Axelrod

The X-Men book is maybe the biggest head-scratcher for me of the contest. I really can't see anything beyond the corner issue. And it is so clearly superior to the Strange Tales book that the thought they would get the same grade seems laughable. I suppose that might have annoyed me if I was anywhere on the same continent as the leaders. As it is, meh. As someone else said, we're all kind of operating on the same information anyway. No one should be proud of themselves for getting the X-Men book right though!

Well, I'm going to console myself with the thought that I didn't miss any book by more than 3 grades. I missed a bunch by exactly 3 grades.... 8 this round, I think, which is like 35 total. Thanks Mike! This is a great contest and impeccably run.

Can't tell if you're joking or not, but, the man does have a track record. Not just for making movies that make a lot of money, but also making movies that audiences actually like. And look good too. There will probably be some drop off in interest given that Avatar came out over a decade ago, but even with that, it's going to be huge. And if it's actually a good story...? That's my expectation, but then again, I understand he had something to do with the story for Terminator: Dark Fate, so, he's clearly not infallible.

And yet....

One other thing I feel, now that we've been through Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi, and this Dr. Strange. They do not appear to be building towards anything in particular, the way the original movies were always building towards The Avengers and then Thanos. Every movie is ending with some little stinger about future stories of that/those particular characters, but not some larger cross-over event. They are very much just doing random things in the Marvel-verse right now.

I, on the other hand, just thought it was fun that there was a random minotaur there as one of the mystics. I didn't know who Rintrah was. I assumed it was a character from the comics, but I didn't really need to know more.

It probably would have been better for the "villain" Wanda to have been a Multiverse Wanda, as opposed to "our" Wanda. Seems like they could have done that without changing too much.

It's an interesting point, to me, that a lot of people just do. not. like. when we - as an audience - are seemingly asked to sympathize or understand a character who has done terrible, even evil things. They flip out and get angry. This person did terrible things! I am not going to feel sorry for them! I don't want to "understand" them! You (movie makers) shouldn't even be trying to make me! Not saying that is you, specifically, but I get a sense of that here that you feel like we as an audience are being asked to forgive her and still think of her as a redeemed hero at the end, but you reject that, and moreover, feel like everyone should reject that. Also, I am not saying that this movie nailed it as far as making Wanda's motivations credible - far from it, in fact - but I don't reject the ideas behind them.

They don't all have that pink staining on the sword though. But I also looked for reference images and saw a couple high graded Howards with that same kind of pink staining, so I assumed it wasn't actually staining but some kind of manufacturing thing that just happened to some of them. Though the pink wasn't quite as bad on the other images I saw as on this one. For that and the bad corner, I thought 9.2 seemed about right. Clearly the pink didn't factor at all though.

Well, best round so far at 6, I think. Two bullseyes. Still over-graded the other three. edit: I did not over-grade the Howard, lol. Had it as 9.2

My suspicion is that a cute girl holding it up or standing in front of it, has never, actually, sold a product that the guy wasn’t going to buy anyway, but guys (and some gals too) still advertise with them ‘cause, well, guys. Maybe they drew the guy’s eyeballs to the product which wouldn’t have been drawn that way before. Maybe.

I am waiting until the last minute and then rushing all my grades based on first impressions. Since the way where you looking closely at the scans and try to judge individual defects hasn't been working for me at all.

So, personally I think 5 is a really excellent score for a given round, at 1 grade off per book. Which means that if I want to have an average a score of 5 for the whole contest, I only need to average -.5 for each of the next two rounds! This should be doable, I'm thinking.

Only 15 points off the lead! Should be easy from here, now that we've got those practice rounds out of the way.

Well, my massive over-grading continues.

Well, I got the after R1 also, and I stunk up the joint, so, he's clearly not simply virtue signaling.

Man, next round not till Tuesday.... I need to not submit grades fast anymore.

Wait, you're saying I wasn't perfect? I don't believe it.

The plus side of tanking R1 is I am (almost) guaranteed to do better this round!

I over-graded everything except the Det., which I way under-graded. So, I don't even have consistency going for me. I think I assumed that several of these comics would get cleaned up at least a little and then look a little better. Still don't quite see how the Det. is higher than the Hawkman or the Spider-Man.

Ooff. Practically out after 1 round!

When I was looking for this a year+ ago, I didn't find anything that didn't cost a fair bit of money, like a subscription service. So, you probably already know about the paid services like these: https://www.collectorz.com/comic/clz-comics https://covrprice.com/ (not recommending them specifically, I haven't tried them, I am just aware of them) I think these do what you want in terms of bar scanning and automatically calculating a value, but they are also subscription services you pay for every month or yearly. As far as a "free" way to catalog your collection, I found https://www.icollecteverything.com/ (which used to be "Sort It Apps", but apparently they got bought/merged/re-named). This one is okay for what I use it for.) I say "free" but I did pay $5.00 to "upgrade" it so I could enter my whole collection (as opposed to a limited number of titles) and also edit the individual title information. I would say it's not very usable without that. I think it's supposed to allow you to enter titles by using a bar code scanner, but I never tried that feature. This app also won't automatically enter a value for your comic. You have to figure that out yourself. I will also caution you about this app. in that it lets you search for images of a comic when you want to add said comic to your collection, but it apparently pulls from a database of user-uploaded images, and many of the images have pornographic pictures hidden on the backsides. You won't even see them unless you go to "edit" an image and see if there is a "back" image included. That was something of a shock when I first encountered it. Some people think they are being funny, I guess.

I can understand why it would be frustrating to submit a book you closely scrutinized, and believed was a good 9.8 candidate, to not only get a 9.6 (or worse), but also get no indication at all of why it got that grade. I've only ever done one submission, and I had two copies of a book, and - to my naked eye - they looked pristine. One got 9.6, which is close enough that it could just fall within a coin-flip, I guess, but the other one got 9.4 and neither came with grader's notes, so I'm like. Not saying the grades aren't correct either. It's just a bit annoying to not know what the deal was.