Grading is judgmental. Thus, mistakes are going to happen. Considering the large volume of books graded by CGC, the number that are obviously wrong will likely be minuscule. So no big deal. As a buyer, because this risk exists since judgment is involved, buyers need to do their own due diligence to make sure they don’t overpay. To rely solely on CGC to be perfect is unrealistic.
Possibly the book was switched with a 9.2. After all , CGC never introduced a new case to resolve the bait and switch issue. Also, ASM 300 is one the most graded book (scam book) out of that original scam list. There maybe other people doing copycat crime.
I highly doubt it’s a switched out book given it was graded in May and sold in July. It was likely graded and went straight to heritage (or was submitted by heritage). You can also see the flaws in the CGC scan of the book on their site. They aren’t as clear since there’s some light reflection, but it’s the same book.
Maybe it’s me, but when you start to have consistent and obvious mistake over and over (QC / QUESTIONABLE grading) and IGNORING the fact that your case has been compromised. You can start to argue that “CGC GRADING” has becoming more and more like a SCAM than a legitimate business. Especially with the recent increase of 9.9 and refusal to address and fix your problems. How is this not a scam? When you knowingly ignore a compromise security feature that indicate validity of your product? Of course when your invested thousands such as myself . I become hesitant to broadcast my opinion because i am essentially burning 🔥 away my 💰. Either way I’m screwed… sigh…
@@AutomaticComics Remember employees stealing books, switching labels. No one can say they didn't steal the higher grade submission and slide this one in when they graded it. CGC has no legs to stand on.
A piece of advice - if you look at them from far enough away, they're usually 10's. 🧐 Seriously, though, good advice and methodology in the video. I, myself, am guilty of buying the grade too often. The only time I ever say "oh, hell no" to a comic I really otherwise would want is when there's something like a badly faded cover. I once saw a 4.0 and a 5.0 of Space Adventures #12 in the same auction. The 5.0 went for about $100 more even though it was REALLY faded. I decided to not bid on either one of them, but if forced, I would've taken the 4.0 because the colors popped on it way better than 5.0. The 3rd-party grading of comic books leaves a lot to be desired, but I still buy mostly slabs online.
Of course the rich clients are going to get the benefits. Plebs with our lower grades mean nothing and will not ger fair grading. You know you can visualize all those fat cats smoking cigars while they pass their golden/silver age 9.9's and 10's to each other.
The over-parsing of grading in the 9-9.9 range has always been my biggest complaint about grading. Doing that just makes it more difficult to properly grade, which leads to the kind of wildly inconsistent and, worse, inaccurate grading you covered in the video.
If your book gets a 9.9 after re-subbing it from a 9.8 it was a 9.9 all along. It's a money grab. Stop grading it means nothing anymore. The inaccuracies don't lie. Ryan is proving it in this video. What more to say.
A major red flag about these examples is the fact that these books have to be submitted under the highest tier grading services because of their value. I get it if some new grader is doing this on ultra moderns worth $50. But these premium tier submissions absolutely have to be graded by experienced high performing employees and clearly these were not
All of us collectors keep saying, "Buy the Book, Not the Grade", but then why do they keep selling graded books? Why are record high sales keep occurring? Why are more and more 9.9 copies being graded? The answer is because it is a business. If someone sends in their copy they believe is Near Mint and it returns as not NM, well then they will possibly stop submitting future books. #keepcomicsraw
CGC has always had a problem with consistency. It’s understandable because there seems to be good graders who really know how to grade comics and graders who really need to be retrained or fired. It’s hard to believe that two graders are looking at every book. I don’t think two trained graders would miss all the spine ticks on that ASM #300. I’ve always bought the book and not the label. I’ve seen too many CGC graded comics that I felt were over-graded and some that I felt were under-graded. I’ve even resubmitted books I felt were under-graded and got a higher grade!
RE: the sub shop analogy--there's a saying "We judge ourselves by our best acts and most noble intentions, but we will be judged by our last worst act". It's exactly what you were talking about; CGC can the majority of the grades correct but one mistake, especially an egregious one, that can turn people off of the service (or any service)...and of course set the "scammer" dogs loose!
Do you think that because they are now grading more 9.9s and 10s that they just aren’t being quite as picky about 9.8s? I get that 8 spine ticks is still a bit of a stretch though.
Thanks for zooming in and showing what come cgc graders consider a 9.8. I have a couple books in for grading and each has a very small spine tick that breaks color. Crossing fingers because those are the only defects (objectively of course)
That's only because they were trying to squeeze the widely accepted Overstreet grading scales into a "simpler" 10 point system; the fact is that, even though it's a 0.2 difference between a 9.4 and a 9.2, it's still the same one step down the scale as a 6.0 to a 5.5. (NM to NM- vs. F to F-) The only issues with doing so are, as you mentioned, the confusion of so many grade levels in the 9+ range and, because they didn't want to fit it anywhere else, the inclusion of a 1.8 level. LOL
Of course when I sent MY meager, 20+, mostly Bronze Age collection in (AFTER getting every one of them C & P'd)- and keep in mind; these are books I've had since I was 11--- so for almost 55 years-- AND a few of these (my multiple "Wolverine 1s"-- Frank Miller issues-- to give but one example) were LITERALLY bought at the comic book store and bagged and boarded from minute 1-- were ALL undergraded (the highest Wolverine score i got was a 9.4, the other two were a 9.2 an 8.5 lol; these being books hadn't even OPENED, much less stored improperly or whatever). So I now have a bunch of 8.5s which are literally almost flawless and WAY better that some of the "9.2s" I've bought off eBay- and I'm think of cracking and resubmitting them. oh and btw: there WERE no grader's notes... CGC is the devil.
I think sometimes the grade is incorrectly entered into the system and nobody double checks that. ETANick got a Star Wars 1 in like a 7.5 and it should have been (and eventually came back) a 9.4. I believe probably entry error.
I'm not super knowledgeable at comic grading, but I could definitely see that getting a 9.4. But, 9.8??? No way in hell. Either the grader needs new glasses, or maybe that book was swapped.
That is why I don't trust stuff graded after 2020 and especially 2024. I trust the older graded books because I believe most of them were graded accurately
I keep the same rule in sports cards. Buy the card, not the grade. I've seen mid grade cards that were psa 8/9s that were bout cheap and resubmitted to come back 10s. Same for comics.
The biggest scam is charging a percentage on the value of the book for grading. Not only is this a conflict of interest so you're telling me it takes more effort to grade action comic 1 than action comic 10 to the tune of $120,000 for a 3million dollar book? Really! And who assigns the value for a book that never sold? Charge by age of the book. Golden age ,silver age,bronze and so on.
They have to charge more for the higher value books because it costs them more (in terms of insurance) to have those books in their possession. But I agree that there should be a cap on that 4% of FMV figure; there should be a "max" or "not to exceed" figure. But realistically, anyone who can afford to spend $3 million on a single comic book probably isn't going to bat an eye at paying $120,000 to get it graded, and if that $120k helps to "subsidize" CGC's revenue and keep the costs low for the Modern and Vintage books for the rest of us, should we really even complain? LOL
I've always wondered how books are actually graded. By that I mean, do graders use a hand lens? Is it just what the naked eye can pick up? If it's just naked eye what happens if a grader is a bit far-sighted? Being near-sighted I can make out tiny details that the average vision person can't detect. I mean, I can naked eye read the state names on the back of a five dollar bill on the Lincoln Memorial. The average sighted person would need a hand lens for this. So, is it bad grading due to ignorance or bad grading due to vision? Does CGC have a vision test for its graders? I suspect a far-sighted person can easily tell a 3.0 from a 5.0. But not a 9.6 from a 9.8...or a 9.4. The 9s are where the difficulty is going to live for the slightly far-sighted.
I apologize for the length of this comment -- but I hope you might find this inquiry interesting enough to maybe reply some time, when you have the bandwidth. I am fascinated by the slabbing phenomenon, but I generally don't buy slabbed books and there are a few things about the economy of slabbing that I don’t understand. My outsider perspective often leaves me a bit baffled and cynical about the way it all seems to work. So I’m writing to you with a couple of questions, because I have enjoyed many of your videos and you clearly have lot of experience in this rather niche market. In particular, I’m curious about what impact you think the various scandals at CGC, and most recently the increased production of 9.9 labels, is having - if any - on the comics market. I am also wondering if there is any way of telling whether raw book sales have recently increased, perhaps in response to increased concerns about CGCs practices? Or are all the sales monitoring platforms primarily set up to track slabbed books? First, though, would you broadly accept the following characterization of third party comic book grading?: It seems to me that the original impulse behind third-party grading was probably good: rooted in a desire to protect buyers and collectors by providing a useful service assessing the condition of fragile collectibles that were sometimes subject to amateurish forms of restoration and other dirty tricks. But the job of assessing condition was (and is) much more challenging than perhaps most people realize (because it actually takes time and training to do any kind of highly specialized work, and that cuts into profits). As a result, whatever the original impulse, the main purpose of "slabbing" is not to provide a reliable and consistent assessment tool for collectors of older books, but as a marketing tool for sellers that can transform relatively common 1970s, 1980s and 1990s comic books more desirable commodities. CGC (and others) did this by essentially manufacturing a new kind of rarity with that elusive 9.8 label. And this work of manufacturing rarity was easier, cheaper, and much more immediately profitable (for a lot of people) than the work of providing a consistent and high quality condition assessment for genuinely rare items. I don’t personally see this shift of focus as a bad thing in and of itself -- the phenomenon of "manufactured rarity" has a long tradition in many fields (think of any "limited edition" item, whether it's a colored vinyl LPs or a designer handbag or a signed and numbered fine art print) and it's not necessarily a scam. But after a while there was just too much money to be made rapidly grading hundreds of not very rare comics and "manufacturing" 9.8s -- just too much money to be made churning out those cases and labels -- and this led to a breakdown of standards: longer wait times; ethically dubious sliding payment scales based on the perceived value of the book; inadequate holders (particularly given the archival function they are supposed to serve); special favors to bigger clients (I really am amazed the community is willing to stand for this, but your own vids seem to suggest that is what is happening with many recent 9.9s, such as those Wolverine books); lack of consistency in grading practice, with the difference between high grades such as 9.4 or 9.6 or 9.8 often left unexplained (if not deliberately mystified); and just a general lack of transparency and accountability when things go wrong. BUT even as standards slip and scandals rock the faith of the collecting community, many people remain heavily invested. Or perhaps, over-leveraged? Because I sometimes wonder if the folks who continue to buy slabbed books from an obviously dodgy company have just sunk too much money into the slabs, and so cannot afford to face the truth that maybe this has all been a bit of a Ponzi scheme, and that companies likes CGC don't even really provide the basic "guarantee" they claim to provide? I mean, it's really hard for me to understand why people keep coming back ... (BTW I'm am absolutely NOT saying that "grading is a scam." is a skilled practice, and can be part of the fun of collecting. But "grading" is NOT the same thing as "slabbing." You seem to be maybe kind of treating the two things as synonyms in your aside today about people saying "grading is a scam" ... but I think maybe when we fall into that confusion we give far too much power to companies like CGC, and it might be one of the reasons they get away with so many bad practices ... because frankly we we can all learn the basic skills to tell a 2.0 from a 5.0 from a 9.0, and if "buy the book not the label" has ANY meaning, then grading is something we all need to learn, at least a little bit ...) The collapse of the Covid comics bubble, while unrelated to CGCs failings, might make it harder to swallow such a bitter pill. It's a double whammy for anyone who has invested many hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars in high-end slabs. So I see people grumbling about the wait times, complaining that the distinction between a 9.4 and a 9.6 or 9.8 doesn't always made sense, and expressed righteous horror at things like the re-holder scandal -- or the overgraded books you discuss here -- but they continue to tolerate the many errors (and naked greed) of third party grading companies, because getting a few 9.8s in a big batch of submissions is still a way of turning dross into gold. (The 9.8 number apparently just makes that much of a difference to what people are willing to pay for items that are otherwise quite common in perfectly presentable condition.) Does this strike you as a reasonable description of the slabbing phenomenon - at least with regard to more modern books - or am I being too cynical? I also have a follow-up question regarding the effect of the (proportionately massive) increase in 9.9 books that started a few months ago on which you have been reporting. Would you agree that by adding these new 9.9s to the market, CGC is risking hurting their most loyal customers -- the same people who have invested so much in pursuing 9.8s? Because surely there is no way that an increased volume of 9.9s won't have some consequences for the value of 9.8 books? As I mentioned, I a bit of an outsider to all this (99% of my books are raw), and so maybe I am missing something. But it seems to me that CGC has initiated a very risky policy that will almost certainly diminish the desirability of what was, up to now, their most important "product" -- the 9.8 grade -- in an effort to manufacture a new "product" in the form of the 9.9. And that is surely going to hurt their best customers, many of whom are already smarting from the post-Covid crash. I suppose it could be a gamble that pays off if people start resubmitting those 9.8s in sufficient numbers, hoping for a 9.9 …? Which leads me to a final set of questions: Is this an inflection point? Might it lead more collectors to decide that many comic books don't need to be officially graded in order to be valued and appreciated? Are they already pulling back a bit from slabs and reverting to raw - are you seeing any evidence of that? (Indeed - is there any way to look for evidence of that, through the various market monitoring systems and price indexes? I genuinely don't know the answer to this, but I figure you might?) BTW, just so you know, I sent a similar message to an earlier video but I am not sure if you read comments on older vids. Thanks for your time - and for the enjoyable video content. I hope this wasn’t too boring to read, and wish you all the best with your channel and your business.
I always love these grade investigations! You mentioned that the Hulk 180 came in the same submission batch as the ASM 300, and therefore was graded by the same person. How well do we know this? I’ve also heard that graders specialize in time periods and even titles, implying that the bronze hulk and the copper ASM would be sent to different graders.
We don’t know for sure but I don’t think they split up books like that. They split them up by submission tier, otherwise there’s a big risk of losing books if you’re splitting up a submission (since they all get shipped together). These were in the same submission tier (they had to be or they wouldn’t have the same basic serial number). They were likely submitted either in a high value or walk through tier (likely high value).
Inconsistency, thy name is CGC. Just so happens yesterday I saved a picture from the same Heritage auction of a Conan #37 CGC 9.8 with 5 or 6 front cover spine ticks. Graded in 2019 I think. Lot 13841 Auction 122428.
On eBay, I've returned cgc 9.8s that in my judgement were not 9.8s. I don't want to own a book that is over-graded. I wonder if these are cases of cgc incompetence, or friendly grading for high volume customers? If this was raw and the seller called it a 9.2, the market would decide what the true grade and cost would be. But with it being slabbed, it's automatically determined that the grade is the grade, and there's plenty of people who don't care about the book, only the grade. For me, that's a real problem with this hobby, and one reason I don't buy (for the most part) big ticket books anymore. The only thing fortunate about being 62, is that I bought most of the silver age grails 30+ years ago!
I, for one, am going to do the only sensible thing and submit a few thousand more books to CGC and buy as many slabs for exorbitant prices that I can. That’s clearly the only way they’re going to remedy these issues. These are the grades the community who has blindly supported them for decades deserves.
I wonder how often books get damaged after being graded but becore encapsulation. Is anyone paying attention while they get handed off fron the grader to the slabber? Does one guy do the whole thing? 🤔
Great discussion video…but I hope your triathlon training kicks in when you bump into the people who bought these books at a convention since you just flagged the books going forward forever! Run away! Jokes aside, it’s difficult for many collectors new or old to properly examine books via on line photos and they are, as you say, buying the grade, especially a cased book at auction. Interesting discussion - but, as a regular viewer, don’t overthink it and drive yourself nuts: we collect comic books. Thanks again.
I feel like we have to have patience with CGC especially when you consider the employee pool they are dealing with. The people of Sarasota, Florida are likely hovering around ~85 for average IQ score At 10:56 you mention a well known production defect that is allowable under a 9.8. Unless this a production defect on every copy produced I think this is ridiculous. At the very least the production defect should be noted on the label
I just had a similar video myself. Where I talked about the 9.8 lie. I’d say you stole my video idea but nobody watches mine. lol. 9.4-9.8 are too close and just buy the cheaper one.
Been saying that to my comic buddies for years; don't waste your money on a 9.8; buy the 9.6. It's basically the same thing from 5 feet away, and you don't have to pay the ridiculous 9.8 premium. And you can save yourself even more money by buying CBCS instead of CGC. Buy the book, not the label.
Even with everything going on, the CGC fanboys are doing CGC grader content talking about CGC grading discrepancies. But they still love CGC because of the resell value. 😆. Ironic. Seriously.
Yoooooo I think the grader should be in the notes and u can see what graders grade hard and mess shit up trust me I got books back when I am sure it’s higher than what it was clown shit 😮
