Wrapped in Plastic
Just when I thought the comic book business couldn’t get any crazier, someone surprises me.
REMEMBER when comic books were considered too juvenile to be read? Now it appears that they have become too valuable to be touched.
A company in Sarasota, Fla., has created a sensation among collectors by taking their comic books, both rare vintage issues and brand-new ones, and encasing them in plastic slabs that make them both unreadable and instantly more valuable.
The Captain Marvel and Donald Duck comic books that arrive at the offices of the Certified Guaranty Co. are treated like archival treasures of the highest order—armed sentries guard the lobby, technicians and appraisers wear latex gloves as they carefully examine each page and a sophisticated sonic device is used to seal the books up in the sturdy plastic containers that some collectors call “coffins.”
Depending on the age and pedigree of the book being appraised and “slabbed,” CGC charges from $12 to $1,000 for its services and, in upcoming months, the 7-year-old company will slab its 1 millionth comic book. That book may be a 60-year-old issue of Detective Comics that costs as much as a Porsche but it could also be the latest $3 issue of World War Hulk—about half of the books that come to CGC now are fresh from the printer and probably 80% of them have never been read.
“It’s changed the nature of the hobby, it’s turned comic books into a medium of exchange instead of a medium of entertainment,” groaned James Friel, who works at Comic Relief, the longtime landmark store in Berkeley. To Friel, who has been collecting comics since 1958, “it makes these books a sealed-up commodity. You can’t read them. It makes me sad. Some of these books will be sealed up forever.”
Read the whole things. It’s nuts.
Not only does it defeat the purpose of having the book in the first place. (Books are to be read) It also adds a new form of fraud, selling reproduction covers wrapped around blank paper in a lucite slab.
Posted by Remulak MoxArgon on 08/25 at 03:44 PMGod, they’re such idiots . . .
If this keeps up, we’ll be stuck in the 90s all over again. (And for the most part, that was a sucky decade for comics.) I mean, how many people are going to do the same thing to, say, Tolkien’s books or the Harry Potter series? Aren’t comic-books and graphic novels supposed to be read? I think they are such wonderful art forms. How many other reading mediums have visuals and text working together besides storybooks? Now, the same fools want to put us back into the “dark” ages (in more ways than one).
Did I mention that these people are idiots?
Posted by John Cassidy on 08/26 at 11:31 AMIt started with collectible coins, which I can kinda-sorta see.
But comics...okay, maybe with Action #1, but 99% of the others? Although, keep your flawless Youngblood #1 in a capsule and read any one of those sitting in the $0.25 bin at your local retailer....
BTW, the company that does this had made it pretty much immune to fraud, due to their decades of experience in the coin field, during which no passable fakes have been detected.
Wish I’d invested in them before they thought of the comic angle, though...they’ve made gobs of money off it, approximately doubling their cash flow. Pretty slick.TW: economic. Yes, quite.
Posted by on 08/26 at 05:39 PM
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