The Arcane Art of
Grading Comic Books (Part 1)

Comic Book Grading is apparently a secretive process that has few practitioners willing to define what constitutes a given grade. There has also been a movement to assign a number grade in lieu of the familiar letter-grade system, and while it may or may not be intentionally vague and confusing, I still use the old system because I am familiar with it.

My purpose in this continuing series of articles is to define, both for the reader and myself, what goes in to grading a Comic Book, and what is an acceptable flaw in a given grade. I say that it is for myself as well as the consumer because while I think I am reasonably consistent when grading Comics, I have no written criteria that I refer to when grading a given Comic, preferring to rely on memory as I have graded tens of thousands of Comic Books using the “system” I will describe here. This series of articles will nail down what exists in the dim recesses of my brain, and will hopefully be useful for all.

The first thing I do to a given Comic-Book, before I try to discern anything else about it, is to determine the completeness by counting the pages (and as long as I’m in there, I look for other things too, which I’ll describe later).

Page-counts vary in Comic Books from different ages and from different Publishers, but a good rule to remember is that ALL Comic Books have an even number of pages between the cover and the center staple. (Although all rules are made to be broken: some cheaper Publishers have recently used the covers in their page-counts, this makes figuring out if a given Comic is complete a more involved process: you actually have to look for discerning marks like page numbers, or — ugh! — read the story!)

I am right-handed and so I take the Comic and lay it in my right hand on my splayed-out fingers, and with the thumb and index-finger of my left hand I “fan” the pages of the Comic and release the pages, one by one, from the back to the center, counting as the pages tic by. I then check to see that the staples are where they belong (eight pages in, for instance), that they are centered and not damaged by rust or have pulled through the center-fold. I then continue the count to the front cover. It is important to note that I do not count the covers in this run-through.

On most Modern Age Comic Books, there will be eight pages to the staple from the front and the back cover to the staple. Sometimes there will be a special issue with a higher page-count, but it will always be an even number of pages, usually in increments of four (Twelve pages to the staple, Sixteen pages, Twenty pages, et cetera.) As mentioned previously, all rules are meant to be broken, as some publishers now use the first page as the cover, or bind only 24-pages (6 pages to the staple). I think Power-Records had but 5-pages to the staple, and I’ve seen some Qualities from the ’40s with 14-pages to the center. Then there are comics that count 12-pages one way, and 16-pages the other — closer investigation reveals what appears to be sliced-out pages in the “short” side of the book, but page-numbers and story-lines confirm that the book is complete. The sought-after Suspense #3 is such a book.

While Publishers in the past may have dropped page-counts in lieu of the kiss of death of raising cover-prices, that practice seems to have stopped at the 32-page comic-book, which is to say 8-pages to the center-staples. More advertising whittled the story down but generated revenue that the exercise of keeping the page-counts at 32-pages precluded, and sometimes the center-fold is all 4 pages ads. So too occasionally a given “wrap” in the book will be entirely advertisements, which is to say a page several leaves in will be ads front and back, and the corresponding page the same number of leaves in from the back will also be ads front and back, this is a wrap. There are 8 wraps in a 32-page comic-book, 8 pieces of paper, plus the cover, held together with two tiny pieces of metal. I dwell on this as comic-readers will sometimes slice out an ad-page when it is front and back ads, and especially pull the entire wrap if it is all ads — this will screw up the page-count when the book otherwise reads complete. Also there are pin-up pages to contend with as well as house-ads that depict all the other books out during the month that the book in question was published, sometimes these are excised whether they are backed with story-pages or with ad-pages. You have to be keen on many things when you’re in there checking to see if a book is complete.

You will get a feel for the page-counts of the different ages of comic-books, but as mentioned, a good rule of thumb is that your page-counts will always be even in number, and usually in increments of four.

Now we move on to the other flaws that knock a book out of higher-grade status and down into the realm of the read and the re-read and the abused.

Let’s face it, (most) comic-books are produced to be read, and classically they were only designed to last as long as it took for the next issue to come out, which is arguably to say that they were not intended to be saved, collected, and preserved. When you read a given issue of Time, or Newsweek, or T.V. Guide, or whatever magazine you like, you usually don’t save it unless there’s something in it that you want to refer to later, or if you’re a good German, or if you’re a pack-rat. You throw it away. Or you recycle it, or you use it to train puppies, start fires, or for insulation when sleeping under a bridge on a cold night. I digress. Landfills are filled with the cast-offs of society which includes comic-books, but somehow some of these weighty tomes struck a chord in some readers, gentle or otherwise, who saved these things! Or desperate parents saw how voracious little readers were kept at bay with a few of these funny-books and squirreled-away a box for a rainy-day, or the inevitable grand-kids. No matter; they were saved, but generally in “used” condition, because they were usually read by children who are notoriously hard on things until they learn to care for the things that they own.

How to quantify what can go wrong with a comic-book, the mind reels. For our purposes there are two sides of a point in each book’s history: when it was being read, and when it was being saved. There is reading-damage, and there is storage-damage.

A given issue of Action Comics #1, the holy grail of Comic Book Collecting, may have been lovingly read once, carefully inserted in an issue of Life Magazine from the same month, and then put into a box of keepsakes that was stored in an attic where it was exposed to 68 years of constant and drastic fluctuations of temperature and humidity. Today it probably would be brown and brittle.

Or it could’ve been the top copy, in a bundle hastily tied with jute-twine, that was tossed off a truck, sliced open by a harried newsie, and put up on the stands where it was bought the same day, by a kid who after reading it while eating a moon-pie and drinking a pepsi-cola, rolled it up and jammed it in his back-pocket for the street-car ride home, where he let his kid-brother read it after he took out the garbage for him. It was eventually tossed in a box of other comics and put down in the basement, where it was nice and cool year-round, and there was good drainage because they lived on a little rise, so the basement was never wet, and anyway the box was high up on a shelf where the mice couldn’t get at it, and there were plenty of spiders to eat the silverfish and bookworms. Today it would have nice white pages, but would be stained, creased, folded, rolled, ripped, and the Johnson-Smith ad would’ve had a bunch of stuff circled, and every woman or girl in the entire comic would have a mustache and goatee.

The flaws are many, and the combinations are seemingly endless. I’ll try to get most of them, and why they, in my opinion, beat a grade down. Some flaws bother some people a lot, while other flaws go seemingly unnoticed to the same individual. I’ve seen dealers put high grades on books that were obviously water-stained or that had tanned or browned front and back cover edges that only became apparent when the book was removed from its bag and opened for inspection. When people spend little time grading a book individually, or give a cursory glance before putting it in a bag and assigning a grade to a sticker, many flaws are often missed. And as the price-spread continues to widen for comic-books in the higher and lower grades, these omissions through sloth or laziness, or sometimes borderline unscrupulous behaviors, can mean a difference of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Look for these flaws and come to recognize them for what they are.

You should decide what you think is acceptable or unacceptable in a given grade for a book that you will put into your collection. Look at an expensive book before you buy it, and take heed of the flaws therein. When a dealer over-grades a comic to give it a bigger price “by Guide”, that is just plain wrong — I have always been a firm believer as a dealer in being brutally honest with the grade and then pricing the comic at what I want to get out of it.

Lastly, when there is a criteria that must be met with every book, you can quantify a grade and know what to expect when you purchase said book sight-unseen. The reasons that a company like CGC exists is because of wildly different interpretations of the vague descriptions of comic-book grades in the Price Guides; the constant upward pressure on dealers when grading and pricing comic-books; as well as the previously mentioned sloth, laziness, or borderline unscrupulous behaviors that some dealers practice.

So, what are the flaws that often are present in comic-books in the different grades? I’ll start chipping away at this iceberg next time.