Key? No. OAK? YES!!

One of my lofty, but at least feasible long-term goals in my graded comic book collecting endeavors is to eventually have all 75 original Marvel Graphic Novels in CGC 9.8 WP.

This is a very difficult goal to achieve and I have a LOOOOONG way to go before I ever hope to reach it. But little by little, one at a time, I'm very slowly getting there.

For a while, I held the number one ranked MGN set, but when a bunch of them showed up in 9.8 earlier this year on Ebay, somebody paid extremely high prices to acquire most of them, then inputted them on the registry and passed me for the top spot. I'm slowly gaining ground on them but it will be some time until I catch up again. This is due to a number of reasons.

MGNs are notoriously tough to find in high grade. The large, cumbersome nature of the books makes them difficult to store and protect, and many of them have solid, jet black or solid white covers, making them highly susceptible to visual imperfections. Add to that the lower print runs of many of them and you have a recipe for difficulty in finding 9.8 copies.

While some of them are immediately recognizable and even iconic and highly sought after, most of them are not so easy to locate, let alone in good enough shape to have graded. In fact, many of them don't even have a graded copy yet!

Such is the case with one that I just recently located at the Baltimore Comic Con. While browsing around the dealers with my big brother, I came across a raw copy of MGN #30. It's titled "A Sailors Story" and I knew of it, but hadn't found a nice enough copy anywhere yet.

It's not a big key or anything. It doesn't feature a major Marvel character. It's not highly sought after. It's nothing "special", per say. It's just one of the many MGNs that no one has ever submitted for grading before, and I still need in order to ultimately have a complete set.

I found it in a magazine box, among a few other magazines and took it out of its bag for a close eyeballing. It looked gorgeous except for a couple of small indentions that did not crease or color break the cover in any way. So I had to decide whether a press would be necessary or not.

Ultimately I paid for the book ($5), paid to have it pressed ($25), paid to have it graded ($28) and paid to have it shipped back to me ($10). That's $68 total to get the book from the dusty dealers box to its final, graded completion.

For me, that's a deal, when you're talking about what would become an OAK for a set I want to complete, because no matter what the final grade was, this would be the only graded copy to date of this MGN!!

I now have the book back in my hands, and I'm happy to say that my estimation of its condition was right on the money! I am one happy camper!!

Now I'm no grading expert by any stretch of the imagination. My big brother is a much stricter grader than me in my opinion, which typically results in the graders generally agreeing with him in most instances. But apparently I'm pretty good at grading these awesome Marvel treasures.... unlike square-bound annuals, which we won't mention here....... please.

This isn't the only MGN I found at Baltimore though. At a different dealer, I also found a copy of MGN #18, which is the John Byrne She-Hulk issue! It has a jet black cover and is extremely hard to find in top grade. I believe it is 9.8 worthy as well and will submit it soon! I'm just waiting for a little while to see if maybe I can it signed before grading.

I also have a copy of MGN #2 that my big brother gave to me a while back, which is the P. Craig Russel Elric issue! I believe it is 9.6, but definitely worthy of grading, since it is an especially tough issue to find in high grade due to its jet black cover.

These books are more expensive to grade and much harder to locate in high grade, but I feel that ultimately they are very much worth the effort.

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