Whatever happened to the days when every comic was Mint? Part I

When I first started collecting comics back in the late 70's the Comic Buyers Guide was known as just The Buyer's Guide. It was, in a nutshell, an ad rag. Very weak on content and production quality but loaded with ads for every comic imaginable from dealers all across the country. There was also Rocket's Blast Comic Collector which was a little better on content - they always had really cool covers - and also chock full of ads. If you were not near a store or a regular convention (which there were very few), which was pretty much everyone at that point, you had no other way to complete your collection than to purchase through the mail.

These ads were camera ready style. In other words, the seller would send in their ad copy on a piece of paper and the magazine (TBG was actually a tabloid newspaper) would put the ads onto the page as it, sometimes shrinking them to fit as needed. You had everything from well produced ads that someone had professionally laid out and typeset to ads where folks just grabbed a pen and wrote everthing on an an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper and sent it in. The old catalog that is posted on the Mile High Comics website was, if I remember correctly, in an issue of TBG right after they aquired the Edgar Church collection.

At that point grading comics was just starting to get perfected and there were varying definitions of what 'Mint' was. Sure there were plenty of folks advertising Mint comic books but not alot of the folks actually had them, especially by today's standards. There were also newsstand, pristine, super and I think I even remember hyper Mint. I think one of the funniest was dealer mint, whatever that means. But, Mint then was a whole different ball game than it is now.

See, the grading standards back then were just being refined. The Overstreet Price Guide only had Good Fine and Mint, and if I remember right the split was in thirds. So a Golden Age Batman comic that was $60 in Mint was $40 in Fine and $20 in good. There were people who had seen truly high grade comics but most of them were in a few major collections and got gobbled up very quickly. Your typical Near Mint comic back then would today fall into the Very Fine range and most folks did not even notice or care. It was a nice looking copy, probably just about as nice as it was when it came off the spinner rack.

Next I will talk about restoration as it was back then!