CGC and "The Wild West"

About ten years ago the comic collecting hobby got well and truly rocked when a group in Florida, Comics Guarantee Corporation, or CGC, started to grade and encapsulate comic books in plastic containers.  The whole idea was that, as a buyer, you would now have a trusted third party that would have graded the books and a common grading standard would be in force across the industry.

Well...you can imagine what happened.  Some dealers and collectors hated it.  Some thought it was great. Others, like myself, were fairly agnostic on the whole thing.  The ones who hated it were mostly the folks whose comic book grading was not so good, or who felt the CGC grading was not up to their personal standards, or who felt encapsulating a comic was ridiculous...comics were meant to be read (an excellent point...the cases could be opened though, but that invalidated the grade).  The ones whose grading skills weren't so good were selling books on eBay...calling them Near Mint when they were no where near that grade.  They were now in a bit of a pickle.  The ones who felt it was silly to encapsulate books, or who disagreed with CGC grading, just ignored it for a while and let it play itself out.  The folks who liked CGC were, generally, collectors who had a pile of very high grade books and stood to benefit from the whole thing.  (Very high grade books got huge premiums over lesser books in those days...and they still do today)

But the ones who REALLY benefitted were CGC themselves.  They were getting anywhere from $15 to $80 a book or more for grading services.  Not bad.

The advent of "official grading" turned the hobby into the wild west for a while.  Arbitrage opportunities abounded.  You could walk into a comic book dealer (one of the ones who was not interested in third party grading), buy a really nice copy of a sought after book, have it graded, and then sell it for way more than you originally paid.  This was happening regularly and was very easy to do.  The dollars involved were not insignificant either.  When high grade copies of books like this Incredible Hulk 181 (first full appearance of Wolverine) were selling for $300 "raw" vs. $3000 "slabbed"...the choice became rather clear if it presented itself to you.

Eventually the "Wild West" got to be more tame.  But CGC is still around and recently graded it's two-millionth comic!  Amazing.  At the end of the day I think CGC has been a good thing.  Yes...it has put some very high grade books out of reach of the everyday collector...but I think it has also helped reduce the price of lower grade comics to make them easier to buy.

Until next time...

Blogging here on Sundry Collectibles and at Disney Postcards on, you guessed it, Disney Postcards!