Qalyar

On 5/10/2020 at 8:09 PM, fastballspecial said:

Many years of looking. If you don't know go figure it out.

 

Guessing that's a 1st printing? If so, very nice. I have a friend who offloaded a 2nd for 100 not too long ago, but I don't believe I've ever encountered the 1st print.

Grimm Fairy Tales certainly has enough market value at 9.8 (at least for the first couple issues) to suggest that someone else out there is actively collecting. I assume that some of the (many) limited variants would have some value too (although mostly not later in the run, where everything looks like it curves down to slab cost).

There are no shortage of other characters who are at least somewhat adult that are actively collected. Vampirella. Dawn. Early appearance of Lady Death (helps that her first appearance in Evil Ernie 1 is also Ernie's first appearance, but regardless, that's a very not-cheap book in high grade). Ebay has at least reasonable respectable prices for some of the variants of stuff like Notti & Nyce, although I don't know whether much actually sells at those prices. Halle the Hooters Girl is worth ... a few dollars, anyway, mostly for the controversy. On the other hand, stuff like Unholy or Hellina? Well, at least it would be cheap to pick up runs, right; good luck finding all the fiddly limited, though.

The stuff that comes on the safe edge of mainstream is likely to have more collectors' interest than material on the other side of the line, because the potential buying audience tends to be bigger. But yes, the short answer is that you're not the only collector of adult covers or mature comics in general.

I've slabbed plenty of drek. Not all of us view this hobby as an investment. I never intend to flip the stuff I collect. For what it's worth, most (but not all) of the things I'm interested in have at least a few books "worth" slabbing. In the grand scheme of things, slabbing isn't that expensive, and the aesthetic of a uniform collection is appealing.

Of course, later this year, I'll probably be requesting a registry entry where honestly nothing should have been slabbed and you all can roundly mock me for it. :P

I would not. Most of those defects are not pressable, and I echo that CGC is often harsher on foxing than they were here.

If you get a great press, and graders who aren't strict about foxing, this could see a 6.5. But it really could come back a 5.5. 

I see 11 SS copies of ROM 1 Sketch Edition (blank cover, except for the trade dress at top) in the census: 8 copies at 9.8 and one each at 9.6, 9.4, 9.2. The census doesn't break those down by who was responsible for the SS, as far as I know.

I wouldn't even hazard a guess at value. These sorts of things, with a blank cover and an added SS sketch, you're largely buying the original artwork and not the comic that was incidentally used as the medium. Nice Miller pieces, though. That last one is hilarious.

16 hours ago, Summydad1 said:

Took a picture of the Fallen Angels 2. I’m glad this topic got started. She deserves some admiration. Her art just makes me happy. That’s the idea I think?!?

She definitely has an anime/manga influence to her style. That cover reminds me quite a bit of Mononoke Hime.

This is pretty much the definition of a comic with "a significant defect that needs specific description", especially since it is completely invisible from the outside. I can only assume it would get a Qualified label. I'm not... extremely familiar with how they assign green-label grades. My guess would be, if this book still has the cover presentation of a 9.2, that you'd get a 9.2 Qualified. But my suspicions here shouldn't be treated as gospel, to say the least.

I don't think those edge chips are brittle-paper chips, but rather the result of some sort of trauma the book suffered at some point since 1939 -- a trauma that also caused the defect at front cover right edge center. Might get called a darker page color than OW due to some of the edges and top left, though 

Yeah, even I would press this one. Some of the defects at front cover top right (near the date) will resolve, as will some of the non breaking creases on the back near the right edge and the coupon. I'm not sure this will make 2.0 or not after a press, but I do know this is gonna be a sharp looking book for grade once tidied up and slabbed.

And if you're in this for value, pushing Bat 121 from 1.0 to 1.5 to 1.8 are nice jumps in FMV.

1 hour ago, Bax77 said:

Which is as it should be??  I'm going to guess you own a bunch of books with slight restoration?

Well, "as it should be" is probably the case for C-1 restoration, which is pretty common. A lot of comics have that sort of (usually) well-meaning amateur "help". And for those books, it's pretty easy to imagine what the book's state would have been without the restoration. But it's utterly impossible to reverse engineer more involved and/or professional work.

And what would the "without restoration" grade even mean for a book with a married cover? A trimmed book? There's no way to even guess at the previous state.

It's not a bad idea, exactly, but it's not a very feasible one. CGC sees what the book looks like now, and that's all they can pass judgment on.

I'm pretty sure that purple would be considered C-1 color touch. It is not a professional-grade effort to restore the original appearance of the cover, but it does serve to (vaguely, at a distance) conceal the defect. It's not really any different that using a sharpie to fill in a scuff on a non-matching black field.

This book was a little doomed from the start because that bad miscut (which wouldn't itself count against grade) left the top margin of the front cover unprotected. And it shows, with the creases up there, especially the long horizontal crease that breaks color and marks where the cover overhangs the rest of the book. Oh, and I don't think that stain is distributor ink. I think it's just a stain. The spine is in rough shape too, not the least problem of which is that big notch in it at the base of the Marvel Comics Group box. I can't decide from these pictures whether there's also significant darkening of the back cover along the spine and in a broad area at back cover top right, or if that's a trick of the light. Given the rest of the book's condition, I don't expect the latter. For that matter, we don't have a close-up of the bottom staple, but to my eye, it looks darker than the top one, which is, shall we say, not a good sign if that's actually the case. There's quite a bit we can't see at all that might matter, including interior paper condition (I don't think this has white pages...) and the centerfold in particular. These badly skew-cut books are prone to little page tears around the staples.

I'm not the grading expert that some others here are, but my gut instinct is 6.0.

I am not a frequent advocate for pressing and cleaning, but I especially don't think it would help here, in terms of the presentation appeal of the book, its technical grade, or its monetary value. A press might help the wrinkles at the upper left front, and might remedy the problems at the back cover bottom, but it simply can't repair color-breaking faults, and this book has a lot of color breaking faults. That stain isn't going anywhere, either. I don't think a full grade from pressing is realistic unless a lot goes in this comic's favor during the process. I think a 6.5 post-press is more likely. For slabbed books, Gocollect reports a $20 FMV jump between 6.0 and 7.0 on this book. That's not going to pay for the pressing even if you get a great press.

I don't think the defects on this book are the sort that can be remedied by pressing. But I tend to be a pressing pessimist (pressimist?) in general, so if you feel it's worth the expense to attempt, it's certainly your prerogative.

Also, I'll side with the masses here. This book's a 9.6.

Honestly, right now, I think one of the biggest appeals to yellow-label books (either from CGC or its primary competitor) is that they are witnessed signatures that can be realistically guaranteed to be authentic. Signature collecting has been a thing for decades, but so has signature forgery. And with current estimates that 60% (or more!) of the collectible signatures currently on the market are outright frauds, well... For example, Stan Lee signatures outside of a witnessed book are rapidly approaching worthless because there is so much bad paper that it drives out the good. And I don't see any realistic way to change that; PSA is a trainwreck that shows signature authentication is only slightly less dubious than handwriting analysis.

So, to some extent, some SS books will always be valuable. But I don't think their lofty heights are forever, and I certainly don't think they're going to be forever viewed as "superior" to high grade Universal copies.

4 hours ago, lighthouse said:

I think signatures today are where restoration was in the 1970s. For some it’s a way to turn a less desirable book into a nice payday. For others it’s a third rail they want no part of.

There’s no denying that a low grade copy can be improved with a signature or restoration. I’ve got a low grade X-Men 2 that Stan Lee signed on the splash page in 1987 and there’s no doubt it’s more desirable than another random low grade copy of that book. But I cringe every time I am checking the census and see there are only 10 known copies of a book in 9.6 and 2 of them have yellow labels. 

For a lot of people, yellow label is better, and worth more. But not for everyone. I tend to think that this signature craze is a lot like restoration was in the 1970s. It takes a book, and (often, and stereotypically) makes it worth more, so why wouldn't you? But it didn't take all that long in the scheme of things to go from "restoration makes your comics better!" to "restoration makes you the sad owner of a PLOD book". Personally, I'd be happy to never own a yellow label book, just as I don't collect purple ones.

I view organized, systematic comic collecting as a very "young" hobby. As I've pointed out a lot on these boards, we don't even have a truly comprehensive catalog of print variants for the people who would choose to collect that way (Overstreet ain't it). Other, similar hobbies learned a lot of these lessons. Once upon a time, people did the same sort of restoration on stamps, and cleaned or polished coins. Stamps with restoration are essentially worthless in all but the edgiest of edge cases, and cleaned coins are considered damaged (and get the equivalent of green grades, at best). Tiny printing differences in postage stamps -- the paper used, the gauge of the perforations, sometimes even the phospor tagging visible under black light -- can make hundreds or even thousands of dollars of difference. Slowly, sometimes too slowly, we're learning. There are several GA keys that are now all but impossible to find in unrestored condition, because everyone had tears sealed and pages cleaned, even when the books really didn't need any help. And, yes, most of the hoopla over newsstand variants right now is flipper cash-grabbing, but some of those books are real rarities hiding in plain sight.

Thirty years from now, are we going to look back and wonder why people "back then" got so many comics signed by... well, anyone vaguely related to the book? Cover artist, interior artist, Stan Lee, writer, actors who played the characters in an adaptation, Stan Lee...? Every time someone makes a 9.8 SS book, that's one less 9.8 Universal that will ever exist. For a lot of books, that won't really matter. There will still more 9.8s out there than collectors who are likely to care. But there are limited books, low-print run books, books famous for poor quality production runs, where that might not be the case. There are over twice as many 9.0+ SS copies of Cerebus 1 as 9.0+ blue labels (and that assumes that none of the blues were cracked to hand back to Dave Sim for signing); I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.

No matter what happens to collecting trends, a 9.8 Universal will always be a high quality collectible, even if something bad happens to CGC or to the slabbing industry as a whole (after all, you can always crack a slab). You can't have a cover unsigned.

This is cheating, a little bit, because "The Pit" by the Silversun Pickups is literally based on Charles Burns' Black Hole, although it doesn't exactly follow the story in sequence. Regardless, I associate the song's themes with Keith and Eliza's last story arc in 11-12.

I'm not as enamored of pressing as most folks these days, but even I would get this one pressed. It's tough to predict how well crease smoothing will take, but I think this book should deserve an 8.5 when all is said and done.

Comparing it to that Heritage copy does it a disservice, because there's no way that book deserved the grade it got. That dark strip at the top is exactly mirrored on the back cover, so if that's just a... really aggressive dust shadow, it penetrates all the way through the copy. Compare it to what probably is more normal dust shadow at the front cover right (near the "8"), which discolors the blue field but doesn't show up in any sense on the back cover. I'd look warily at the latter because it can indicate fiber degradation, but I can't believe they didn't ding the former much more harshly because it certainly does (in addition to being a large and unsightly defect).

Sometimes there are real dogs of comics that manage, despite the odds, to retain a beautiful cover. We like to euphemistically say those "present well", and they make the best low-grade slabs. This thing is the exact opposite. That cover could barely get worse if my dog got to it, but the interior pages are fantastic.

I agree that this would get a 0.5 label, but I even more fervently agree that it shouldn't be slabbed. Slabbing this book would rob it of the features that make it worth owning; it needs to be able to be opened to be appreciated for what's genuinely very good about it.

So, Midnight Nation 1 shipped with a 50/50 ratio of two covers. One shows David Grey in full figure, and has a primarily black background. The other has David's face over a skyline with a bright red background. By convention, the former is the "A" cover and the latter is the "B" cover. There are also a bunch of other versions of this book: a Dynamic Forces variant cover, the DF cover with a gold foil logo, the DF cover with a blue foil logo, a DF "European Exclusive" variant cover, and a 2nd printing of the comic itself (which uses the "B" cover, color-swapped from red to blue). And that doesn't include the black and white re-issue under a slightly different title, which we can safely ignore for the rest of this thread!

The CGC Census for this book lists 29 copies with no variant, 4 copies of the DF variant, 5 copies of the DF gold, 4 copies of the DF blue, and 4 copies of the European Edition. Presumably, no one has ever bothered submitting the 2nd printing for slabbing. Strangely, it also notes "Gold foil logo" as "Key Comments" for the issue as a whole, which is factually incorrect (of the 7 distinguishable versions of this book, only one has gold foil). But what concerns me is that, based on the Census, all normal (non-DF) copies of the book have been slabbed identically without regard to the A/B cover distinction. I was able to locate one such slabbed book -- a CGC SS 9.6 (fair disclosure: I don't own this; it's currently listed on eBay, but I don't collect signed comics). I've cropped and attached the label from that book's listing. It bears a note that "Two different covers exist both by Gary Frank.", which is certainly accurate, but doesn't really do anything to enable distinct collection of slabbed copies of the two covers. I suppose that it's possible, if immensely unlikely, that all 29 submitted copies are, like that book, cover A?

If a submission for grading and slabbing included both a copy of Midnight Nation 1 (A cover) and a copy of Midnight Nation 1 (B cover), how would those be labelled? Would they be distinguished in a way that would allow for separate entries in the Census and a theoretical title Registry (as none currently exists)? I presume that the 2nd printing would get the standard "2nd printing" treatment, and all the other variants of this issue are recorded correctly, so it's really just the A/B split that leaves me concerned. I know nothing can be done about the way this book was graded previously, but I have an eye to the future here. I know CGC doesn't get into the weeds on all variants (direct vs. newsstand, among others), but surely entirely different covers should be labeled separately?

...and, yes, for everyone else reading this, I know. I'm quibbling about the labels on slabs for books that might, on a good day, maybe be worth more raw than their original cover price. We all have our peccadilloes, do we not?

1 hour ago, hoffitmus prime said:

Above and beyond. Thanks!! Well I bought a NM copy this week of issue 1 if it’s not first print I guess whatever.. I kind of feel I’d rather have that than the VHS one but I’ll keep me eye out for it. Sounds interesting. Thanks again detective. 

If/when you have it in hand, I'd be very interested to see if the indicia/colophon gives any indication of the printing. I assume it does, in some fashion.

So, I tried to dig into this a little bit. I don't have physical copies of these at hand, and haven't for years and years. Certainly, several retailers (including Chuck) list and price sundry printing separately. I really do assume that there's a colophon in there somewhere. However, I also have good news and bad news, depending on how strict you are about what constitutes a "first [English] appearance".

The first US printing of Pokémon: The Electric Tale of Pikachu was released by Viz on November 27, 1998. At least some comic sites consider this the first appearance of Pikachu (and Ash, but really, people are in it for the Pikachu, right?) in English comics. This book is now on [at least] the 16th printing. If not for the pandemic, I could probably scare up some physical copies and conclusively determine how to identify the printing. But... as it turns out, arguably, that's not the first appearance of Ash and Pikachu anyway.

A few days earlier, on November 24, Viz released the first VHS compilation of episodes of the Pokémon anime (Pokémon: I Choose You! Pikachu!). Some initial run copies of this VHS tape were packaged with a so-called "manga sampler" ediiton of Pokémon: The Electric Tale of Pikachu 1. This sampler edition is shorter than the normal comic and simply cuts off the story midway through. It is also easily distinguishable from traditionally-released versions of the comic due to the modified cover. Nevertheless, it arguably qualifies as these characters' actual first appearance in English comics (and Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia, considers it such). I've never actually seen one of these, for what it's worth, and none of the comic book indexes or sales sites (GCD, MyComicShop, and even Chuck) make any mention of its existence. Locating a copy will be a lengthy and difficult quest, but I have found and attached a cover scan at least.

For the sake of providing comprehensive information, there is also a similar "manga sampler" edition for Pokémon: The Electric Tale of Pikachu 2, released in the same way as a VHS pack-in, but no equivalent versions are known for the later monthly comic issues.

I'm inexpert at this, but I'll take a stab with a 9.0/9.2. The biggest issues are that semicircular color breaking stress mark (front cover, bottom staple); and the crunched spine at bottom (most visible from the back). There are also a few handling marks along the bottom edge back. The good news about the spine is that I don't see any ticks in the traditional sense, but that color breaking arc is almost certainly worse.

Finally, I really can't decide from the pictures whether that whitish mark above "Got Milk" is an intended part of the design or a surface scuff. If the latter... that might knock it down another point?

1 hour ago, hoffitmus prime said:

Since there were 16 printings of this, does anyone know if you can tell which is the first print? As far as I can gather the only discernible difference is early printings or first print has barcode on front. Any ideas? 

I don't think there's any reliable method based on the covers. You're likely going to have to open the book and check the indicia.

So, pressing can probably correct the smaller crease near the right side, which doesn't appear to break color, but the big told is color breaking and can't be corrected. I'm not at all confident that a press will be worth the cost, nor that it will substantially improve this cover's presentation. A shame, as it's a real pretty book otherwise.

I don't have a great track record at numerical prognostication, so I'm hesitant to drop a number down. But I can safely say that EC's recent grade estimates are, with no offense intended, uselessly lowballing these comics. If I absolutely had to guess, I'd suggest that this told is significant enough to be a major defect, and that the final grade is probably 6.5. If they're willing to let that crease go as a moderate defect, I think you could get a 7.5. Either way, that's a $50 slab, give or take a little, per gocollect.