I hope you're wrong because grading is killing the business. Slabs are about the flex/status. There's enough new collectors that don't read or care about the actual books, to them it's all about having the same 30-50 keys on their wall to demonstrate their HiveMind habits. You folks are monetizing/investing the fun out of this hobby.
You couldn't be further from the truth. People don't slab books or by graded books just for flex/status. There's countless reasons to get collectibles graded outside of monetary purposes. Sentimental value. Authentication of signatures. Protect the commission or sketch you got from a beloved artist. Preservation of an old book perhaps a brittle book or a book of significance. Detection or restoration or missing pages. List goes on and on. Just because one chooses to grade a book doesn't mean they aren't a true collector or they're killing the hobby and so forth. We can always crack open the sale and smell and read the book.
I'm not talking about old, brittle books that need a slab to keep from falling apart. I'm talking about books that are perfectly fine being handled by their owner. While slabbing books was originally a practice to preserve our books, if you can't see they've become a way for this new influx of collectors to "flex," then I don't know what to write that will. You'll see, now that the phenomenon of the MCU has died off, you're going to see a ton of mostly slabs collections flood the market because these fair-weather collectors were never serious about their books/collections, they just wanted to keep up with the "Joneses." All the while CGC is laughing all the way to the bank my friend.@@MarcSpectorComics
@@sulumonlives4932 honestly that's fine with me. I'm all for people spending money how that want to noones forcing us to buy the hot book of the week and slabbing it. I've always been a vintage collector golden silver and bronze age. People should stop sending in these NCBD books in for grading so CGC can stop making money off people but until these people get burned they'll never realize that. I like to educate people on that on my channel whether they listen or not is up to them.
If u go to CGC you are helping to create a monopoly and then prepare to get screewed.. Monoplies are bad news..So blame yourself if this happens !!!!!!!!!!
I'm certainly glad I'm the age I'm, almost a great granddad collector, I remember picking comics off the racks and reading them to death, now it seems that fun experience is dying! Because people have been brainwashed into putting READING matter into plastic coffins to supposedly make money, and stuff the hobby! My collection is being left to a couple of good friends for them to do what they want with! The collection did cost me a lot of money over the years, but you can't take it with you, so who cares what's worth! Raw is good, you can do with them what they were printed for, READ! To be price controlled by what character is in a movie or TV series is preposterous. I understand first appearances put the prices up, but nowadays, there are so many first appearances of nobodies that stop people being able to complete runs it's beyond a joke.
I wouldn’t buy a slab unless it was the same price as a comparable raw. Then I would crack it. If you are buying a big key wouldn’t you want to see the inside and verify for yourself it’s complete? Just seems assign to trust a company that regularly caught clucking up.
I own a few slabs, but not many. Books deteriorate inside their slabs and can be damaged by dropping or stacking, so older slabs may not reflect the actual grade of a book. Which is the main reason I don't pay any kind of slab premium, the number means nothing after enough time has passed. If it's priced more than $40-50 over a raw book of the same grade, it's getting left on that dealer's shelf.
As a comics dealer, albeit on a pretty modest scale, I try to have both raw books and slabs at any convention to sell. And while I can’t speak for everyone, I find it much harder to sell slabs rather than raw books. I think this is because slabs are automatically more expensive, and a lot of slab enthusiasts want to get them graded themselves. Others just hate the idea of slabs in general, I used to feel that way. Finally, I think a lot of people just don’t like the shadiness of some of these grading companies.
For people into pulp comics which are pricy enough as is, that market is ripe to explode into grading. I'd say nows the time to purchase before values skyrocket
Cards and comics are not comparable for slabbing. Cards are static. Books are closer to video games grading and slabbing (which is tanking currently), whereby doing so you're rendering the medium useless. Slabbing a book is akin to turning it into a trading card. No longer has any inherent value of being a story with artwork. I suppose I understand for high value and older books, to facilitate buying and selling. But you're also trusting a few companies (which are not trustworthy by nature and have proven as much) to tell you how valuable the thing is. Books are paper, not plastic.
Hard agree. As a card collector, I have many slabs in my collection, but I also have a few very nice rare CIB games that I refuse to get graded for this exact reason. I think for some of the rarer / pricier comics and games, people will want to be able to enjoy them, but won’t be able to BECAUSE they’re slabbed up. For game collectors maybe this means that collectors will move towards having their game for display only and then having an emulated version available to actually play. Likewise for comics, scans of all these pages exist and can be reproduced as cheap knockoffs. But the problem there too is that you don’t get the full authentic experience of being able to feel the pages in your fingers, or for me, smell the old cardboard from decades past. Slabbing takes something away from the experience of what that item would otherwise be able to deliver.
@@HighPopProfessor Yes, omnibus and TPBs are great for reading too, but there's something special about the floppies' aged pages and the smell and the feel and the nostalgia hit.
My comic shop only sells raw ungraded comics, won’t even touch the tpbs and omnibuses. I kinda get annoyed hearing the words “keys/Minor Keys”…it seems to me that we got way to many trying to have a nest egg from comic books.
I'm afraid to read my comics now. I may want to submit my comic in the future for grading and I don't want to add fingerprints, boogers, etc, which would certainly drop the condition down to below 8.5 ☹️. The hobby has changed for me in that sense. I read a lot of comics in my youth. I would read them very carefully and then store them in bags and boards for condition preservation. As an adult, I enjoy grading those same comics, as well as new additions. I've always had keen eyes when evaluating the condition of a comic. Now I am looking to the grade given by an independent third party to confirm my evaluations. The same company also provides the service of encapsulating the comic I enjoyed reading long ago, for even better protection. I can rest easy that the comic won't be further damaged if and when I move, etc. I display these graded comics on my wall, like wall art. In this way, I see them often and enjoy them more than if they were in a box in the closet. It's also thrilling to get a package delivery from CGC to see if the grades exceed expectations. Thanks for reading my comment. God bless you!
If u say cgc is bad or grading company is ruining the hobby just grow up we not in the 1900’s or 1960’s the future going to come no matter what stop gatekeeping
If everyone slabs there comics where's the rarity? It will be in the raw books that are still out there then the wheel will turn and the collector who has them will be the one people will be going to....just a thought
To those that say slabbing is a scam or bad for the hobby you are living in the past. comic dealers evaluate their books based on the “grade” of the book in raw form do they not? They overestimate the grade of their raw book while underestimating the grade of your book. It’s still based on -you guessed it -GRADE. You like to flip through the pages I get it.. ask yourself does the IPhone generation do that? Nope they can read the comic online. So the allure is the slab that something old is inside.
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Uhg. I hope we don't live in a future where the slabbers ruin the hobby for the raw collectors.
I hope you're wrong because grading is killing the business. Slabs are about the flex/status. There's enough new collectors that don't read or care about the actual books, to them it's all about having the same 30-50 keys on their wall to demonstrate their HiveMind habits. You folks are monetizing/investing the fun out of this hobby.
You couldn't be further from the truth. People don't slab books or by graded books just for flex/status. There's countless reasons to get collectibles graded outside of monetary purposes. Sentimental value. Authentication of signatures. Protect the commission or sketch you got from a beloved artist. Preservation of an old book perhaps a brittle book or a book of significance. Detection or restoration or missing pages. List goes on and on. Just because one chooses to grade a book doesn't mean they aren't a true collector or they're killing the hobby and so forth. We can always crack open the sale and smell and read the book.
I'm not talking about old, brittle books that need a slab to keep from falling apart. I'm talking about books that are perfectly fine being handled by their owner. While slabbing books was originally a practice to preserve our books, if you can't see they've become a way for this new influx of collectors to "flex," then I don't know what to write that will. You'll see, now that the phenomenon of the MCU has died off, you're going to see a ton of mostly slabs collections flood the market because these fair-weather collectors were never serious about their books/collections, they just wanted to keep up with the "Joneses." All the while CGC is laughing all the way to the bank my friend.@@MarcSpectorComics
@@sulumonlives4932 honestly that's fine with me. I'm all for people spending money how that want to noones forcing us to buy the hot book of the week and slabbing it. I've always been a vintage collector golden silver and bronze age. People should stop sending in these NCBD books in for grading so CGC can stop making money off people but until these people get burned they'll never realize that. I like to educate people on that on my channel whether they listen or not is up to them.
Slabbing is a scam! Less than 2 minutes in and you remind me why I don't collect or like collectors.
If u go to CGC you are helping to create a monopoly and then prepare to get screewed.. Monoplies are bad news..So blame yourself if this happens !!!!!!!!!!
I'm certainly glad I'm the age I'm, almost a great granddad collector, I remember picking comics off the racks and reading them to death, now it seems that fun experience is dying! Because people have been brainwashed into putting READING matter into plastic coffins to supposedly make money, and stuff the hobby! My collection is being left to a couple of good friends for them to do what they want with! The collection did cost me a lot of money over the years, but you can't take it with you, so who cares what's worth! Raw is good, you can do with them what they were printed for, READ! To be price controlled by what character is in a movie or TV series is preposterous. I understand first appearances put the prices up, but nowadays, there are so many first appearances of nobodies that stop people being able to complete runs it's beyond a joke.
There are already too many slabs of cards and comics. Used to be a slab was rare. Good luck with all that.
I wouldn’t buy a slab unless it was the same price as a comparable raw. Then I would crack it. If you are buying a big key wouldn’t you want to see the inside and verify for yourself it’s complete? Just seems assign to trust a company that regularly caught clucking up.
I own a few slabs, but not many. Books deteriorate inside their slabs and can be damaged by dropping or stacking, so older slabs may not reflect the actual grade of a book. Which is the main reason I don't pay any kind of slab premium, the number means nothing after enough time has passed. If it's priced more than $40-50 over a raw book of the same grade, it's getting left on that dealer's shelf.
As a comics dealer, albeit on a pretty modest scale, I try to have both raw books and slabs at any convention to sell. And while I can’t speak for everyone, I find it much harder to sell slabs rather than raw books. I think this is because slabs are automatically more expensive, and a lot of slab enthusiasts want to get them graded themselves. Others just hate the idea of slabs in general, I used to feel that way. Finally, I think a lot of people just don’t like the shadiness of some of these grading companies.
If it’s not in a CGC Slab I won’t buy it. I’ve been collecting them since 2005. They revived the hobby when it was on the verge of collapse 🙏
For people into pulp comics which are pricy enough as is, that market is ripe to explode into grading. I'd say nows the time to purchase before values skyrocket
I would never buy or have a comic slabbed. I don't even bag and board them anymore. I just read them.
Yeh you're probably right CD. We can always get trades to read the keys.
Cards and comics are not comparable for slabbing. Cards are static. Books are closer to video games grading and slabbing (which is tanking currently), whereby doing so you're rendering the medium useless. Slabbing a book is akin to turning it into a trading card. No longer has any inherent value of being a story with artwork. I suppose I understand for high value and older books, to facilitate buying and selling. But you're also trusting a few companies (which are not trustworthy by nature and have proven as much) to tell you how valuable the thing is. Books are paper, not plastic.
Hard agree. As a card collector, I have many slabs in my collection, but I also have a few very nice rare CIB games that I refuse to get graded for this exact reason. I think for some of the rarer / pricier comics and games, people will want to be able to enjoy them, but won’t be able to BECAUSE they’re slabbed up. For game collectors maybe this means that collectors will move towards having their game for display only and then having an emulated version available to actually play. Likewise for comics, scans of all these pages exist and can be reproduced as cheap knockoffs. But the problem there too is that you don’t get the full authentic experience of being able to feel the pages in your fingers, or for me, smell the old cardboard from decades past. Slabbing takes something away from the experience of what that item would otherwise be able to deliver.
@@HighPopProfessor Yes, omnibus and TPBs are great for reading too, but there's something special about the floppies' aged pages and the smell and the feel and the nostalgia hit.
My comic shop only sells raw ungraded comics, won’t even touch the tpbs and omnibuses. I kinda get annoyed hearing the words “keys/Minor Keys”…it seems to me that we got way to many trying to have a nest egg from comic books.
I'm afraid to read my comics now. I may want to submit my comic in the future for grading and I don't want to add fingerprints, boogers, etc, which would certainly drop the condition down to below 8.5 ☹️. The hobby has changed for me in that sense. I read a lot of comics in my youth. I would read them very carefully and then store them in bags and boards for condition preservation. As an adult, I enjoy grading those same comics, as well as new additions. I've always had keen eyes when evaluating the condition of a comic. Now I am looking to the grade given by an independent third party to confirm my evaluations. The same company also provides the service of encapsulating the comic I enjoyed reading long ago, for even better protection. I can rest easy that the comic won't be further damaged if and when I move, etc. I display these graded comics on my wall, like wall art. In this way, I see them often and enjoy them more than if they were in a box in the closet. It's also thrilling to get a package delivery from CGC to see if the grades exceed expectations. Thanks for reading my comment. God bless you!
If u say cgc is bad or grading company is ruining the hobby just grow up we not in the 1900’s or 1960’s the future going to come no matter what stop gatekeeping
If everyone slabs there comics where's the rarity? It will be in the raw books that are still out there then the wheel will turn and the collector who has them will be the one people will be going to....just a thought
Talk about a twilight zone episode…future looks grim.
You could build an entire channel on the CGC supply going up across all age comics. No one else talks supply, only demand!
I'm workin at it, thanks Dan! lol
Crypto and NFTs bottomed out so now you are on to slabbed comic?
To those that say slabbing is a scam or bad for the hobby you are living in the past.
comic dealers evaluate their books based on the “grade” of the book in raw form do they not?
They overestimate the grade of their raw book while underestimating the grade of your book. It’s still based on -you guessed it -GRADE.
You like to flip through the pages I get it.. ask yourself does the IPhone generation do that? Nope they can read the comic online. So the allure is the slab that something old is inside.