I have to say, if that statement Matt Nelson made is exactly as he meant it to sound (CGC spending seconds on grading a modern), it really has me irate.
I can accept all the shenanigans over the years with blank cases, acetate covers, mistakes, damaged books etc, etc, etc. Sh*t happens. Companies do stupid things.
But this one… this one just invokes so many negative aspects that DONT involve the word Trust or Accuracy or Quality.
I find the statement completely unacceptable in practice, and it certainly makes “Buy the book; not the grade” a phrase to be etched on the Sarasota mountainside because their grades on Moderns can’t be trusted or considered accurate imo.
I shudder at how much time is being spent on grading pre-1975 books. I hope it’s at least 61 seconds so I can hear him say “minutes” on some future date.
I don’t mind Bill’s videos, but yeah those new fart noises are a bit annoying. Then he repeatedly says “that’s was she said” after he says a dirty one liner. Considering this is from the 80s and 90s, not sure why he’s still saying it but it’s corny in 2022 when he was saying it but even worse in 2023.
Other than that, I do enjoy most of his videos. He does a pretty good job reading his books each week and provides a top 10 of which books to buy for the following week. It also helps for first appearances or something big in an upcoming book.
Figure he is the lesser of all evils when you look at the guys associated with KCC and the YouTubers that were involved in the Whatnot acetategate last year. When that happened most of them disappeared off of YT which is crazy to think since they have a following.
I’ve noticed some of the YT’s that were in some way associated with ComicTom are the ones that have disappeared. Nerdy Girl Comics, Skeff, and Skeleton Key Comics to name a few. I could be missing a few others that I can’t think of off of the top of my head.
I did also follow Basement Collectibles (he was never affiliated with the above) and he was always good with his book reviews. He hasn’t been making videos either.
You don’t mess with Disney and you don’t mess with the IRS. Nintendo either. Arguably the three scariest agencies or organizations that love to slap you with a lawsuit/lien/etc.
We know that Black Flag got hit with a letter on the floor of Boston Fan Expo. You don’t need to actually be the recipient of that type of letter for it to have an effect. If they were talking about it and fearful of it, it could cause some chilling effects.
The only argument he has is they should have refunded the money if they could not grade the book.
If they cannot beyond a reasonable doubt prove the authenticity then they should not grade it. It’s like signature verification at cbcs. I’d they don’t enough examples to compare to it gets sent back. Doesn’t mean it’s not real…they just don’t have the means to prove it’s authenticity. And they will only spend so much time and resources on trying.
Maybe the book is not authentic. The person in the video does not even contemplate this scenario. Maybe he’s in denial that could be the case because he likely paid a lot of money and could not except he made an error.
Grading is subjective, and what risks the company is willing to take on today and put their name on is different than the risk they may have been willing to take in the past with “similar” situations. Maybe they have gotten burned in a few times and the risk is now too high to grade these types of oddities.
CGC does not have to invest a significant amount of energy just to grade a rare book if they feel the cost of being wrong outweighs the benefits of being right. They are not going to invest a significant amount of time and effort for the sake of one book either.
I believe I mentioned I had issues with a couple of books I recently received back from CGC. To be fair to them, I started grading books in 2000 (still have some of them) and this is the first issue I personally have had.
At any rate, they are handling the issue HOWEVER, I was not aware that I was supposed to contact them within two weeks and typically it would not be taken care for free if outside of that time frame.
Honestly, I’ve been very busy and I received the books, gave the box and contents a cursory look over and set it aside. I only closely inspected the books later and ultimately contacted CGC after two week.
So, I’m glad they took care of me, BUT…lesson learned about closely inspecting things immediately and starting the process if needed. That’s on me, but just fyi if others didn’t know.
If that were true, you would not only be the most comprehensive repository of comic publishing history, but also constantly striving to fill in deficiencies in that information, like this blind spot.
You guys should see what had happened to me with this last CGC sub. They lost my box about 3 weeks ago in the warehouse and could not find it. I kept calling CS and they give you the canned response as always. Their forums admin Mike had been on vacation for a week, but I ended up going straight to him on Monday and by Thursday my books had been graded and then shipped out on Friday. It’s a real fiasco over there. They really need someone to fix their entire workflow process because there’s no real process on how certain things are done.
