Why defect-based Qualified grades should be abolished in the future

[fantastic_four]

After all those posts in the main forum about the CGC Qualified grade, I realized that I never did relate what I've felt is wrong with Qualified grading. So here's what's wrong with it--it's a band-aid cure for an illness which requires surgery. Take note that I'm talking about grades that are qualified due to defects; I still find the Qualified grade to be useful for some qualities related to a comic such as signatures, artist drawings, or certain other aspects of a comic which are not regarded as defects by a significant portion of the collecting community.

 

Comic book grading has been HEAVILY influenced by grading in other similar collectibles hobbies which have been around longer. Coin grading might be the biggest influence on our grading...certainly that's where the term "mint" came from, and most of the other text grade descriptions dealers have used and Overstreet standardized were first used in that hobby. However, comic grading has also been heavily influenced by stamp and card grading. If anybody can think of other hobbies which have had an impact on comics, please share those with us.

 

The problem with this influence is that comic books are much more complex collectibles than coins, stamps, or cards because they have both an interior and an exterior. This is well known and widely acknowledged. However, what I don't see being as generally well-known or widely acknowledged amongst collectors is that the guidelines for grading the interior of a comic book are largely unstandardized. This was one of my main complaints about the original Overstreet Grading Guide. The new guide offered some new criteria related to how to categorize, measure, and deduct for interior defects, but not enough.

 

In the 2002 Grading Guide, there are 21 defect categories presented for each of the 25 unique grades. This is one of the major improvements in this edition, but consider the following observations about these 21 categories:

 

• 9 of them relate specifically to the exterior--bindery/printing, cover inks/gloss, cover wear, cover creases, spine split, staples, stress lines, corners, and missing pieces.
• 7 of them could relate to the interior or exterior, but are typically downgraded significantly more if they lie on the exterior--soiling/staining, dates stamps, spine roll, staple tears, rust migration, acid odor, and amateur repairs.
• 6 of them relate specifically to the interior--centerfold, interior tears, paper quality/color, coupon cut, and readability.

The categories are solid and a great improvement to Overstreet's standard. However, I find that the criteria by which we downgrade for exterior versus interior defects are mostly nonexistent. How much should a 5" crease on the cover lower a grade--and how much if that same 5" crease is on an interior page? How much does a 3" square stain lower grade on the exterior versus interior? If these criteria exist, I haven't come across them yet.

 

Since comic books are more complex collectibles than coins, stamps, or cards, I would argue that the interior should be graded differently than the exterior because they serve different functions for collectors. When reading a comic, we appreciate the visual style of the artwork and the intellectual content of the writing. In the vast majority of cases, interior defects aren't even noticed while reading a comic UNLESS they are significant enough to interfere with the panel art or prevent holding the book open or turning its pages. If there's a crease or a fold on a page, does it impede the reading experience? A little, but not much. Do tears interfere with reading? Somewhat, especially if they make it harder to turn a page. However, when these defects appear on the cover of a comic, they are more distracting because the function of the exterior is different from the function of the interior. A cover is used to help sell the comic on the newsstand, at cons, or in scans on the Internet. The cover is what shows when the comic is laying on your desk, resting on the top of a pile near your comic boxes, sitting in a slab waiting to be sold, or mounted in a frame on your wall. Once you've already read a comic, the cover is the primary way we reconnect to one or more of the interior elements of fiction such as the characters, the story, or the art.

 

I find arguments related to which function of a comic book is most important are pointless. Some people read comics...some people just like to look at covers...and many people like to do both. Collectors relate to comics in different ways. A story is a vector across time...a cover is typically a snapshot of a given point in time, or for multi-paneled covers, a very short segment or overview of time. Many adults feel that they have outgrown the stories in comics, but they still like to look at the covers to remind themselves of the times in their lives when they did enjoy reading them. It shouldn't matter why you like the exterior or interior of a comic...they're both important to enough people to consider them to be important within the comic book grading standard.

 

If the interior is defective beyond that which is reasonable and the exterior isn't, then one of the two primary functions of a comic is still serviced. If the exterior is chewed to hell and the interior is completely readable, then again, one of the two primary functions of a comic is still intact. To lower grade straight down to the lowest level on the scale when one or the other is severely damaged--or even entirely missing--is unbalanced. A coverless comic with a pristine interior that is easily read with few signs of aging is FAR superior to a coverless comic missing half its pages with nasty stains that make you not even want to touch it. By the same token, a comic missing one or more interior pages with a pristine cover still looks GREAT on a wall or in your hand as compared to that same comic with missing pages but a creased, torn, generally ragged exterior.

 

So what's wrong with the Qualified grade? In the long run, I don't believe it's necessary or the right solution. CGC didn't create the "Qualified" grade, they just used it for the same reason that dealers and collectors have used it for decades--to describe what they believed to be exceptions to the common grading standards of the day. I don't think that comic book grading should apply to all books EXCEPT ones that have this defect or that defect...the grading standard should incorporate all of the "exceptions" that comic hobbyists have been pointing out over the years when they assign grades. The fact that so many people have to point out "qualifications" points to the fact that the grading standards are underdeveloped and have not yet grown to incorporate those types of defects...and this is a completely normal thing to expect out of a hobby that has grown so fast over the last few decades since money became such a major part of it. The long-term solution is not to continue qualifying grades, but to innovate the grading standard to account for variable numbers of defects of all types and all severities.

 

So, how do you fix the grading standards to make Qualified grades unnecessary? I don't know.

 

The best idea I can think of is to assign one grade to the interior, one to the exterior, and possibly combine them together into an overall grade. This is the direction I believe grading for important (high-dollar) books needs to head in anyway--grades assigned to SEVERAL defect categories which are brought together into a single overall grade. The problem with this approach is that it increases the amount of time it takes to grade a comic, but that's why I say it might be restricted to simply the higher-cost books. If I extruded grading subcategories to CGC's submission tiers, it might look something like this:

 

• Economy - one overall grade only
• Standard - overall grade PLUS interior and exterior grades
• Express - same as Standard
• Walkthrough - same as standard/express PLUS individual grades for some standardized set of grading subcategories which fall beneath the main interior and exterior categories.

I know this makes grading sound much more complex than it currently is...but I would argue that the comparative complexity of the comic book as a collectible begs a slightly more complex grading system. With regards to complexity, the thing to remember about this also is that these categories are ALREADY accounted for by most tight graders, it's just that they don't take the extra 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or perhaps 1 minute to assign grades to more than one category. It may be that more than three categories (interior, exterior, and overall) isn't even economically or temporally viable when weighed against the value of 99% of the comics out there...but I can guarantee you that it makes sense to many discriminating collectors with the disposable income to buy the best material.

 

In conclusion, I hope that in 10 years' time the grading standard will have evolved to the point where we won't even need the Qualified grade for defects any more...but I am extremely skeptical that we can get rid of it without adding subcategories to the current 25-notch grading scale.

[garthgantu]

A fine, if somewhat exhausting, post, FF!

 

A couple of points:

- I totally disagree with the "Qualified" grade. I've got almost 5,000 comics, and each and every one is entered into an Excel spreadsheet, with title, issue #, grade (alpha and numeric) and value based on Overstreet. Do I have a column devoted to "qualifying" the info in the Grade column? No. Does anyone who records the condition of their comics - either in digital form, or written (on bag/mylar or in some paper form) "qualify" their grades? I doubt it. While I certainly have books with loose c-folds and back covers missing and etc., I don't list them as "qualified VF" or whatever...I just factor in all 'defects' and list them as what they are.

 

- I think the Qualified grade becomes more tenable/feasible with the advent of slabbing. At the point where a comic is encased in plastic and is essentially unreadable, the importance of interior 'defects' (such as "10 pages missing") drops considerably in the eyes of prospective buyers, I believe.