MILWAUKEE (AP) — A Milwaukee comic book shop is looking to sell a rare copy of the first appearance of Spider-Man.

Collector’s Edge has acquired a copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15, the Journal Sentinel reported. The comic book, written by Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee and published in 1962, tells the story of how Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, gained amazing powers and learns that with great power comes great responsibility.

The shop’s owner, Steve Dobrzynski, first posted photos of the book on social media last Tuesday. He told the Journal Sentinel a couple found the book among a dead relative’s possessions and brought it to him for help selling it. He did not name the couple.A near-perfect copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15 sold for $3.6 million at auction in Texas in 2021. The Collector’s Edge copy is worn and the edges have small tears.

Dobrzynski sent it to the Certified Guaranty Company, a Florida-based comics and collectibles grading service. The service rated the book at 3.0 on a scale of 0.5 to 10, with 0.5 being very bad condition and 10 being perfect condition. Dobrzynski said the book could fetch as much as $35,000.

“It depends, if you put it up at auction, who’s bidding on it,” he said. “If nobody’s bidding on it, it’s obviously going to sell for a bit less.”

Dobrzynski contacted some regular customers to give them a shot at buying the book before making it public, but he hasn’t gotten a yes or no from any of them yet.

“They’re thinking about it, but I can only wait so long for people to think about it,” Dobrzynski said. “If I’m selling it for someone else, my due diligence is to try to get the best possible price I can.”

A comic worth, say, $50,000 raw could be worth $250,000 slabbed in high condition. All of the highest-value comics are slabbed because they're rare and valuable, and slabbing them helps preserve them from further damage or degradation over time.

And I'm reading it costs about $30 plus shipping both ways for slabbing, so it's only really worth it if it's a sought-after book with an already high value.

What's strange for me is that the book really skyrockets in price when the book is slabbed. A book that's "raw" in great condition will sell for multiple times that value if it's slabbed and the condition is confirmed. One site says --


I can see adding the cost of the appraisal itself onto the value of the book, but for it to be worth five times the actual value just because it's slabbed seems insane.

I don't own any slabbed books, but I'll admit to buying books just to have, like New Gods #1, Mister Miracle #1, and Kamandi #1. I have them HCs and TPBs of those stories, but I wanted to have the real issues since they mean so much to me.

I support this practice wholeheartedly, slabbed or un-slabbed. Being able to read a story isn't the same as owning a copy of the actual book.

And I know this in a discussion about high value books, and almost all of those have been collected / reprinted / trade paperbacked at some point, but there's still so many books from the 70s that were never collected that buying the individual issues are the only way to get them.

If I were to slab my AF#15, they'd want 4% of its value extra to do it. $1200 on a $30K book, plus shipping and boffo insurance costs.

I wonder how many boxes marked UV go "lost in shipping"?

I also wonder if a slabbing service gets 4% of a book's value if they are more inclined to grade them higher?

CGC slabbing scandal rocks the collecting world
"Slab-gate"

By Heidi MacDonald

While The Beat doesn’t often cover the high stakes world of collecting super valuable comics, a slabbing scandal has rocked this corner of comics that threatens the very foundations of trust that world is built on.

The scandal involves CGC (Certified Guaranty Company), the company that rigorously grades and then slabs (encases in plastic) comics for collectors, complete with a seal of authenticity. You’ve undoubtedly seen their booths at tables at cons, and many collectors have availed themselves of CGC’s services to grade their comics for bragging rights and resale. During the pandemic, collecting all kinds of stuff got super hot, and prices soared. There is a whole giant world of websites, apps, YouTube channels and other companies that take part in the collecting world – and it’s fair to say it’s another multi-million dollar facet of the industry: the aftermarket.

Personally I find the idea of slabbing anything antithetical to my nature. I like to read comics and hold trading cards. And certainly, you can argue that the whole idea of “collectibility” has led to the variant plague and created an ecosystem that damages the comics industry. But comics collecting as a hobby is pretty foundational to comics history as well, so with this in mind, let’s begin.

Details of the “CGC Scandal” as it’s known (I guess Slab-gate was taken), broke over the Christmas holiday and it has mostly been covered in YouTube videos. Even a brief dive into writing about it became very time consuming and made me quickly learn such terms as “grade and trade” “GPA for CGC” and “Mark Jewelers variant.” Also “heat gun.” So what follows is certainly a laypersons view of a very complicated matter. However, I’ve spoken to a few trusted friend who straddle both worlds who tell me this is a serious development, so I’ll do my best. Since I am not a native speaker of the language in which the scandal has been talked about, I may have a few points wrong – I’m open for corrections.

Okay here’s the short version: a scammer (possibly more than one scammer) would buy a valuable comic in a high grade, say a 9.8 Hulk #181 (first Wolverine) and send it to CGC to grade, authenticate and slab. Then, using various tools, they would open the slab, swap in a lesser grade comic, then send THAT comic to CGC to be “reholdered” in a new slab and then sell the less valuable comic at the first price. A comic can be reholdered when the slab is damaged, hence the loophole.