers involved when he briefly thought that getting called out for the character label shenanigans was somehow libelous. The thing is, anyone can threaten to sue. Actually doing it? That's something different entirely. Because that would require getting an actual lawyer involved, who would then provide our buddy with some actual legal advice. None of which, I think, he'd very much enjoy at this point.

It's impossible to give a meaningful response to your observations, because we don't see what you see. If you have concerns like this, photos help. With that said, some things to consider: Technical grades are not intended to be a measure of the visual appeal of a book. Some "defects" may not count against grade, or count less, because they are production defects. Bindery chipping is the big offender here, but for some eras of books, that may also include printers' creases and other production defects not generally seen in Modern books. But it's also possible that you have a better book in a slab with a lower grade: CGC does sometimes make mistakes in grading. They're not nearly as common as some people here believe (the forum vastly oversamples slabs with problems, because people come to complain; no one makes a thread to say "my books look like the grade it says on the slab"). Post-encapsulation damage is possible also. Some variants of the slab / slab process have been more prone to internal shifting and damage than others (see various threads about shaken comic syndrome); it's possible that a slab with a high grade on an undeserving book didn't start that way.

I think there are realistically a few options for what happened here: Dylan legitimately had books damaged by CGC. Books do get damaged at CGC on occasion, but I am reasonably sure that they're cognizant enough of this particular issue to exercise special care. Also, believing this is what actually happened would requiring believing Dylan is being forthright and honest. I don't think I have that in me. Dylan legitimately had books damaged, but they were damaged in transit because either he or his presser (if different) do not know how to pack books. Dylan legitimately had books damaged, but they were damaged by his presser (who might very well just be Dylan himself) because they don't know how to press books safely. The before and after pictures do not represent the same books, and this is a sad, sad attempt at simple fraud. Combinations are possible!

Maybe he just owns more than one cape? It has to be boring to be a superhero, doomed to a single fashion ensemble for eternity.

Honestly, "verifying" Stan Lee signatures without any provenance is voodoo science. His is the worst type of signature for authentication because 1) it varied wildly during his life, so comparison to known-good exemplars is futile and 2) known forgeries, some with forged provenance, are commonplace. I've seen known bad Stan Lees that are pretty solid matches to at least certain of his known good signatures. I don't collect signed books, but I'd never even consider a Stan Lee signature that wasn't witnessed. There are plenty out there. If this is from that eBay seller linked above, though, I wouldn't have much hope for it. There are lots of Stan Lee books out there, but these ultra-cheap bulk sellers of Stan sigs on eBay (and there have been several over the years) are almost always forgery mills.

And made all those details match the certification record? There is no credible reason to believe there are "fake CGC slabs" of any sort. But if there were, they wouldn't be fakes of the peculiar Wizard 9.5 experiment books.

Real collectors know the money will be in their first appearance, not their solo title. I think that's Fusion #5 (Eclipse Comics, 1987). However, that indicates I have some really misguided brain cells storing information I don't need, so I almost hope I'm wrong.

I don't see anything to suggest this is not a first print. Second prints have a copper title and a second print stamp (and are themselves very rare, since most copies were inadvertently destroyed). Third prints and later have entirely different covers. There are other copies of CPD1 known that didn't get the red stamp. I'm not sure how CGC would indicate this. Technically, it's a production error rather than an intentional variant, but that hasn't prevented some errors from receiving full registry callouts. You may wish to inquire of CGC directly before submission. Also, either way, very nice book.

Honestly, if anything in the Modern Era suddenly stops being worth anything at all one day, I bet it'll be these Counterpoint Comics. Most of what they print (Do You Pooh?, Hardlee Thinn, and Tiggomverse in particular) are one-offs for which they have printed cover after variant cover. In the case of Hardlee and Pooh, I wouldn't be surprised if they were up to 100 cover variants each at this point. The stories are thin, and pointless. They exist only to fill the space between the front cover and the back. With regularity, they commission a new cover for one of their titles, then engineer a suite of sub-variants (normal, chrome/chromium, metal, crystal fleck), all limited to comically (pun intended) small prints runs, often as low as 25 copies, and all sold for $25-60 (or more!) apiece. Sometimes that's not enough and they have Artist Proof sub-sub-variants. Those are usually limited to 10 copies. GET THEM WHILE THEY LAST. And... they pretty much all sell out. It's like a caricature of the modern trend for limited print runs and variant covers, all rolled into one. But hey, I can't fault them for doing what works, I guess. I just can't imagine anyone caring about these a decade or two from now, even if retailer incentives and ratio covers for real comics manage to hold their value.

Right? I'm always dubious of the "Oh, my dear old dad bought this in the glorious past" auctions for valuable books with insufficient feedback. But sure, let's pretend that's a true story. So... you then paid for a witnessed Stan Lee signature on dad's book in 2016, and are selling it now? And didn't mention any of that? No, I wouldn't think this could be legitimate. I suspect it's a scam, and I'd bet the scammer doesn't even understand enough to know why a gold label makes this more suspicious, not less.

Seriously, that box is ridiculous. It looks like all the stuff that's missing out of boxes I get to look through. Hell, even had the Alf seal-molestation issue for giggles.

I'll reiterate this. There's no good way to estimate a value of these shelves from these pictures. As with comics, condition is important for evaluating BLBs, and we can't see enough. Although, what we can see suggests these are mostly low-grade copies. BLBs with detached covers (like the one labeled thus in the bag) or the spine torn off (to the left of Monsters of Mongo) typically retain negligible value. Intact, but low-grade BLBs aren't worthless, but they're not very valuable either, and they're likely to be very, very slow movers. I didn't check everything visible on these shelves carefully, but I didn't see any of the great rarities. If you're not already invested in this field, I wouldn't bite on this collection based on what I can see in these pictures. But YMMV.

cancer.

Honestly, my best guess? Someone whose only exposure to Valiant was the post-Unity books that have been the "bulk" in oh-so-many long boxes since the 90s. See Valiant icon, dump in clearance bin, go on with life. And the thing is, that's not a terrible plan 98% of the time, because nearly all the Valiant material likely to come in with a collection buy is post-Unity stuff that is still mostly worthless. But when it's wrong... it's really wrong. How's condition on those books? If they're coupon-intact, I have to assume they're generally in nice shape overall.

When I saw "Harbinger 1-4" in this thread, I was like ... yeah, sure, the 2012 series isn't all that great. I mean, #1 doesn't deserve to be in the bargain bin, but that's why we have these sorts of threads, right? It's not like anyone would clearance out the 1992 series, surely... Oh. Nope. That's patently ridiculous, even if they were 4/$10 and so not technically dollar books.

I actually suspect they haven't because they can't -- or don't think they can. The census tracks "grade category", but not the specific type of label associated with the book. For example, the problematic X-Men above is Cert #2133081001, with a grade category of B-1 (as correct for a restored book). It doesn't say that it has a character label. Indeed, no book in the census indicates which books are slabbed with character labels. If I was in charge of CGC, and had their system to build all over from scratch, I'd be sure to include slab model and label version as tracked fields. That'd be helpful for other QC issues too. Now, it's possible that they have that data and just don't display it externally, but... I kind of doubt it. I really do not think they have any easy way to retroactively search for this. It might be possible for accounting to provide a list of the times that someone has paid for a character label, then run that list against the database to look for books with a restored grade category. But depending on how they store those two data sets, that might not be as trivial as it sounds.

I have a CGC 10. Totally counts.

As far as grading goes, the biggest problem pressing presents is increasing the divide between technical grade and eye appeal in some books. A comic with several color-breaking creases is still a comic with several color-breaking creases when pressed, but pressing does reduce or eliminate the obvious "ridging" and allows the creased book to lay flat. That makes it look a lot nicer, but doesn't actually change anything from a technical perspective. We regularly extol people to "buy the book, not the grade", but that has to come with a measure of consideration that not all pretty books are sound ones (and that's true regardless of pressing, but it does compound the situation at times). On the other hand, competent pressing as a means to repair large bends (as commonly inflicted by improper storage) is a fairly universal good.

The Smithsonian recommends < 65 for archival paper. Many other facilities cite 70 as the top range. That said, I don't think 75 at 44% RH is going to do damage to your books in any really relevant time scale. You might consider more complex environmental condition management if your collection includes issues prone to (or already displaying) paper degradation. I wouldn't keep a copy of All-Negro Comics at 75, but that's not a problem that I (or most of us) will ever have.

I'd go 6.5 on this, I think. A lot will depend on how they judge the top and bottom of the spine. Those defects almost certainly began life as bindery tears, but especially at top, I think have become more pronounced since manufacture. Regardless, really nice book. And I think there's a strong case to be made that that's from the Pennsylvania collection. There are a lot of those books raw in the wild because of how and when the collection was distributed. CGC credits wild books with pedigree labels at their discretion, but I'd certainly inquire about it for this one.

No. CGC errors happen. It's unfortunate, and a problem, but this isn't a single random mistake. The character labels aren't supposed to be available on purple books, per CGC, but they've allowed a lot of restored books to get slabbed with blue labels this way. Even though CGC has said they stopped doing so. The problem with this seller is that he knew there was a loophole and has submitted several tranches of restored books for grading and character labels specifically to get blue labels on purple books, then sells them without drawing attention to the tiny text that demonstrates what he did. Then makes vacuous legal threats when called out on it.

Awesome Comics? Only because he managed to get Moore on board. I didn't have any better opinion of Liefeld as a publisher than I do of Liefeld as an artist. I think there's reasonable cause to believe he was doing some shady stuff with Maximum Press when he was with Image, and the whole Fighting American / Agent America / Captain America debacle at Awesome was, well, not awesome. Unlike some of the other quasi-Image publishers, I never expected Awesome to last very long. Moore's work was never in danger; he's Moore (and, indeed, just packed up his things and created ABC when Awesome failed). If anyone, I feel a bit sorry for Ian Churchill in the whole affair. Coven was an interesting enough book, and while he's ended up just fine (Teen Titans, etc.), I seem to think he had a lean stretch after Awesome died. And Coven has never been revisited anywhere, so far as I know.

I mean, they do okay in higher grades. They're not expensive books, but they aren't dollar bin fodder. I suppose to some extent that's true of many Bronze Age books, but there are certainly things you could pick up for far cheaper than a nice run of LR.