PGM X-Men 101 - Grade is In! 4 4

[Funnybooks]

On 7/22/2022 at 1:52 PM, grendelbo said:

[Nilo2]

Thank you all for the feedback. I completely agree with the general assessment that this is a very generous grade. I bought the book knowing about the back cover tear. The seller had not disclosed that said tear included several interior pages... That being said, I paid a midgrade price and I also didn't know about the Mark Jewelers insert either so even stevens I guess. This is for my PC. I'm not looking to flip the book and I'd certainly disclose the defects if I did. The book does present beautifully. If not for the tears, it would likely grade in the low 9.0's. Shockingly, the grader notes do not disclose the interior tears. CGC definitely needs to get its act together. See below:

Grader Notes:
light spine stress lines to cover
light tears to cover

[scburdet]

On 7/22/2022 at 3:04 PM, Nilo2 said:

grader notes do not disclose the interior tears

Let me throw my 2¢ that no one asked for and probably isn't worth 3¢, even with inflation. I also sent a book CC signing, X-Men 94. I posted about this in the grading issues forum. It had some color touch on the cover, which I knew about when purchasing (why it sold for a price I could live with), but the seller missed a clipping of an ad inside the book that didn't impact the story (how I got a partial refund that came close to covering the SS/grading cost). CGC caught the color touch, but either missed the clipping or didn't put it in the graders' notes (https://www.cgccomics.com/certlookup/4030430001/).

Feel free to reject any or all of my hypotheses. Graders are human and as susceptible to mistakes as the next person. As perfect as I am (), I occasionally make mistakes in my work and catch them later. That's not an excuse, but there's inevitably going to be a rate of failure >0 at CGC. I think it's possible that once a significant defect is found—color touch or back cover tear—there may be a tendency to jump to a grade. Your book front could have been a >9.0 on first look and a tear automatically drops it to 8.0. There isn't as much incentive to scour the rest of the book so something like a page tear or clipping could be missed. It's also possible that a single tear that goes through multiple pages could be considered collectively and viewed less harshly. I do think the default should be for more graders' notes, but I'm sure that has something to do with volume of work. It could also represent a disagreement in different grader's assessments (i.e. only consensus defects go into notes). I can't see how a tear could be ambiguous, but on the other hand it's visible in the holder unlike an internal defect or maybe light creasing. My understanding is that the SS process is completely separate from the regular grading, so when people are generalizing about grading, they're potentially talking about two separate business units with different staff, etc.

An outside hypothesis would be some sort of leniency for MJs copies. I see the belief that there are different standards for some kinds of books, so it's not too outrageous to think something that came from a newsstand on or near an army base could be treated differently than a direct edition of a book (although XM101 are all UPCs). My XM101 (not a MJs) came back from CC as a 9.0, so I don't want to throw too much shade on their grading.

[grendelbo]

On 7/22/2022 at 5:15 PM, scburdet said:

I think it's possible that once a significant defect is found—color touch or back cover tear—there may be a tendency to jump to a grade.

Yes. Very true.

[scburdet]

On 7/22/2022 at 11:10 PM, grendelbo said:

Yes. Very true.

This is the non-nefarious explanation for a lot of what people see as inconsistency. When you have a lot of work to do, no matter what the job, you look for ways to take shortcuts. If there's something that happens a lot (small tear) it's more mechanical to just stamp a standard number on something than to spend another 10 min or more on the job. I'll bet it's a lot "easier" to grade mid and low grade books b/c they can list a bunch of defects to justify the grade. High grades are going to require a lot more effort to eliminate possible defects.

[Nilo2]

On 7/22/2022 at 7:15 PM, scburdet said:

My understanding is that the SS process is completely separate from the regular grading, so when people are generalizing about grading, they're potentially talking about two separate business units with different staff, etc.

@scburdet, I had not realized that the SS program had its own dedicated grading team within CGC. This makes sense though and also explains the accelerated pressing and grading turnaround times offered when submitting a book for SS.