Fantastic Four Annual #1 9.8 in Comiclink May auction was a 9.6.... 3 3

[Domo Arigato]

5 hours ago, AstuTE said:

Only those "in the know" knew these books were being pressed when this ad came out in 2004.

And now 16 years later.....if that add came out today......they have to change it to:

CGC'd 9.8: $780

Heritage Auction number: 122022,  Lot number: 11310,  May 31, 2020

 

[lou_fine]

6 minutes ago, Domo Arigato said:

5 hours ago, AstuTE said:

Only those "in the know" knew these books were being pressed when this ad came out in 2004.

And now 16 years later.....if that add came out today......they have to change it to:

CGC'd 9.8: $780

Heritage Auction number: 122022,  Lot number: 11310,  May 31, 2020

That's what investors would call "putting your money to work and watching it **ahem**............shall we say grow downwards".    

[lou_fine]

2 hours ago, AstuTE said:

Only those "in the know" knew these books were being pressed when this ad came out in 2004. One of the first people to know was Borock's buddy Matt Nelson. The difference was pressing!

 

 

Yes, this was still before those wild and raucous times on the boards here back around 2005 when Danny Dupchak, @MasterChief , RedHook, and the likes first outed these guys through their before and after scans on how books like this were actually being artificially manipulated in order to acheive these uber nosebleed grades.  Definitely an enlightening and eye-opening time for everybody here, especially since everybody had been under the mistaken impression that one of the main goals of CGC in the first place was to ensure that the undisclosed manipulation of books would no longer be taking place like what Borock used to call the "days of the Wild Wild West".  How absolutely silly and naive of collectors here to think of such a thing as all we really needed to do was to open up our eyes to see what the CCG linked ownership had done in the other collectibles fields like coins and sportscards to know that they would do the exact same thing with the comic books since it's always about the money.    

I can just imagine if Borock had been better buds with Jason as opposed to Matt, and if the policy on pressing and micro-trimming had gone the other way in our bizarro world.  Any bets there would have been a big run on scissors down at the loonie store as speculators and flippers would be running as fast as their little feet could take them in order to look for the sharpest pair of clippers in the store.  We would then get musings from CGC such as "micro-trimming is considered to be nothing except maximization of potential and an activity that had always been done in the hobby ever since comic book collecting first began.  Of course, the other rationale would be that all books are trimmed by the printers anyways, as part of the overall printing process making it virtually impossible to detect. Hence, since micro-trimming cannot be detected with 100% accuracy when it is done properly, you would not want CGC to be guessing when it comes to determining whether a book had been artificailly micro-trimmed or not."  Of course, in this bizarro world, Jason would now also be head of CGC grading and everybody would be sending their books in for hacking and whacking as part of the whole CMTR game until there's almost nothing left.    

In this bizarro world, Borock would have come up with the statement that boldly and loudly declared that "pressing is not restoration as it is considered to be DESTRUCTION of a comic book", and this statement alone would have scared the freaking bejeebers out of anybody that might have been thinking of squashing the living daylights out of their books in order to obtain a higher grade.  Instead of being seen as the current savior and godsend to all of today's flippers, poor Matt would have been seen as the pariah and banished to the deep deep dungeons along with the rest of the old school comic book manipulators and never to be seen again.  

Of course, not being the dummies which they clearly are not, it's pretty obvious why they went the way they did.  After all, remember it's all about the money and it's a whole lot easier to have a book squashed multiple times without clear evidence of manipulation, as opposed to micro-trimming which can probably only be done once without detection and then, only if it's done properly.