New member Rex Fury's mention of slabbing comics prompted me to register my distaste for the process. I'm not going to go into a full rant about it. I just want to express my frustration as a comic art lover. Recently Heritage Auctions offered a near-mint copy of a Durango Kid issue with the note, "Frank Frazetta art makes this a highly desirable comic, especially in this condition!" It sold for north of $4000.
In reality, what did your four thousand bucks buy you? A cover photo of Charles Starrett and a back cover photo (ad) of Tim Holt. Period. That desirable Frazetta art is locked inside a impenetrable plastic vault where you (or anyone else) will never lay eyes on it. In my fantasy world comics to be slabbed would have to be scanned for future generations before being locked in their petrochemical prison. However I'm sure that whoever assigns condition grades would insist that scanning a rare issue would lower its potential auction return.
The whole thing is nuts. I mean, for all you know, between those two photo covers could be the guts of a 1964 Charlton war comic. In his screed against abstract art, The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe argued that the greatness of such artworks lay not in the paintings themselves, but in the explanations by art critics of why the paintings were great. A similar thing happens with slabbing. You're buying a comic not for the great art but for the promise that great art lurks unseen behind that plastic wall.
