COI

The market played itself when it decided that paying an average of 5x more for a 9.8 over a 9.6 was reasonable; now that's just shifting to 9.9/9.8. If 9.9 is the new 9.8, most 9.8 holders will be too busy playing the 9.9 resub lottery to complain, and when that 1 in 10 lands for big bucks, all will be forgiven. If you don't like it, stop collecting labels.

Chiming in again, against my better judgment. Debating something that happened between two people, based almost entirely on conjecture and personal biases, misses the point entirely. If, on one side, you think the deceased is the victim here because he made a mistake that has been blown out of proportion, then I don't see how you can't apply that same logic to the woman who made the accusations and say that she made a mistake that was also blown out of proportion, because of the way she chose to handle this issue she had with him. If, on the other side, you think Piskor's actions were wrong and that it's important that she not be blamed for coming forward, it's reasonable to see that there is no proportionality in outcomes here. We don't give out death sentences for being a "creep". Nothing resembling justice was done here, and I would guess that, far from helping her heal whatever wounds she might've had, the woman involved in this has now been further damaged by the outcome as she will undoubtedly be targeted by the backlash mob, in addition to the shock of suicide and the contents of his suicide note. . Where do these positions intersect? The internet mob escalation made everything in this situation infinitely worse. I get that it's hard to miss an opportunity to look for a single target for your moral outrage - the perpetrator - or a clear victim to sympathize with - the victim - because it's easier and more satisfying than trying to tackle the much more complicated problem that this scenario, and the rest of us by extension, are nested in. But this kind of discourse just makes things worse.

Terrible situation, ugly thread. We've had exponential growth in technology, but we have not grown INTO the technology and we seem to have no chance of catching up. What's worse is that the nature of social media appears to be projecting, exploiting and amplifying our worst traits. Not individually, but in sum. The most extreme, maladjusted and misinformed voices get to dictate the terms of the discourse. We've equipped everyone with the tools to express themselves, but not the skills to evaluate the value of those expressions. I don't think any of us know what we're doing here, but I do know that many people actively make things worse when they decide to add to the noise every minute of every waking hour. I'm not the arbiter of worthwhile utterances, and I'm just as guilty as anyone of saying nonsense, but I think it would serve us all to remember that just because you can, doesn't mean you should. In the vast majority of instances where you feel compelled to speak, you don't have much of value to add, and in some cases you might actually do some damage, regardless of your intentions. I try to tell myself this on a daily basis, but sometimes I just can't help myself. Like right now. My condolences to anyone who knew him..

I don't know if it does or doesn't lead to more bias. My overall point is that the scenario you laid out is plausible, but equally plausible scenarios exist to explain why and how this copy ended up as the first 9.9 to be graded in close to 25 years. It's hard to ignore the great marketing opportunity to feed the modern 9.9/10.0 initiative by having a mega key from 1975 hit the 9.9 mark for the first time. It's a great way to usher in a new paradigm where 9.8 is no longer considered a sort of glass ceiling on submission expectations for moderns, coppers, or late bronze. Whether that's what is happening here or not, I don't think a tin foil hat is required to spot the marketing opportunity.

I get that. Matt Nelson said that in a case like this, more people weigh in than is usually. His point was that decisions like this aren't made through the normal process because they're unusual. It's a major key, where the difference in grade could mean hundreds of thousand of dollars, and this is the first 9.9. I think it's more far-fetched to believe something like this would just go through the normal process.

I saw an interview Matt Nelson did sometime in the last few months where he said that the decision to give a book like this a 9.9 is made by multiple people. As in, when the grader decides this is a potential 9.9, more people are called to weigh in. Based on that alone, you could see how a number of circumstances (like introducing a 9.9 prescreen, recently making an official video about 9.9s and 10s, and so on) might impinge on that decision process. Again, we don't know, but if you're a fan of simple explanations, it doesn't seem far fetched to bump a high profile book to 9.9 because it dovetails nicely with a new marketing initiative. That doesn't mean this is what actually happened, but I think it's much more plausible than you're making it out to be.

I appreciate your reluctance to go full tin foil hat, but I'm not sure your conclusion is supported by this breakdown. The problem is, there's nothing mathematical or inevitable about hitting a 9.9 on a GSX 1, because the assigning of that grade is a subjective call made by humans. It's hard to ignore the myriad of incentives that could have potentially played a role in assigning a 9.9 to this particular copy at this particular time. So I don't think Occam's Razor applies here; it might just be a straight up 9.9, or it could just as easily be a marketing decision. There's no way to know for sure, so everyone is just going to believe what they will.

CGC has become so big and so rich off of collectors pressing and resubbing books dozens of times, or sending cases of brand new books straight from the printers, that they've forgotten what's important: the collectors. We, the collectors, who press, resub and prescreen (9.9 baby!) out of love. I'm not sure how a business predicated on enriching its clients by facilitating the unregulated, high value trade of commodified non-essential goods through a mostly arbitrary and subjective process, has so thoroughly lost its way? Come back to the light, CGC. My retirement depends on it.

Billion dollar companies don't care about me?

I understand. To be clear, I'm not saying that on an individual level, collectors only care about labels. Obviously, most people are in this because they love the books. But when you're looking at the way the market behaves, functionally speaking, the label is what ends up mattering. The main function of third party grading is to commodify comics to better facilitate trade. The label then becomes the criteria for assigning value, and therefore the focal point when real money is involved. Someone loves ASM 300, so they buy a high grade raw copy. Then they want a slabbed copy; then a 9.8; then a newsstand 9.8, and so on. The story they tell is that they want to have 'the best' copy of the book they love, but that pursuit takes them to a place where the label is what counts. The impetus for the pursuit might be a love of the book, but the label is the only real basis for paying those premiums at the highest levels. That's what I mean when I say the label is all that matters.

You guys remember when pressing in and of itself was controversial? Most of you probably don't. 15 to 20 years later, the lesson I learned is that the actual contents of a slab is far less important than what's written on the label. It was inconceivable to me back then that the market would ever be okay with paying a significant premium for some '9.6' when there was a real possibility that the '9.6' in question was sitting in a '9.0' holder just weeks prior. How quaint, right? I'm not saying that this situation is analogous to pressing; what I am saying is that the pressing scandal and subsequent change in paradigm surrounding the practice is evidence that the vast majority of people trading in slabs will do the mental gymnastics required to move past this scandal as well, because focusing on the label and ignoring the contents of the slab is the entire game. How else can you explain the market adapting so easily to pressing, or forgetting that there may be tons of unaccounted for 'Ewert Specials'. OR for that matter, the very fact that there is a premium for WHITE pages, or the sometimes obscene price spreads at those arbitrary 9.6-9.9 levels on common-as-dirt books? The label is all that matters. No one is going to stop buying Hulk 181s because there is some unknown percentile chance that some of them may be qualified books in universal holders. I'm not saying this is good or bad, right or wrong, nor am I saying I agree with the mindset, but that's where we are. No one cares about what's in the slab; what they care about is that the cert number on their book isn't on a list. Some number of provable examples will surface and be taken care of, based on the efforts of CGC and some motivated collectors, then the 15, 25, 35 percent-ish of terminally online buyers who are even aware that this happened at all will move on. The community isn't going to sacrifice the golden goose because of a bunch of missing value stamps, tattooz, or over graded Mark Jewelers copies, especially in the context of a market where the grading company under scrutiny holds 90%+ of the market share, just as they didn't sacrifice the goose over violated principles in the pressing scandal, or violated books in the Ewert scandal.

A few things: Saying it's not as profitable to be a youtuber as it is to be successful in business is weird on its own, because there are people who make ridiculous money on youtube and having a youtube channel IS a business, so I don't understand the distinction. Maybe there isn't as much money in being a comic book youtuber, but he's using youtube to market his business and I don't see an issue with that. Apparently it's a bad thing that's he's trying to build an auction house...because reasons. He's not complaining in the video; he's explaining why he's selling stuff that in prior videos he said he was planning to hold. Considering how rare it is for anyone to ever admit to being wrong about anything, I think it's refreshing for him to come out and talk about losses. It's very clear that on the internet, you can never 1) admit you're wrong or 2) apologize because it will always be taken as cynically as possible. So all I see here is either schadenfreude, or people jumping to judgment without watching the actual video. Or maybe people don't like him because of who his father is. I don't know, but I don't see people calling out Vincent Zurzolo quotes for all the carnival barking he does about investing in books. Of course you're going to believe in and push the thing you're investing all your time and money into.

You guys are being super cynical about that Youtube guy. He's selling books to keep his business going, and he's far from the only person who 1) is suffering because of 2021 and 2) was wrong about stuff in 2021. Half the video is him admitting mistakes, like losing money on an FF 4 or speculating on a modern. Cut him a break.

I'm sure that's true sometimes, and other times I think dealers/collectors over-extend themselves and need to free up cash. I've never understood trying to ascribe motives or specific rationales to the buyers behind the numbers, when we have no clue who they are most of the time. I understand the reasoning that someone in a position to spend five or six figures on comics MUST have some sort of 'bigger picture' plan in place, because for most of us average folk, the idea of casually throwing the average middle-class yearly salary on a book impulsively seems absurd. Yet, we see the evidence of people making horrible decisions with large sums of money all around us, including people who 'should know better'. *cough* NFTs *cough* Being good with money isn't a necessary condition to having it; there are wealthy people who are also impulsive and wasteful, just as there are poor people who are frugal and resourceful. When I see someone lose $10K on a book, I have no idea whether they also made $15K on another book in the same auction, or if they're going to be using the proceeds from that book to stave off foreclosure. Neither would surprise me.

When you're buying labels and not books, might as well go all the way with it.