Grading comic books

This is the first of what I am sure will be many blogs about grading comic books. The first installment right here is originally from a post on the Comic Collector Live message boards that I fealt would be a good start.

At Park Circle Comics we have been super excited about finishing out the first week of our webstore on Comic Collector Live. We have already met several of you out there and are looking forward to doing business with and meeting even more of you as time goes on!

A couple of quick comments on grading. We are sticklers about it. We hate overgraded comics just as much as anyone else. We realize that most comics that are ordered from other dealers that are listed as NM are usually, at best, VF/NM and more often than not VF. Very Goods are typically Goods. Well, we do our best to make sure that every comic that we send out, from the 49 cent bargain comics to expensive Golden and Silver Age, is graded accurately. We follow the Overstreet grading standards and we never do "through the bag" grading.

We do, however, have a few exceptions where we do not stick with Overstreet standards because to us, quite frankly, they are too lenient. These have been pet peeves for decades and since I don't like them, I hit a comic pretty hard on grading when I see them, and even if we find it acceptable for a grade we still make note of it.

Tape - for us, you will never see any book above a "Good" with tape on it. And, for it to be a 'good' with tape, it has to be very minor and unobtrusive.

Detached cover - Never will be above a "Fair" unless it an exceptionally nice copy and we might assign it a "Fair/Good" but that is rare.

Loose centerfold - no better than a "Good." Loose at one staple we will go up to a "Fine" but it darn well better be pretty nice otherwise.

There are a few others but those are the biggies. As said earlier, all of our comics are graded with extreme care. For less expensive comics for speed we assign a single grade (Fr, G, VG, F, VF, NM) and that is the LOWEST condition you will get. When you order a NM you are getting an exceptional copy. Our Very Fines are going to be what most dealers sell to you as NM or NM-. For more expensive comics we will assign partial or split grades such as VG/F but only when warranted and not to pump up the price.