Daryl4Fun Posted March 5 Share Posted March 5 I just want to know or should i say learn a bit about when to get a comic Graded or slabbed Jesse-Lee 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadroch Posted March 5 Share Posted March 5 The original purpose of CGC was to be an unbiased third party so that when I buy a book from someone, I know exactly what to expect. Grading was all over the place, making buying sight unseen problematic. I wouldn't consider having a book graded if it wasn't worth at least two hundred dollars. There are many things in the hobby that you should know before you consider sending a book to be graded. Daryl4Fun and Dr. Balls 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SOTIcollector Posted March 5 Share Posted March 5 On 3/5/2024 at 3:36 PM, Daryl4Fun said: I just want to know or should i say learn a bit about when to get a comic Graded or slabbed Welcome to the boards! There are lots of reasons why somebody might slab a comic. Maybe they like the way a slabbed book looks, maybe they want to be able to hand it around the dinner table at Thanksgiving with limited risk of it getting gravy damage, maybe they think (erroneously) that a slab automatically adds value, etc. Maybe it's a high value book and they want the restoration check that comes with having a comic graded. However, money is probably the most common reason people ask about grading a book. Are you wondering how to tell if you'll make more money by selling a comic book raw, or by paying to have it graded and then selling it? If that's what you're looking for, here are the steps you can take. This is assuming you'd be trying to sell the book at retail yourself, probably on some online venue such as eBay, Instagram, Facebook Marketplace or in this very forum. 1) First, figure out how much the comic would sell for raw. For the most common comics, you can often look at completed sales on eBay to find out how much things in comparable condition have sold for. There are also online price guides with varying degrees of accuracy. It's important to compare condition, so it's a like-for-like comparison. It's also important to recognize that there can be a large difference between an eBay asking price and a selling price. If there are 5 copies of a book on eBay at $99 each and nobody's buying, then you can tell that $99 is higher than the true market value for the book, but you can't determine from that $99 price tag whether your item is worth $1 or $98. 2) When you know what your book might sell for raw, try to figure out how much it would sell for if graded. If you aren't comfortable estimating what grade the book would get if graded, you could post it in the "please grade my" thread in this forum to see what the experts think. After you have an estimate of the if-slabbed grade, you can estimate the value using the same approach as #1. 3) Calculate the cost of grading. The pricing schedule is here. CGC Services & Fees | CGC (cgccomics.com) Add what it would cost to ship the comic to Sarasota, plus the grading fees, plus what it would cost to have it shipped back to you. There's the grading cost. 4) Do the math. Is the amount you'd net from a graded comic, after expenses, significantly greater than the amount you'd net from selling the raw comic? My personal rule of thumb is that the grading costs a minimum of about $60, with shipping both ways and grading fees. If having a comic graded only adds $60 in value, then to me it's not worth having graded. Not only that, but all of the above are just estimates. I have to be pretty confident that grading will add, say, $100 or more to the value of a book. Otherwise, I prefer to sell raw. That's the way I see it, but your mileage may vary. After you know how much (if any) additional money you can make from grading, you can decide for yourself what your personal threshold is for having something graded. Engr62, KCOComics and Daryl4Fun 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cman429 Posted March 6 Share Posted March 6 Step 1: Look up graded examples of your comic up on eBay. Step 2: if it’s worth more than about $100, it’s worth getting slabbed as long as you’ve never read your comics ever. Step 3: ????? Step 4: Profit. Daryl4Fun 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jesse-Lee Posted March 6 Share Posted March 6 (edited) On 3/5/2024 at 2:36 PM, Daryl4Fun said: I just want to know or should i say learn a bit about when to get a comic Graded or slabbed This is a great approach - like many others, I made plenty of mistakes when I was just getting back into comics in the past couple of years - I collected back in the 80s and 90s when CGC obviously wasn't a thing. There's a ton of great info on these forums (and @SOTIcollector's answer is a great example of this). I'll say in my personal example too, there are books that probably aren't necessarily worth the trouble of grading yourself, but you may want to have them in a slab for whatever reason. For me, that was Batman 404-407 - the Year One run. I personally just wanted to have those books in slabs, and it made much more sense for me to buy them already graded than to spend the money getting them graded myself, because they're so abundant to buy and the cost to buy them already graded wasn't much more than the cost would have been to pay for the grading/shipping/etc. of doing it myself. Welcome to the boards! Edited March 6 by Jesse-Lee SOTIcollector and Daryl4Fun 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Balls Posted March 9 Share Posted March 9 (edited) Depending on how involved you want to get in comic book collecting, I used to say that it's always good to send in some books (perhaps ones you might be trying to sell) to get graded and see if CGC is matching your own grading. Getting experience looking at differences between 9.4/9.6/9.8 is always handy when dealing with modern books (especially because the insides of modern books are generally not a factor in CGC grading, since they are theoretically 'new' and not subjected to a lot of handling that would bring the grade down). CGC's grading has been the subject of a lot of discussions - I'm not sure I'd render that advice any longer. If you are talking specifically about modern books - the alternative would be to look at already graded books and get a feel for why those books attained those specific grades. If you want to get good at grading, inspect all your raw books, practice grading and write them down. Then six months from now, do it again, and you'll likely find that you are grading better: i.e., looking closer at the imperfections that bring grades down - and then you will have a much better idea of what should or shouldn't be sent in for grading at CGC. You'll also be much closer in determining what grade you're going to get back, and can balance that info with current market values on those books to find out if it's worth spending the money on grading. Edited March 9 by Dr. Balls Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Backyardace Posted March 12 Share Posted March 12 All of the graded books I have were purchased already graded to ensure that the ones I wanted were 9.8. However, I find it interesting the difference in values at times between a graded 9.8 and 9.6 comic. Does the grade matter to most or does preserving and protecting matter most? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadroch Posted March 13 Share Posted March 13 Money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KCOComics Posted March 13 Share Posted March 13 On 3/12/2024 at 7:18 PM, Backyardace said: All of the graded books I have were purchased already graded to ensure that the ones I wanted were 9.8. However, I find it interesting the difference in values at times between a graded 9.8 and 9.6 comic. Does the grade matter to most or does preserving and protecting matter most? I think the grade matters to most. That's where the value is. You can protect a book just as well with bags and boards, stored in a short box. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
