2001-04-25 - 11:50 p.m.

Sealed in Plastic

This is something I snipped out of my attempted rant on the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. It's about a pet peeve of mine, which is, in fact, a monument to human greed and stupidity. It's called "slabbing," which is a term for a comic (or certain other kinds of collectibles) that has been graded and sealed in plastic. This is a peculiar sickness parto mature collectible markets, and I hope I can describe the phenomenon without getting too long-winded.

The practice of slabbing comes from two very understandable human impulses: the desire to preserve a perishable collectable and the desire to quantify the condition of said collectible.

Here's how it works. You send off your comic to a grading service, along with a check, and a few weeks later you get your comic back, sealed in a hard plastic case, along with a little card that says what the condition of the comic is. This card has a little hologram watermark on it so it can't be forged, in theory, that is.

Comics are graded on a scale from MINT (a dead-on perfect book) to POOR (A comic with many defects - barely readable or collectable). What the people who slab comics do is assign a number to these conditions from 10 (Mint) to 0 (poor).

I don't much care for this number system. There are a number of fine distinctions that are lost in this way. There can be a wide variance in how comics assigned a certain number can look - is it worse to have a comic with a small crease, or some slight yellowing? Both may be equal but some people prefer comics without creases, while other abhor yellowing.

This is just a preference of mine, but that's not the main point I want to make. Slabbing would be a harmless eccentricity if people didn't take it so damn seriously. I've hear reports of high-grade slabbed comics going for obscene amounts of money, and there have been instances where the difference between a comic in grade 9.3 and a comic in grade 9.4 could add another zero to the price.

Even more disturbing are the instances of near-worthless comics selling for ten times their real value, just because the book was slabbed. Are these people insane?

The reason why this bothers me so much is that I've seen all this happen before. Twenty years ago it happened to the coin collecting market. There were several firms that slabbed and graded coins, and there was similar crazy behavior about the grades. The thing is that the grading system wasn't perfectly consistent - no system can be. It was common practice for coin dealers, if they didn't like the grade their coin got, to break the coin out of its plastic holder and have it get graded again and again until they got a grade they liked. More disturbing were reports that at some grading services a few dollars to the right person could give your coin a higher grade.

All of this broke open in a huge scandal, and the coin market fell apart. I don't know if they still slab coins, but fewer and fewer people care about coins each year. I don’t want to see this happen to comics, but unfortunately we are already pretty far down that path.

All that aside, I think there is something obscene about the practice of sealing comics in plastic. You see, a comic isn't like a coin or a baseball card. You can still pretty fully enjoy a coin or a card that's been sealed in plastic - you can still look at both sides. A comic is meant to be read, and slabbing makes that impossible. While I would be hesitant to actually read a thousand dollar comic book, sealing it in an airless plastic case removes the opportunity entirely.

It's not really a comic anymore, it's just a four-color paperweight, and more's the pity.