Nerds like slabs, bigger nerds like slab data.
It has been said that investing in CGC graded modern books should be CGC 9.8 or nothing. Does that advice hold up to testing? What do 2005 prices look like in 2021? Could the best rate of return be (MUCH) lower on the CGC grading scale? Yes it can!
Read the whole article on GPAnalysis.com here.
GPAnalysis reports how many copies sell for individual issues and there may be few surprises when the most often CGC graded comics are also the most often sold. But turn those numbers into percentages and the surprises abound. Take a look at the most recent twelve months in terms of what’s trading more often than you might expect.
Read the full article for free on GPAnalysis.com
Before the introduction of the direct market in the late-1970s, every comic book was a “newsstand” edition. Comics published from the 1930s to the late-1970s were all newsstand editions, which meant three things: 1) They could be returned for credit if they didn’t sell by a certain date, 2) They were not ordered according to demand, but according to distributor processes, and 3) both serious and casual comic collectors obtained copies of identical comic books, since all books were newsstand editions.
With the introduction of the direct market, comic book publishers were able to supply comic shops with exactly the number of copies of each book that the retailer purchased. Additionally, in exchange for a discount on the price of each comic book, the direct edition books could not be returned for credit. Comic shop owners could decide which books would sell best, which books would be good to keep in the back issue inventory, and which books they didn’t want to purchase at all.
Read the full article for free on GPAnalysis.com.
The CGCAMC – Average Market Capitalization introduced in a series of articles during 2020 has been taken to the next step, an Estimated Market Capitalization (EMC) that includes the premiums paid at the highest end of the CGC market. Compare any two comics across ages and genres for their total CGC graded valuation – or at least an estimate that doesn’t take 100 calculations per book.
Read the full article for free on GPAnalysis.com
Which books take home the most gold?
What if each CGC Grade was its own Olympic event?
The most submitted book to earn CGC 9.8 grades is Spawn #1 (1992).
All the CGC grades are included in these “CGC Census Olympics” and the awards are Gold, Silver, and Bronze
Read the full article for free on GPAnalysis.com here…
Every comic book is high grade, mid grade, or low grade – even if collectors have different personal definitions for those categories. Picture this: Using the CGC Census, it is possible to visualize what has been CGC graded so far, and perhaps discover clues about what grades remain to be CGC graded (or not!) in the future.
Read the article for free on GPAnalysis.com here.
The CGC Census has been reported throughout the 21+ year history of CGC grading, beginning January 1, 2000. Using end-of-year CGC Census totals from CGCdata.com, the history of CGC can be summarized as:
Having this many points of data allows for a calculation that “predicts” the CGC Census numbers based upon the amount of time which has passed since CGC began grading.
That formula result is a little “ugly” to look at, but it works very well for the first 21+ years of CGC’s history.
Y = 0.00000000505*X^4-0.0000585*X^3+0.250095*X^2+5.88495*X
Where X is the number of days since January 1, 2000.
If the formula continues to be similarly accurate, the following numbers would be expected for the end of 2021 through 2025.
This is a significant increase predicted, nearly doubling the 21.5 year CGC Census totals of January 2000 to July 2021 in the time span of just 4.5 years from July 2021 to December 2025. However, the CGC Census did double most recently in just 5.5 years from December 2016 to July 2021.
Can calculating the average universal CGC grade tell us anything about how many copies of the book may still exist? Probably not! But don’t tell that to the first appearances of Superman, Batman, and Robin! Is it just coincidence, or is there a data discovery on the horizon?
Read the whole article for free on GPAnalysis.com here.
Take a closer look at CGC submissions in five-year blocks over the past 20 years. The latest article in the CGC Census history series breaks the numbers down as Top 25 most submitted by decade from comic books of the 1930s to the 2010s. Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 dominate, right? Not exactly. The CGC Census has fewer copies of those books than you might expect, especially compared to other books of the same age.
Read the full article with Top 25 lists for each decade here.
This month’s article steps through time in five-year blocks, looking at the CGC Census for books graded during 2000-2005, 2006-2010, 2011-2015, and 2016-2020. The Top 25 for each of the five-year timeframes do have many of the same books, however, these are separate lists isolating the books graded by CGC during those five-year spans and not a running total since CGC began. The Top 25 for the whole timespan from 2000-2020 is presented at the end of this article.
Starting with the Top 25 CGC Submissions for 2000-2005, the results for the first five years (technically a little over six years, from late 1999 until the end of 2005) have Wolverine Limited Series #1 as the most submitted book to CGC in the timeframe.
Read the full article for free and see the Top 25 lists on GPAnalysis.com.
The first CGC graded comic book was Walt Disney Comics & Stories #1 (Dell Publishing, 1940) – CGC Serial #0000001001 (Invoice 0000001, Item 001), originally graded November 9, 1999. CGC opened to the public on January 1, 2000, bringing the “slab” concept from coins and cards to the comic book market.
Take a closer look at CGC’s first 100,000 graded comics.
The first comic books submitted to CGC provide a “snapshot” of the state of the comic book market and CGC as it was during 2001. The market seems to have moved on from the “hot new books of the day” from 2001, but CGC is still spending lots of time grading “hot new books of the day” in 2021. Does our past show us our likely future?
Read the full article on GPAnalysis.com here.
The third article on the topic of CGC Average Market Capitalization (CGCAMC).
The CGC comic book market was significantly impacted by the events of 2020, so much so that the final 2020 list for the Top 25 comic books by CGCAMC calculation is nearly 25% higher than the mid-2020 list. For the first time, Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 are not in the Top 3, replaced by more recent key issues with higher CGC populations. Is this a reflection of a price bubble or a reflection of the books valued more by the market?
Read the complete article on GPAnalysis.com here.
Multiply the average price for the average CGC grade by the number of CGC graded copies and you get CGCAMC – a simple calculation that allows any two comics to be compared on roughly equal footing. Looking back five and ten years, it’s possible to see trends in the market and fascinating to see comic books from the 1980s compete head-to-head against comics from the 1930s. Enjoy multiple Top 25 lists in this month’s article with all the calculations done for you.
Read the complete article on GPAnalysis.com here.
When the headlines say, “COMIC BOOK SELLS FOR OVER $3,000,000!” it is certainly an attention-grabber. It is not hard to name the most valuable comic books of all. Do those highest priced comic books truly represent the most total market value for an issue? Would it be better to have 2 copies of a comic worth $100,000 each or 50 copies of a comic worth $5,000 apiece? Don’t worry – the math is already done for you, and the results may be surprising when you see the Top 25 comics calculated with CGCAMC.
Read the full article on GPAnalysis.com.
This article is Part 4 in a continuing series. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 are linked. In previous articles, it was established that books like Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962), Incredible Hulk #1 (1962), and Fantastic Four #1 (1961) – which are submitted to CGC in all conditions – provide a better representation of what conditions might be expected to exist for other comic books of the same age, even if they are never submitted to CGC. Additionally, the percentage of restored books on the CGC Census may be representative of the time period, reflecting attempts to improve a comic’s appearance over the past six decades.
Read the latest article on GPAnalysis.com.
In previous articles, it was seen that there is a significant financial incentive to submit even the lowest grade copies of certain books like Amazing Fantasy #15, and the CGC Census grade distributions for Amazing Fantasy #15 are likely to be a good representation of all existing copies of not only Amazing Fantasy #15 but perhaps all 1962 comic books as well. Looking beyond 1962, Fantastic Four #1 (1961) and Avengers #1 (1963) enhance the evidence for the grade distributions of comics books from early 1960s in different ways. How many of these books are CGC 9.0 today? Perhaps just 1%, and the answer to the restoration question might surprise many collectors who never touched their raw books but can’t be too sure about their books’ previous owners 50+ years ago.
Read the full article at GPAnalysis.com
(from OSPG #50, pages 129-130, published September 2020, written in December 2019)
Greg Holland
SlabData.com
Certified and encapsulated comic books (“slabs”) are only a small percentage of all comic books in existence, but the slabbed comic market represents a much larger percentage of total dollars spent annually. Certified Guaranty Company (CGC) opened to the public in 2000. As this book is printed, it is now 2020 and with CGC’s permission, I have been compiling the CGC census into a searchable database online for almost the entire time. 4,816,652 comic books were reported as professionally graded and encapsulated according to the official CGC census in the first 20 years of CGC (as of mid-December 2019). This 20-year total is 3,936,750 universal grades, 772,851 signature series, 58,187 restored, and 48,864 qualified grades. Those 4,816,652 slabs are for 195,695 different comic books. Most comic books submitted to CGC have been graded fewer than ten times. More than 50,000 comics have been CGC graded only once. Nearly 100,000 comics have been CGC graded no more than three times. At the other end of the list, ten comic books have been graded at least 10,000 times each. Amazing Spider-Man #300 became the first comic to pass 20,000 CGC graded copies, followed by New Mutants #98, Wolverine Limited Series #1, Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8, Amazing Spider-Man #361, Uncanny X-Men #266, Incredible Hulk #181, Spawn #1, Amazing Spider-Man #129, and Amazing Spider-Man #252 in 10th place. Nine of these ten most submitted books are from Marvel along with Spawn #1 from Image Comics. The most submitted comic from D.C. Comics is Batman: The Killing Joke in 18th place with 6,615 copies on the CGC census. The Top 100 most-submitted comics have 99 comics from Marvel (84), D.C. Comics (11), or Image (4). The only Top 100 book by another publisher is Rai #0 (1992) from Valiant Comics in 69th place (3,852 copies graded), rising from 101st place a year ago and perhaps nearing the Top 50 by the time of this publication. The Top 100 most-submitted books to CGC represent 553,534 copies on the CGC census, or 11.5% of all slabs. While the CGC Census shows nearly 200,000 different comic books graded almost 5,000,000 times, one in nine slabs comes from a short list of just 100 comics (see cgcdata.com for the full list).
CGC Census Counts by Comic Decade (as of mid-December 2019):
CGC counts, totals, and averages are not a random sample of the whole comic book market. Comics which are sent to CGC have often been selected by the submitter for exceptional qualities of high grade condition, high market value, or both. By definition, the average raw comic is unlikely to be exceptional. Another important note is that comics which have few copies on the CGC census are not necessarily rare. When a comic book has little market value, even if it is very old, there is little reason to pay for third-party professional grading and encapsulation. Comics which appear uncommon on the CGC census may be extremely common and of little value in the market. Since most comic books in existence are worth much less than the cost of CGC grading, we should not expect to find many low-valued comics in the CGC census. The opposite is also true, the higher the value of a comic book, we should expect that more of the existing copies will be graded. There will be copies of every valuable comic book which are never sent to CGC, particularly when the owners have no desire to sell the books, but the number of $10,000+ comic books changing hands (publicly) without first being CGC graded is rapidly decreasing. A review of more than 2,500 sales for $10,000+ comic books at Heritage Auctions shows 99% are “already slabbed” comics. Understanding that the market for $10,000+ comic books has overwhelmingly become slabbed comics; it becomes important to recognize that the CGC census for the highest valued comics now provides significant data points about the existing copies remaining. Expert estimates for the number of surviving copies of Action Comics #1 (1938) and Detective Comics #27 (1939) generally suggest 100 to 200 copies exist. With more than one-third (and perhaps as high as half) of those top two key issue estimates already appearing on the CGC Census, it may be possible to estimate the remaining copies of other $10,000+ comic books as well. With all conditions of Amazing Fantasy #15 now worth $10,000+ and the CGC census showing 3,203 copies graded, perhaps an estimate of 6,500 to 10,000 copies is accurate if about one-third to half are already graded. If previous estimates for surviving copies of Amazing Fantasy #15 have been much lower or much higher, then perhaps CGC is providing the industry with a better method for calculating estimates on books of such high values. Estimates for surviving copies of books of lower values are certainly not reflected as clearly by the CGC census, however, it may be possible to understand surviving copy estimates between books of similar value even if only 1% have been CGC graded. For example, if any two books have been approximately the same value for the past 20 years of CGC grading, and one book has twice the number of CGC graded copies on the CGC census, then it may be fair to estimate that twice as many copies exist. Using simple supply-and-demand logic, when the demand values are identical then the different counts of CGC graded copies are most likely related to supply. Sure, there are always other factors and we may never know exactly how many copies remain for books, but it may actually be true that there are twice as many copies when the values are similar and the CGC counts are double. We will never understand everything about the comic book market, but perhaps 2020 will be the year we take the time to really review what can be known (hindsight is 20/20, after all). Whether we’re talking about the seemingly never-ending debates of first appearances, or the estimates for surviving copies of the highest-valued comics, the decades of census information, sales information, and expert estimates really are the best sources we have in 2020. CGC has been a focus in this market report, but when another grading company makes their census available and gives permission, they will be included in future reports. While some collectors proclaim that all surviving copy or print run estimates are a permanent mystery, maybe other collectors like me are thinking that nearly 5,000,000 comics graded over 20 years represents a sample large enough to teach us some things we haven’t known before. Some say the goal in the market is ABC – Always Be Closing (the sale), but I say always be learning (the market). More information is available at slabdata.com and more detailed CGC census analysis can be performed at cgcdata.com.
The CGC Census generally reflects a strong portion of the best copies known, a lighter portion of the existing mid-grade copies, and usually a very small portion of the existing low grade copies. A temptation exists to interpret the CGC Census as representative of both graded and ungraded copies, but the more focused evidence within the CGC Census for specific comics worth grading in all conditions may be applied more broadly to all comic books of the same age. Starting with the CGC Census grades for Amazing Fantasy #15 – a comic absolutely worth submitting to CGC in all conditions.
This article provides evidence for the likely grades for all other surviving comic books from 1962, even if the vast majority of those comics are never submitted to CGC. Read the full article from August 27, 2020, on GPAnalysis.com here.
The CGC Census reflects which comic books and how many copies of each have been submitted to CGC for grading and encapsulation for over 20 years. There are 204,534 individual comics with 5,210,195 copies CGC graded according to the June 30, 2020, CGC Census. With very few exceptions, newly-released comic books have always been sold without any certification or encapsulation, and billions of comic books printed through the decades still exist as those same “raw” comics in personal collections and dealer inventories. It is tempting to use the CGC Census as a view into the existing quantities and surviving conditions of comic books, but it is important to understand what the CGC Census can and cannot reveal. One question to ask is how far the CGC average grades drop as comics get older? Greg Holland compares CGC average universal grades with the ages and numbers of submissions for all comic books 1930s to present.
Read the full article from July 28, 2020, on GPAnalysis.com here.
Since CGC began grading comic books in 2000, the most submitted book is Amazing Spider-Man #300 (1988). More than 22,000 copies of ASM #300 have been graded as of May 12, 2020.
The current CGC totals and grades for ASM #300 can be found here:
http://www.cgcdata.com/cgc/search/isolateid/273
The Direct Edition of ASM #300 was sold to comic book retailers via direct market distributors, having a Spider-Man head on the front cover in the white box on the lower left. Direct editions were sold as non-refundable, in exchange for a discounted price for the retailer. Many dealers ordered extra copies to keep their back issue inventory supplied for years to come.
The Newsstand Edition of ASM #300 with the UPC barcode on the front cover. Newsstand editions of comic books, along with monthly magazines, were most often supplied to locations such as grocery stores, drug stores, gas stations, sandwich shops, and other non-retailer comic shops. Unsold copies of newsstand editions were returned after a month or two for credit, and presumably scrapped, shredded, recycled, or trashed.
More information about Newsstand Editions can be found at Newsstand101.com
As of May 2020, CGC does not differentiate between the Direct Edition and the Newsstand Edition of ASM #300. An evaluation of over 500 copies of ASM #300 in the Ebay.com marketplace on three different dates (January 2016, August 2018, and May 2020) gives a view into the CGC ratios between Direct Edition and Newsstand Edition for ASM #300.
| CGC grade | Direct | Newsstand |
| 9.8 | 38 | 1 |
| 9.6 | 106 | 5 |
| 9.4 | 99 | 18 |
| 9.2 | 54 | 17 |
| 9.0 | 29 | 15 |
| 8.5 | 29 | 15 |
| <8.5 | 40 | 40 |
| TOTAL (506 copies) Average CGC Grade | 395 9.14 | 111 8.36 |
Another view, showing the ratios as X-to-1 for each CGC graded is presented in the graphic below:
The average CGC grade in the recorded sales for Direct Edition ASM #300 was CGC 9.14, while the average CGC grade for Newsstand Edition ASM #300 was 8.36.
The CGC Census for ASM #300 can be shown with counts for each grade, even though the Direct and Newsstand editions are not separated. The average grade (Universal and Signature Series) is 8.76.
Applying these market ratio estimates to the full CGC Census numbers (22,000+ copies) for ASM #300 results in the following:
The lower average grade estimates for the full CGC Census (Newsstand 8.14, Direct 8.96) are attributed to the fact that lower grades do not appear in the Ebay.com market as often as the higher grades, relative to their CGC Census totals. Overall, the average grade remains 8.76 for all copies on the census.