OT....now this is a comic book!! The Holy Grail....

[tschock]

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

One's personal knowledge of the census of high-end collectibles is irrelevant to the question you posed.

I think as you move outside the niche of baseball card collecting in particular, and card collecting in general, you will find the urgent NEED to encase everything in plastic with a number grade assigned diminishes greatly. That's not to say that there is anything wrong with slabbing/grading, but it's not for everyone. From what I understand, the current owner of the Edgar Church Collection copy of Action #1 has quite possibly THE most valuable comic collection in the world (including what are estimated to be the highest grade copies of Detective #27 and Superman #1 as well), and refuses to have any of his comic books slabbed/graded. Why? I don't know, but that's his choice. That's not to say that they are not protected in any way (well, now anyway, though if you know the history of the Edgar Church Collection, the comics literally sat in piles for decades, raw, in the basement of Church's home before Chuck Rozanski bought the collection in the late 1970's). To say that he is "foolish" because of his preferred method of collecting is a bit presumptuous to say the least.

I'm not really trying to start an argument here. I just don't think you can apply baseball-card-collecting logic to all areas of collectibles.

One of the reasons MIGHT be that it is much more difficult to see the INSIDE of a comic when it is slabbed, and some people (even serious collectors) actually like to OPEN their comics once in a while. Especially when they show them off (to other collectors).

Now balance that with this question. How much time do you seriously spend trying to look at the EDGE of a card? You can begin to see why slabbing a card might have much less impact (on the enjoyment of the card) than slabbing a comic.