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Post by badwolf on Oct 31, 2022 14:51:48 GMT -5
Maybe a stupid question, but one of those FF 1’s is described as “pre-owned.” Are there any comic books on the back-issue market that aren’t pre-owned? I guess it's like saying a CD was only played once.
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Post by MDG on Oct 31, 2022 15:30:22 GMT -5
The comic book world did a fine job back in the day of educating dealers and collectors on what exactly a Fine was versus a Very Fine. Grading companies seem to purposefully obscure their grading standards. There are so many stories of books being submitted to CGC and then unslabbed and resubmitted, only to earn a far higher grade. I KNOW what NM- is. I THINK I know what a 9.2 is, but I'm not confident predicting what CGC will decide. I suspect that its attempt to be more precise actually invites it to be more arbitrary and subjective. I use three grades: Beat, Nice, and Really Nice
(TBH I really only use two grades: Under $7 and Above $7.)
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Post by Deleted on Oct 31, 2022 17:35:48 GMT -5
The comic book world did a fine job back in the day of educating dealers and collectors on what exactly a Fine was versus a Very Fine. Grading companies seem to purposefully obscure their grading standards. There are so many stories of books being submitted to CGC and then unslabbed and resubmitted, only to earn a far higher grade. I KNOW what NM- is. I THINK I know what a 9.2 is, but I'm not confident predicting what CGC will decide. I suspect that its attempt to be more precise actually invites it to be more arbitrary and subjective. So well that when you ordered from places like Mile High you paid VF price for books that ranged from G-NM (which was only apparent in the fine print) and lots of dealers would not grade or price their books until you got to the counter at the store or picked out the books at their table at conventions and would then look up the ranges in Overstreet and decide what they were going to charge you when they "graded" it on the spot. And the whole grading system was devised by a cadre of retailers in the Overstreet circle to establish and maximize resale values, which is what everyone accuses CGC and grading companies of doing now. And there have always been collectors splitting hairs, in my lcs in the 80s there were about a dozen guys who didn't want pull lists because they wanted to go through every copy available of new comics to pick out the "mintiest" ones to keep for resale and didn't trust the store owner to give them the mintiest copies because "he was hoarding them for himself" and this was just accepted as common practice among a certain subset of collectors at the time. And there were guys who would go for table to table or store to store to get people to "grade" i.e. appraise their books, and then pick whichever grade they liked best of those they got to put on the book when they were trying to sell it and claim "it was graded by a professional" long before people submitted to CGC or other "professional" grading services we have today. The types of behaviors people lump on CGC were all well established behaviors within the comics collecting community long before CGC slabbed their first book. Grading services may highlight and exacerbate such behaviors, but it is naïve denial to believe CGC and such created those behaviors or that comic collecting was somehow purer and more innocent and less about the resale money and flipping books before grading services existed. Comics were already becoming high dollar commodities by the mid-80s (check out the articles in Overstreet Guides of the time or in laces like CBG for a host of articles about the big money sales on books like Action 1 and AF 15 were realizing then and about investors from outside comics adding them to their portfolios as commodities. CGC did not create such attitudes or behaviors, those rose out of the "Overstreet mentality" of establishing grades and prices for comics as resellable commodities which started way back in the late 60s and 70s. CGC was a result of those attitudes and behaviors to be sure, but it is not to blame for them, they are the collecting communities sins from the pre-slabbing era. What CGC tried to do was remove the jargon (mint/near mint/fine/good etc.) which had gotten more complicated and confusing as it tried to be more precise-really what is the difference between VF, VF/NM. and NM really and replace words with numbers, which utterly failed to remove the loaded and imprecise nature that came with the jargon. The "Overstreet" grading system and the CGC numeric system are essentially the same thing-made up arbitrary systems to try to codify the condition of comics to be able to assign values to them for sale or acquisition. They were created for the same reasons to do the same things and the goals of the second system to remove and/or improve on the perceived flaws or weaknesses of the first system would up being futile. 9.0 vs. 9,6 became just as imprecise and loaded terms as VF VF/NM and NM were and preferences between the two systems seems to come down to which was in place when you started collecting, just like almost everything else in comic collecting. They are both imprecise, exist only for convenience of reference for communication within a particular pop cultural community. The "Overstreet" system uses a lot of internal, i.e. emic, terms to try to accomplish it, and the CGC tried to impose outside, i.e. etic, terminology on it (1-10 rather than poor-mint), to monetize the actual grading process in a more formal way (some dealers charged for appraising collections or individual books long before CGC existed as well, so again not a creation of the CGC approach but an extrapolation of existing behaviors trying to "standardize" it) as a larger subset of the collectible community reacted to the transition from collectibles to commodities. But again stubbornly clinging to or insisting on using one arbitrary system over the other accomplishes nothing except to further muddy the issue and create divides within the community, creating us and them lines where there doesn't need to be any. -M
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Post by Deleted on Oct 31, 2022 18:32:21 GMT -5
So well that when you ordered from places like Mile High you paid VR price for books that ranged from G-NM (which was only apparent in the fine print) and lots of dealers would not grade or price their books until you got to the counter at the store or picked out the books at their table at conventions and would then look up the ranges in Overstreet and decide what they were going to charge you when they "graded" it on the spot.
I remember going into a book store in my late teens and the owner thought he could impress me with his comic knowledge. After boring me to death for 10 minutes, he thought he would go look for a recent WIZARD magazine to price a book I was interested in. I didn't have to look anywhere, I was familiar with the going rate for the book as I had already started buying back-issues on ebay. So I knew he was going to try to 'gouge' me as it was in the vicinity of $40-$50 in VF.
While he was away, his mum came in from the back, looked at the comics, and told me $3 each. Her price was much nicer so I bought it quickly and disappeared.
Dealers who want to look in guides at POS can go bugger off for all I care.
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Post by DubipR on Oct 31, 2022 19:40:46 GMT -5
The comic book world did a fine job back in the day of educating dealers and collectors on what exactly a Fine was versus a Very Fine. Grading companies seem to purposefully obscure their grading standards. There are so many stories of books being submitted to CGC and then unslabbed and resubmitted, only to earn a far higher grade. I KNOW what NM- is. I THINK I know what a 9.2 is, but I'm not confident predicting what CGC will decide. I suspect that its attempt to be more precise actually invites it to be more arbitrary and subjective. Couldn't agree more! Regarding the thousand bucks... I'm not a collector anymore. I wouldn't even go for Conan the Barbarian #1, since I have umpteen gazillion reprint versions already. (W elllll... maybe more like five, but that's still plenty). Is it cheating to use the money to order a custom-made hardcover collection of John Coleman Burroughs' John Carter of Mars newspaper strips? I admit I'm quite envious of DubipR 's custom collections. It's a great idea. If you want I can message you bindery that can could that for you. It's a fun but not that cheap of a project. As for the $1K for a comic, again... it's so tough to choose still. Maybe a good first appearance of Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge.
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,709
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Post by shaxper on Oct 31, 2022 22:42:26 GMT -5
But again stubbornly clinging to or insisting on using one arbitrary system over the other accomplishes nothing except to further muddy the issue and create divides within the community, creating us and them lines where there doesn't need to be any. -M By that logic, are you not stubbornly clinging to your belief that they are equally bad? Are you not creating an us and them line between those who see it your way and those who do not? I think dismissing a viewpoint as stubborn is, itself, problematic. Folks are entitled to value one system over the other. As I said earlier, I know what a NM- is. I don't necessarily know a 9.0 versus a 9.2 versus a 9.4, and it isn't for lack of trying. If anecdotal evidence can be believed, neither does CGC.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Nov 1, 2022 6:04:33 GMT -5
If you want I can message you bindery that can could that for you. It's a fun but not that cheap of a project. (...) Well, it's cheaper if you take my bare bones approach...
...but even this one pictured and some others I had done (Thriller, the 1970s Logan's Run, Marvel: The Lost Generation...) were still a bit costly for a notorious penny-pincher like me. I can't imagine how much those beautifully customized books you had done put you back.
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Post by tonebone on Nov 1, 2022 9:56:02 GMT -5
The comic book world did a fine job back in the day of educating dealers and collectors on what exactly a Fine was versus a Very Fine. Grading companies seem to purposefully obscure their grading standards. There are so many stories of books being submitted to CGC and then unslabbed and resubmitted, only to earn a far higher grade. I KNOW what NM- is. I THINK I know what a 9.2 is, but I'm not confident predicting what CGC will decide. I suspect that its attempt to be more precise actually invites it to be more arbitrary and subjective. I have never been a speculator, or even a reseller.... or even a purchaser of "graded" comics in any system... BUT I can understand why some would want a more granular grading system... the range of what a Fine comic or a Very Fine comic could be is pretty broad... whereas having a numerical/decimal system lets you really be quite specific. I mean, it's all still subjective, but at least there's the possibility of more accuracy within the subjectivity. The system that works for me is: "Looks Like New", "A Little Banged Up", "Well-Loved", and "Reader's Copy". I even have a few you could categorize as "Confetti".
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,709
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Post by shaxper on Nov 1, 2022 10:37:19 GMT -5
BUT I can understand why some would want a more granular grading system... the range of what a Fine comic or a Very Fine comic could be is pretty broad... whereas having a numerical/decimal system lets you really be quite specific. I mean, it's all still subjective, but at least there's the possibility of more accuracy within the subjectivity. Oh, absolutely. And I suspect that's why it has taken off in the way that it has, but the problem is that such level of precision is an illusion. It still comes down to best judgments and the hope that every grader is interpreting the definition for each level in the exact same way, so giving it a precise grade is a bit of a lie.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Nov 1, 2022 21:33:50 GMT -5
I've had this come up more with baseball cards in my life than comics, but I agree with most of MRPs post.... grades are there to try to get you to pay more.. we all know what 'mint' is, was 'good' is, and what 'reading/beat/glad I could get the thing' grade is.. that's what I go by.
Whenever I've bought from Mile High/my comic shop I always by the lost possible grade, usually I'm pretty happy... my requirement for comics is intact and no water damage, that's really it.
If a seller/ dealer doesn't mark something, I'll ask if they whole box is the same price.. if the answer is 'pick what you want and I'll look them up' I leave. Just about without fail people that do that start at a ridiculous prize and hope you'll barter if you know that it's ridiculous.. not my thing at all.
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