It's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.

– W.C. Fields

In my time with Wizard as price guide/Market Watch editor and occasional feature writer, I was surprisingly given a lot of editorial leeway, and used that to promote creators and projects whenever possible that did not fit the traditional Wizard mold. It also allowed me to criticize some creators and projects that did fit that mold.

There was one thing though that I could never, ever criticize: CGC, and books graded by them.

Now, I completely understand the idea behind CGC, and I certainly would slab any high-grade Silver Age and Golden Age keys if I had them. Once one starts talking about prices with more than three figures attached to them, one has too much invested to allow for anything that can lower the condition of it.

I can also understand the idea of wanting to have a standardized method of grading. I have seen plenty of retailers that simply have no clue how to properly grade comics, and even amongst people that know what they are doing when grading and have been doing so for a while, any one book could be judged differently.

My criticism isn't really about the people behind CGC, but how a certain percentage of the CGC-using and CGC-buying population treat CGC-graded books. Instead of the comic inside the plastic frame being the reason that one makes a purchase, the grade itself is what becomes the reason for the purchase.

Anyone that buys a CGC 10.0-graded book solely because it has been graded 10.0 is an imbecile.

Before the existence of CGC, no one would look at the racks in comic shops for comics in perfect condition, just to buy them for their perfection, yet to a portion of the comic-collecting population now that seems perfectly rational once one adds on the CGC stamp of approval.

The most recent example of this foolishness comes to us by way of a holofoil edition of Transformers: Armada #1, which sold for $79 in CGC 10.0. Meanwhile, the same comic in CGC 9.8 failed to sell multiple times at under half that price. Full runs of the series went for less than half that. There is absolutely nothing about this comic that says that it should not go barely above double digits, except for a sticker and a plastic case.

This is just the most recent example of foolishness, but it's been going on for a while now. One month ago, on October 23, there was a sale of a Spider-Man #1, graded at CGC 10.0, which sold for a ridiculous $760. First of all, this copy cannot possibly be CGC 10.0, because that would imply that the book was 100% intact, which it cannot be, since the original perfect condition of this book would have it in a bag. That said, this is a book that should sell for no more than $2-3 when outside of the bag. Thanks to the 10.0, 37 people got into a massive bidding war that drove the price to over 25,300% of the typical asking price for the book.

It's foolishness like this that has this person thinking that he can get over $500 for a photo variant for Ghost Whisperer #1. To be fair, he has lowered his price, coming in originally a tad under $700. Or why he also thinks that a 10.0-graded Transformers Animated Free Comic Book Day should go for over $250. Or why someone at the end of September spent over $2,500 for the sketch variant of Blackest Night #0.

The market for books graded CGC 9.9 can often be as ridiculous. For example, there's this CGC 9.9 Action Comics #1, which sold for an ungodly $511.99. There are over 100,000 first printings of this book in circulation, with scores more of second and third printings. There is no way whatsoever that this book will ever be worth anywhere near close to this, especially since DC is bound and determined to make sure that any and every person that wants a version of this issue can get one.

One of the biggest criticisms of CGC grading is that doing so makes the comic unreadable. Well, in the cases above, and numerous other ones, what the story inside the casing is doesn't even matter, just the casing itself.