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About this journal

This journal is moderated by RockMyAmadeus.

Entries in this journal

Why CGC & Third-Party Grading Matters...

I've been meaning to post this for a while; thanks to @Point Five for giving me the springboard to finally get this down in writing: I don't think it's possible to overstate this. It gets to the very heart of why third party grading is so important. For those of you who weren't collecting before the advent of CGC, it was really, really, reaaaaallllly, really the bad old days. I had a good solid decade to deal with rampant and horrific overgrading and undisclosed restoration, and I'm incre

RockMyAmadeus

RockMyAmadeus

The Breaking of the Bat - The 9.8 SS Knightfall set!

This was, in my comic collecting life, the very last "multi-part series within a series" in Batman that I ever bought new. Comics had gone up to $1.25, and it was getting very spendy (hey...it was 1993!) I had gotten a bit burned out with comics after Death of Superman several months sooner, and I was wondering if I should keep buying new stuff. I actually missed the first few parts, so I had to get #488-494? #495? as "back" (still on the shelves) issues, but I got back on the train with #4

RockMyAmadeus

RockMyAmadeus

The Books That Shouldn't Be...A Treatise On The Second Print Newsstand Phenomenon...

Sellouts in the comic book industry...historically...had always been fairly rare. In the decades prior to the the 1990s, there were very few sellouts in comics. Because of the method of comics manufacture and distribution, in which publishers would print far in excess of what they needed to sell, and vendors could return the unsold copies for credit, you almost never had sellouts. This was especially true after World War 2. You had books like Superman #1 and #2 (1939) and Marvel Comics #1 that w

RockMyAmadeus

RockMyAmadeus

The 9.8 SS X-Men #94-143 Odyssey

This has been a set that has long been a dream of mine. Batman is my favorite single character in comics; the X-Men are my favorite team. I don't know how much of that is due to the fact that, when I first got into comics, X-Men, especially from the Bronze Age, were "out of reach" expensive. GS #1? X-Men #94? Yeah, ok. Not going to happen. But, as I slowly filled out my collection, I tended to buy more and more copies of X-Men...starting with the "cheap" #150-ish to #260. I think my first B

RockMyAmadeus

RockMyAmadeus

The 9.8 SS Image Portacio Puzzle Complete!

Again, a little backstory: while these aren't the very first multi-cover panels pieces to exist (that honor would go to Unity 2 years prior), this is the first VARIANT set produced. At the time, as some may know, Image was incredibly late with everything. It had become so bad, the distributors forced Image to make their product returnable...unheard of in the Direct market! So, yeah, it took a while for this set to come out. The first two were Deathblow #5 and Kindred #3. At the time, K

RockMyAmadeus

RockMyAmadeus

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