Slabs & Grails : A warning to the comic readership - by Nigel Brown

 Slabbed comics have become a fixture on the comic collecting scene for a while now. At first they were a novelty, seemingly one more step along the way of storing those comics we love to read.

When comics were first collected as an ongoing hobby, nobody gave serious consideration to comic book storage. Ordinary plastic bags were as far as it went. It’s not uncommon to find photographs of comic collectors in the 1960s and 1970s with their collections displayed all around them, all unbagged comics, including prime titles like the first Marvel comic (Marvel Comics No. 1 October 1939) held in proud hands. 

When I first began to attend comic marts and conventions in the early 1970s, most comics were unbagged, stacked vertically in boxes for easy perusal. Sometime later, plastic bags became de rigueur, with individual cardboard backing boards to support each comic, whether it was a common-all-garden average issue of an unpopular title, or a key early Marvel or DC comic. From there, it was a small step to bagging comics in plastic like mylar, developed by the archiving industry, considered to be chemically neutral for hundreds of years beyond the lifetime of the comic collector themselves.

Slabbing, at first, seemed like another small step in this direction. The concept originated in numismatics, as a way of preserving coins from damage. Both sides of the coin were visible. The sealed, slabbed coin had the advantage of benefiting from a standardisation of grading. This enabled collecting for investment to be placed on a surer footing for non-hobbyists, who wished to invest in what were quickly becoming high-value items.

The problem is that comics are not coins. They have an interior that slabbing makes inaccessible, and so – once slabbed, certified as being in a particular condition and registered as such – that comic cannot be read and enjoyed as a comic. It has become something else.

Slabbed or Unslabbed?  You decide.

I first saw this pointed out by Peter Bickford of ComicsBase on his YouTube video ‘ComicBase Livestream #3.5: What are your comics REALLY worth?’ where he clearly explains how slabbing a comic turns it into a different type of collectible, with a consequent different value (at 36.45 mins to 42.21 mins).

He also states (at 5.26 mins): “I’ve never had an Action No. 1. I’ve held one in my hands, but I don’t own one myself.”

In other words, he hadn’t read that particular copy (I assume!) but he’d been in personal proximity to it.

After seeing this video, I came across the Swagglehaus Comics videos on YouTube, where there was mention of a new category of comics. I was used to hearing about condition categories (mint, good etc) and the category of key issues, but this was a new one to me: grail issues.

These are issues that are most sought after (and perhaps it’s a more personal category, as that can be a very subjective determination). It reminded me of the first time I saw this description about comics, on the excellent www.mikesamazingworld.com website – Mike describes Action Comics No. 1 as his “personal Holy Grail”. At the time, I took that as a metaphor, not a recognised comic book category!

So now we have a growing religious terminology seeping into the lexicon of comic collecting.

Veneration of sacred objects has probably been around for as long as human beings have walked this planet, and I totally understand the awe felt when one sees objects of great historical interest and/or significant items relevant to an engrossing hobby, but we seem to have moved comic collecting, with this ritual encasement, from the realm of the numismatic to the numinous.

Well, fair enough, if that’s what comic collectors want. Nowadays, with cheap digital photography, there’s no reason why certified photographs of the interior of slabbed comics cannot now be supplied with the slab.

But I do wonder that, as more and more early comics are encased in slabs, will there come a point when pretty much ALL desirable early comics are encased in this way? That won’t matter to those comic owners who are pure investors, but what then, for the comic book reader who wishes to read these comics not just in reprint form?

And don’t argue that, to read the comic, the slab can be opened and the comic can simply be removed! Given the dollar differential between slabbed and unslabbed comics, the hapless comic book reader will be paying a high price for this pleasure.

 

 

Copyright. Nigel Brown