Am I alone in disliking the whole notion of slabbing?
I feel as if owning comics should be a fully tactile sensation. That you take it out of the mylar snug and carefully open the pages and read the story, smell the must of the paper, feel it between your fingers. As opposed to being preserved in amber, untouchable unless you care to kill the value.
I find myself hoping that ten years from now slabbed books are looked upon as some sort of collecting oddity that people use as coasters.
PAD
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I think it’s a matter of the slabber and his/her reasons for doing so. If someone has an old Mickey Mantle trading card, is it so unfathomable that they perserve it in a frame, or something? Or what if the person who finds it in an attic somewhere isn’t into baseball, but is a child of the person it belonged to, and is enlightened enough to understand the intrinsic value (not just monetary but sentimental) to others, and wants to preserve it?
On that other hand, if someone starts buying packs of trading cards tomorrow and just slides them directly from the pack into a frame–THAT’s a whole other animal. It ultimately depends on what your priorities are when you buy it. If someone loved Incredible Hulk #377 so much that he keeps one to read but wants to slab another copy because he thinks it might be valuable one day–why not? It’s a free country. To each his own.
On a related note, when I was in Midtown Comics two weeks ago, Peter, where you’ve had a couple of signings before, there was one guy next to me looking at the same issue of the book that just came out (I forget which one it was). He was wearing latex gloves, and was thumbing through the entire pile that was on the rack. What he was checking for, I don’t know. Fingerprints of people who had already thumbed through some of the copies? Lint? Jimmy Hoffa? Call me crazy, but I was just utterly repulsed by this guy. I don’t know why, but I just was. In light of this, slabbing seems tame.
What exactly is “slabbing”? I’ve never heard this term.
If I’m going to spend money for a book, comic, magazine, whatever–I’m darn well going to read it. I haven’t ever been all that interested in comics as an investment, though my New X-Men and Cerebus collections did provide the earnest money for my house. Then again, that was back in ’87.
This is the first time I’ve heard of “slabbing”. I thought for a second that it had something to do with Fred dropping a huge pile of concrete on Barney…
Brad, slabbing refers to having a comic graded for quality and then permanently sealed in a sturdy plastic display sleeve by a professional grading company, and having the sleeve labeled with that grade. It costs a certain amount of money to have each comic slabbed, and if you break the seal, you’d have to send it back to be graded all over again. It’s obviously something that collectors or traders engage in, and not the casual reader.
The argument that slabbing a comic is akin to sealing up a baseball card (or a coin or stamp for that matter) would hold more weight with me if *all* the art and story in a comic were contained on the front and back covers alone.
Laminating a baseball card or sealing away your coins in plastic cases preserves them, but it in no way inhibits your ability to enjoy said objects in their entirety. Slabbing a comic, on the other hand, forever denies a person the thing which–for me–makes the comic valuable in the first place: the bulk of the art and all of the story.
I think slabbing will end up being just another trend in a few years. When people realize that they can’t finance their child’s college education by selling a few comics. If you’re slabbing a Golden or Silver Age gem, fine. But slabbing Spawn #1 is most likely a waste of money.
Hopefully, this whole thing will quickly go the way of the holo-foil-chrome-holographic-12-variant-covers trend we saw a decade ago.
But, as they say, it’s your money. Do with it as you will.
Personally, I like the coaster idea.
Hmm, I disagree. I sincerely wish that people 50 years ago had had the idea — hey, lets come up with an archival way to preserve all these great comics so that they’ll still be around when my grandkids are into comics. I’m all in favor of preserving the “best in show” copies of hard-to-find comics from the 40s-70s.
Tell me the truth, if you had, say, Brave & the Bold #28 in brilliant condition, would you be flipping through it often? Might as well get one of the 40 reprints of it, and save the good one for posterity.
Or rather, keep the reprints in print…
I think the ultimate compliment that can be paid to a comic is for it to be well-worn. So you can guess what I think of slabbing.
Slabbing comics, as a concept, borders on the ridiculous, if not the insane.
On top of that, the grading standards used by the company doing the slabbing are not publicly acknowledged and independently veriafiable.
Not to mention the big what if?
Just suppose that 10, 20 or 30 years from now it comes out that something unforeseen in the slab itself is detrimental to the comics and all you actually have are two well-preserved covers and a pile of mush?
May this whole hoo-ha involving slabbing die a quick and merciful death. Maybe those paying hyper-inflated prices for the slabbed comics will get full enjoyment from just staring at the cover – if so, more power to them.
skring,
I do have to say that on the materials that they use they have had many years of testing on them. The same stuff that they use to preserve the coins and cards. Plus the interior of the slab is filled with Nitrogen (an inert gas).
Slabbing, unfortunately, is here to stay. It is a great way to preserve some of the key issues out there that have been reprinted thousands of times (just how many reprints has Action Comics #1 gone through now?) and the older copies do need to be prserved.
Slabbing was seen as a bad thing in coin collecting at first, now it is accepted for the simple fact that professionals that are impartial to the grade have made the decision and that there isn’t an “arguement factor” to throw into deals. Same with sports cards, there is still a debate about them, but it does smooth out many former problems with deals that are made by mail, internet, or phone. I think in the long run it will be the same to comics.
Once they settle the dispute about the grading scale. To be honest, the numerical scale that SGC is using is more precise, but not clearly defined to the general public. Same happened in both coins and cards.
On the bad side, comics are a multi-dimensional product (unlike coins and cards) and you don’t get to see the interiors of the slabbed comics without destroying the protection that they are in. I’m not sure of a feasable way to improve this situation, maybe have a CD with images of the interior pages to show the thing, maybe just a page with pictures of any flaws.
Ultimately I hope that this ends up being a preservation method for key issue and classic aged comics and not “It’s a #1 SLAB IT NOW!!” type of thing. Honestly with the price that you pay to get the thing graded I don’t think that many will do the new comic slabbing for very long, it’s just too volitile of a market segment.
Hope that helps, and if not at least confuse the tar out of you. 🙂
jeff
Well, thanks, Jeff, I guess (and, it is skrinq – with a ‘q’ not a ‘g’).
However, I’ve been professionally grading and dealing with comics for nearly a quarter-century, and still vehemently oppose slabbing of any kind.
The older type comics you cite were never intended to be permanent – imaging or reprinting them is the best way to keep the stories around, not locking them away someplace where no one can ever enjoy them! Any value associated with a particular issue is not intrinsic – it is imposed by the market and confirmed by the purchaser. Over enough time, as deterioration takes place, ‘normal’ grading standards can become more elastic to compensate – whereas slabbed editions have a ‘locked in’ grading regimen; there can be no adjustment of standards to reflect the reality of the effects of time – that would undercut the existing slabbed books.
As for using nitrogen – I’ve never seen CGC ever refer to that. If that truly is the case, I would question the permeability of the materials and seals. How can one do an independent test of the slabbing without invalidating the warranty?
Perhaps my biggest gripe (aside from the fleecing of mucho $$ from the unsuspecting for this service) is the situation that would arise if someone opens the slab and finmds something amiss. You can’t get any satisfaction/compensation from the company (“Well, you opened the slab, therefore the grade is invalid and there is no guarantee that this is the item that was slabbed”). Wotta racket. P.T. Barnum must be smiling.
Whatever — diff’rent strokes….
Just 2 further comments and then I’ll shut up.
If it seems contraidctory for me to say that I do this for a laiving, and yet be unfamiliar with the iuntricacies of the slabbing process – that is because I am aware oof it, but pay no further attention to it, and handle no slabbed books at all.
Comment the second: Nitrogen is not aan inert gas. One common compound nature readily makes with nitrogen: ammonia.
Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and Radon are inert gases.
When the buyer who paid $1000 for a 10.0 Origins #1 finally realizes what a rube he was, then slabbing will be on its way out. Unfortunately, those “investors” will likely never figure that out.
I paid $72 to get four books graded as my experiment, but after selling one on eBay I’ve held on to the other three. Haven’t broken them out of the slab yet, but some day…
I’m going to have to admit that slabbing is a phrase that’s hard for me to understand, too. Oh well, I’m sure that there’s many things that’ll be hard for me to figure out in all my life.
But I know this, it’s that when I want to read comics these days, it’s for the joy and the fun of it. Wise words indeed, believe me.
Slabbing is one of the most ridiculous thing i’ve seen. I was still managing a comic shop when it first started. I remember people buying comics for 4 or 5 times it’s current value. And i’m not talking about $4 or $5 books, i’m talking Incredible Hulk #181 and X-Men #94.
I think people are just insane trying to find the perfect copy of everything. Most of them are not reading anymore but just speculating. They want to slab new comics, transformers #1 being the big thing to slab now, as an investment. sheesh.
I can’t wait for these same people to try and sell their “slabbed comic” for what they purchased it for. ha ha!
Well I recently got 25 comics slabbed all 14 to 50+ yrs old. I had duplicates of most and read, and picked the best ones too get slabbed.
Will I ever sell them? Prolly not, its just something I wanted to do to actually preserve them, I may break them out of the slabs someday, if I see the conditions of the book deteriorating, if not, well, its a good way to keep them clean.
But the outrageous prices are insane, so far I got back 12 comics graded as low as 9.0 and as high as 9.8.
No gem 9.9 or 10.0s so far. Most of the comics graded, 9.6 and 9.8, 1 graded 9.0, 9.2, and 9.4.
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