9.4 JLA #7 on Heritage

[tth2]

Just thought I'd point out that this book is a resub of the 9.2 copy that was sold on Heritage in April. I know because I was the seller of the 9.2 copy in April (when it had white pages), and can recognize it as the same book.

 

Before the C&P mob starts howling, I'm posting this just so any potential bidder will have full disclosure and can make an informed decision before they bid the big bucks this issue will probably go for.

 

I have no idea if C&P was done, but I DON'T think it would've been required to get this book from 9.2 to 9.4, because I believe that CGC undergraded it initially. I bought it raw and submitted it to CGC and was surprised when it got a 9.2. It was quite simply the nicest 9.2 you will ever see. The reason I never resubmitted myself was because of the slight tears where the upper staple goes in, which you can see in the scan but which are more obvious in person. I guess I convinced myself that this small flaw outweighed the otherwise immaculate presentation of this book, which could easily have received a 9.6 otherwise.

[Aces]

From now on I submit through Heritage!

 

If you can't beat'em, join'em!

[FFB]

Forget the staple tears. A 9.6 with those color-breaking spine stresses? Methinks you've been hitting the sauce, my friend. The book is gorgeous, but it looks like a "tweener 9.2/9.4" to me.

 

Now I just wish that I could see a megascan of the front cover now (Heritage doesn't show the magnified front cover on the new auction for some reason -- just the back ) so that I could weigh in on the C&P issue. Though it would be kind of tough to press away color breaking spine stress.

 

The page quality issue on the other hand -- this really underscores what someone else here (I think it was Murph) was saying about CGC's paper quality determination being a less-than-scientific process. It's too bad that books given the C-OW designation get the cold shoulder, when one often can't tell the difference between OW and C-OW even when holding two such books next to one another.

[sfilosa]

The page quality issue on the other hand -- this really underscores what someone else here (I think it was Murph) was saying about CGC's paper quality determination being a less-than-scientific process. It's too bad that books given the C-OW designation get the cold shoulder, when one often can't tell the difference between OW and C-OW even when holding two such books next to one another.

 

While I understand your point, you have an ISSUE that the page quality went from WHITE to OWW?

 

Let's see, same book 9.2 sells for $X, but now that book is a 9.4 and sells for $X times 2 and a half.

 

Wait, it's the same book, yet the new owner will pay A LOT MORE than the old owner.

 

That really should be the ISSUE, not the change in Page Quality.

[COI]

A question: You've mentioned before that you only collect 9.4+ books(and all the more power to you). If that's the case, and you felt the book was undergraded, why didn't you keep it? Do you need the label to say 9.4? And please don't take this the wrong way, it's just an issue that really interests me. I'm always interested to know how important the # on a label is to serious collectors, as opposed to the book itself.

 

And if you sold because you upgraded, feel free to tell me to shut the up.

[tth2]

Forget the staple tears. A 9.6 with those color-breaking spine stresses? Methinks you've been hitting the sauce, my friend. The book is gorgeous, but it looks like a "tweener 9.2/9.4" to me.

 

Now I just wish that I could see a megascan of the front cover now (Heritage doesn't show the magnified front cover on the new auction for some reason -- just the back ) so that I could weigh in on the C&P issue. Though it would be kind of tough to press away color breaking spine stress.

 

Okay Mr. Smartypants, here's the difference between analyzing a scan of a book and actually holding it in your hands (raw and in a slab): the only color-breaking stress is the one right below Aquaman's word balloon. The ones running across his right hand and just below his knee appeared to be "scratches", for lack of a better term. Maybe that kind of defect should knock a book down to tweener status because it should be treated like a color fleck, but I always thought they looked like some kind of production defect. I can tell you that when you hold the book up to the light, the spine looks tight and there are no indentations except for the one stress mark, which is not very big.

 

Pull up the April listing, where you can still get a front cover megascan, and you can see them more clearly.

[tth2]

A question: You've mentioned before that you only collect 9.4+ books(and all the more power to you). If that's the case, and you felt the book was undergraded, why didn't you keep it? Do you need the label to say 9.4? And please don't take this the wrong way, it's just an issue that really interests me. I'm always interested to know how important the # on a label is to serious collectors, as opposed to the book itself.

 

And if you sold because you upgraded, feel free to tell me to shut the up.

 

COI, no offense taken. I do think the label is important, for reasons that I've stated on this board before: prices for higher grade copies historically have appreciated faster than prices for lower grade copies, and therefore while I may believe a book is beautiful, if something happens to me and my family sells my collection, people are going to pay them based on what the label says, and not what I believed a book's "real" grade was. Therefore, I think there is a good practical reason for trying to get the higher label (but the book DOES have to look deserving of the grade, just to make it clear that I'm not a total label zombie).

 

However, I actually sold the book for different reasons: (i) I needed to raise some money to finance another purchase and (ii) I decided to deemphasize JLA in my collection because I wasn't making any progress in expanding my run of 1-10. I knew where most of the other top issues were and knew I wasn't going to pry them away from their current owners any time soon, and if other copies came on the market I knew these other collectors were going to outbid me because they wanted them more badly than me. So the #7 went out as part of a JLA blood-letting exercise--I simultaneously sold a 9.4 #2 offline and the 9.2 #1 that went on Heritage in April was also mine.

 

The #7 really was a sharp book, and maybe if I lived in the US I would have tried to resub, but with international shipping costs both ways, I just felt it wasn't worth it to try (wrongly, as it turned out ). In any event, I would have sold it anyway, but I guess I would've gotten more money for it.

 

FYI, I DO own 9.2 books, but they're all books that I slabbed myself. When I buy slabbed books, I concentrate on 9.4s and above. I'm willing to pay the premium (within reason), although I certainly understand and respect collectors who choose not to.

[FFB]

Forget the staple tears. A 9.6 with those color-breaking spine stresses? Methinks you've been hitting the sauce, my friend. The book is gorgeous, but it looks like a "tweener 9.2/9.4" to me.

 

Now I just wish that I could see a megascan of the front cover now (Heritage doesn't show the magnified front cover on the new auction for some reason -- just the back ) so that I could weigh in on the C&P issue. Though it would be kind of tough to press away color breaking spine stress.

 

Okay Mr. Smartypants, here's the difference between analyzing a scan of a book and actually holding it in your hands (raw and in a slab): the only color-breaking stress is the one right below Aquaman's word balloon. The ones running across his right hand and just below his knee appeared to be "scratches", for lack of a better term. Maybe that kind of defect should knock a book down to tweener status because it should be treated like a color fleck, but I always thought they looked like some kind of production defect. I can tell you that when you hold the book up to the light, the spine looks tight and there are no indentations except for the one stress mark, which is not very big.

 

Pull up the April listing, where you can still get a front cover megascan, and you can see them more clearly.

 

I'll bet you could have made the same argument without the sarcasm, Mr. Smart-ier-pants.

 

I can't argue about the book-in-hand thing though. Looking at a scan is no substitute for holding the book in your own two hands.

[tth2]

I'll bet you could have made the same argument without the sarcasm, Mr. Smart-ier-pants.

 

(not sure if I'm using this gremlin correctly)

[FFB]

The page quality issue on the other hand -- this really underscores what someone else here (I think it was Murph) was saying about CGC's paper quality determination being a less-than-scientific process. It's too bad that books given the C-OW designation get the cold shoulder, when one often can't tell the difference between OW and C-OW even when holding two such books next to one another.

 

While I understand your point, you have an ISSUE that the page quality went from WHITE to OWW?

 

Let's see, same book 9.2 sells for $X, but now that book is a 9.4 and sells for $X times 2 and a half.

 

Wait, it's the same book, yet the new owner will pay A LOT MORE than the old owner.

 

That really should be the ISSUE, not the change in Page Quality.

 

Steve, that's what YOU see as the main issue, not me. Now granted, what you're talking about is a huge deal for a lot of people. No doubt about it. But for me, the fact that some people are willing to pay twice as much for what is essentially (or in this case, actually) the same book in a different piece of plastic with a different label on it just isn't something I'm going to worry about. There's nothing I can do about it, so why squawk about it?

 

Some people buy comics because they have great stories, some people buy comics because they like the art, and some people are willing to spend twice as much on a different copy of a comic book they already own because the plastic casing on the new acquisition has a higher number than the copy they already have. To each his own.

 

I only raised the page quality issue because it is something that does not seem to get enough attention until a book gets down to cream/off-white, at which point the majority of high-grade collectors won't touch the book at any price (even though the book might get a different page quality grade on a resubmission). Unlike the Overstreet grading guide, which gives us an idea of how a 9.2 gets a 9.2 grade, page quality is not represented on any universal scale that we, as collectors, can reference. Not all comic book paper starts out the same color, so the paper in a book printed on Baxter paper will get a far worse PQ designation than a book that is printed on newsprint even though they look identical when you hold them next to one another. What is "white" for some newsprint is "tan" for Baxter paper. And not all newsprint starts out the same color or ages at the same speed. What paper color scale are we as collectors supposed to look at to determine whether we agree with the designation for a particular book or not? What paper color key are the guys at CGC looking at? Who will mulch? (Sorry, random Groo non sequitur there. I couldn't help myself.)

 

I think that paper quality is a good thing to have on the label and is one of the most important things about a comic book because it gives us a clue about how much the paper has deteriorated on a cellular level and how long the paper will last into the future. But I'd like to see a more transparent system for determining page quality than the one in place now, where we all guess at what the PQ will be based on our own ideas of what is "off white to white" and then wait to see if CGC agrees. It isn't the same thing as comparing the book to the various pictorial examples in the grading guide and picking a number grade.

[FFB]

I'll bet you could have made the same argument without the sarcasm, Mr. Smart-ier-pants.

 

(not sure if I'm using this gremlin correctly)

 

No you're not, but don't let that stop you!

[Silver Surfer]

Never use to think about page quality but now I do every time. If its says "white pages" I'm all over it, if it says "cream" anywhere (unless its GA) I'm gone.

[tth2]

But I'd like to see a more transparent system for determining page quality than the one in place now, where we all guess at what the PQ will be based on our own ideas of what is "off white to white" and then wait to see if CGC agrees. It isn't the same thing as comparing the book to the various pictorial examples in the grading guide and picking a number grade.

 

The funny thing is that you'd think PQ would be so much easier to determine because it should be so much more objective. You have a color guide. You hold it against the pages of a comic. You see what it matches up to. Compared to grade of a book which is so much more subjective, even using various pictorial examples as you point out.

 

I will say that the JLA #7 was without a doubt white when I submitted it and I was not surprised at all that it got the white pages designation. I WAS surprised to see it had dropped to OW-W when it got resubmitted, which means either it degenerated while in my possession (which means my airconditioners and dehumidifiers aren't doing their job, but unlikely given that other books I've submitted recently have gotten the white pages designation), it degenerated while in the buyer's or CGC's possession, or the difference between W and OW-W just isn't that big and is a bit of a crapshoot.

[FFB]

But I'd like to see a more transparent system for determining page quality than the one in place now, where we all guess at what the PQ will be based on our own ideas of what is "off white to white" and then wait to see if CGC agrees. It isn't the same thing as comparing the book to the various pictorial examples in the grading guide and picking a number grade.

 

The funny thing is that you'd think PQ would be so much easier to determine because it should be so much more objective. You have a color guide. You hold it against the pages of a comic. You see what it matches up to. Compared to grade of a book which is so much more subjective, even using various pictorial examples as you point out.

 

Except that you can't do that, because not all paper starts out the same color. Even newsprint from different printers can be a shade or two darker than the newsprint used elsewhere, depending on the particular mix of wood and chemicals along the way. How do you come up with a color guide for every batch of newsprint? And don't get me started on the OWL card. I don't know about you, but the best I ever got using that thing was that I could affirmatively state that the pages of my book were somewhere between white and brittle. I don't think I ever saw a book that was the exact shade of any of the sections of the OWL card. Not once. And if I had a nickel for every book where I couldn't tell whether the pages were lighter or darker than the paper at a certain level on the card (they just looked like a different color, not necessarily lighter or darker), I could use those nickels to buy that JLA #7 in 9.4. (Not that I'd want to. It's a DC after all. )

 

I think a better test would be to measure the acid level of the paper on a given date with those acid testing papers. Instead of "cream to off-white," the label would say "pH 5.5 on 9/17/2004." Lord only knows if it would work, but if it did, it would tell us a hell of a lot more about the state of freshness of the paper than "cream to off-white" would.

[sfilosa]

The Page Quality issue to me, is the same issue tth2 has with the Label having to say 9.4 or higher.

 

1) Basically, I KNOW that Cream to Off-White pages (especially for Silver) are a turn-off for some, therefore I don't buy them.

 

2) I also agree that I NEVER had a page that matched with the OWL.

 

3) As a collector, you should actually like that other people have quirks that you don't share (i.e. page quality, date stamps, production defects, etc). What I'm saying is if you want a particular book, and C-OW doesn't bother you, then you will get a better deal as other people's quirks will stop them from bidding.

 

Unfortunately for me, I seem to have all the Quirks.

[Aman619]

th epH test is a good idea. But the same factoir that makes page quality hard now is not going to be solved by that. I mean the fact that most interior pages have many colors, varying from the edges to the insides of th epages. Where the tests should be done then becomes an important factor: th eworst area, th ebest, an average?

 

Also an interesting pint about some comics being printed on lower quality or aged paper in the roll at the time of printing. But, botom line, IMO, it doesnt matter when the browning began if its just as creamy as any other cream book today....

[skybolt]

I submitted a mid-grade copy of JLA # 7 to CGC several months, and the only thing I thought it had going for it wer the white pages. The book came back a measely 5.0 (I was expecting 6.0 - 6.5), but imagine my surprise when the page designation came back as CR-OW. The pages on that book looked whiter than some of my moderns. Perhaps, I might have overlooked one or two pages that weren't completely white when I was reading it, but the whole book shouldn't be downgraded because of a few pages. Which brings me to my next question, if even one page is Cream and the rest of the book is OW-W, does CGC still give it the CR-OW designation?

[sfilosa]

The one thing everyone should consider when look at the page quality of the books they have is that:

 

The lighting is different then CGC's.

 

In other words, I suspect that the lighting in CGC's office is fairly consistent. While the lights that I use vary from each room.

[COI]

while I may believe a book is beautiful, if something happens to me and my family sells my collection, people are going to pay them based on what the label says, and not what I believed a book's "real" grade was.

 

Good point. I sometimes forget the whole family thing, due to my age and the fact that I'm not married.

 

but the book DOES have to look deserving of the grade, just to make it clear that I'm not a total label zombie

 

Good to hear. My point has always been that there's absolutely nothing wrong with only wanting the top copies, as long as the buyer pays attention to the book itself, and not just the label. You seem to be intelligent enough to distinguish between the 2, but some conversations I've had with collectors who seem oblivious to anything but the label have been outright disturbing, and have left me wondering about the true motivations behind their buying.

 

FYI, I DO own 9.2 books, but they're all books that I slabbed myself. When I buy slabbed books, I concentrate on 9.4s and above. I'm willing to pay the premium (within reason), although I certainly understand and respect collectors who choose not to.

 

I collect early Marvel, and I used to go after 9.4's more than anything else. But after comparing 9.4's to 9.2's and 9.2's to 9.0's for a while, I realized that the difference between the 2 copies was not worth the premium to me at this point. SA Marvel is very expensive, and there's always something around to buy(unlike DC's where quality copies come around so seldom, that you have a chance to build up the "war chest"). You just picked up a DC from 1962(?) in 9.6 for 5K....try getting a superhero marvel from that era in 9.6 for the same price. I'm sure that when I get most of the books I want in 9.0/9.2, I'll start upgrading, but that's a long time off.

 

BTW, I don't know exactly what your collecting goals are, but I would wager that at least a few books you want may not exist in 9.4+. In those cases, will you settle for lower copies, or are you going to wait for the possibility that they may surface one day?

[uclapeterg]

Never use to think about page quality but now I do every time. If its says "white pages" I'm all over it, if it says "cream" anywhere (unless its GA) I'm gone.

 

I have bought a few C-OW books. I don't mind if they are priced right.