The short version
- The scale runs from 0.5 to 10.0 with letter names attached to the numbers, and the gap between adjacent grades is often a single defect you would need good light to see.
- A crease that breaks the colour and shows white beneath it costs far more grade than one that does not, which is why two apparently similar books can be priced very differently.
- A grade printed in a listing title is the seller's assessment. Only a book sealed in a third-party grader's holder carries a grade that somebody else has staked their name on.
Comic grading looks like a precise system and mostly is one, but the precision belongs to the scale rather than to any particular use of it. The same book can be honestly described as Near Mint by one person and Very Fine by another, because grading is a trained visual judgement about a physical object, and two trained people disagree at the margins. Knowing the scale does not remove that. What it does is let you ask a specific question instead of a vague one.
Here is the scale, then what actually moves a book down it.
The scale, with the names attached
Grades run from 0.5 at the bottom to a theoretical 10.0 at the top, and each number carries a traditional letter name. These are the anchors you will see quoted most often:
| Number | Name | Roughly what it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| 10.0 | Gem Mint | Effectively theoretical. Almost nothing printed and distributed by machine reaches it. |
| 9.8 | Near Mint / Mint | The practical ceiling for a modern book. A tiny, hard-to-find flaw at most. |
| 9.4 | Near Mint | Sharp corners, flat spine, a couple of very minor defects. |
| 9.2 | Near Mint minus | The same book with a small stress mark or a faintly blunted corner. |
| 9.0 | Very Fine / Near Mint | Attractive and flat, with defects you notice once you look for them. |
| 8.0 | Very Fine | Clearly handled but well kept. Minor spine wear, gloss mostly intact. |
| 6.0 | Fine | Read and enjoyed. Visible wear at the spine and corners, still square. |
| 4.0 | Very Good | Obvious wear, possibly a crease or spine roll. Complete and sound. |
| 2.0 | Good | Heavy wear. Reads fine, displays poorly. |
| 1.0 | Fair | Substantial damage, may have small pieces missing. |
| 0.5 | Poor | Barely holding together, but still a copy. |
The half-steps in between get plus and minus suffixes on the letter grades. The thing to take from the table is how compressed the top is: the distance from 9.8 down to 9.0 covers defects that a casual reader would call a perfect book at every step.
What actually costs a book a grade
Almost all of it happens at the spine, the corners and the paper itself.
- Spine stress marks, or ticks. Short pale lines running out from the spine fold, caused by the book being opened. A few tiny ones are compatible with a high grade. A ladder of them is not.
- Colour-breaking versus non-colour-breaking. This is the distinction that matters most and the one most often skipped in descriptions. A crease that merely dents the paper is one thing; a crease that fractures the ink layer so white shows through is a materially bigger defect. Ask which kind, and ask for the photograph at an angle to the light rather than square on, because square-on lighting hides both.
- Spine roll. When a book has been read and stored curled, the spine sets into a curve and the back cover slides out of alignment with the front. It is visible with the book lying closed on a flat surface, viewed from above.
- The arrival crease. A vertical fold down the middle from having been mailed or carried folded. Common on older books and permanent.
- Tanning and foxing. Newsprint browns from the edges inward as it oxidises. Foxing is the separate problem of small rust-coloured spots, associated with damp storage. Both are chemistry rather than handling, which means they continue after you own the book unless the storage changes.
- Staple problems. Rust migrating into the paper around a staple, or a staple that has torn through and been re-set, both cap a grade sharply.
- Missing pieces. Cut coupons, clipped corners and removed inserts are absences rather than damage, and they matter more than their size suggests because a grader treats an incomplete book as incomplete.
Direct edition or newsstand: check the barcode box
For books from roughly the early eighties into the two-thousands there is a distinction that a lot of buyers never notice, and it lives in the small rectangle in the lower left corner of the cover. Copies distributed to newsagents carry a printed barcode there. Copies distributed through comic shops usually carry something else in the same box — a logo, a character head, a graphic device — because they were sold on non-returnable terms and did not need scanning at a general retailer.
Both are genuine copies of the same issue. The reason to look is that the two were printed in very different quantities depending on the era and the title, and the scarcer of the two for a given book can be worth noticeably more than the common one. It is a five-second check on any photograph that includes the full cover, and it is one of the few value factors on a modern-era book that has nothing to do with condition at all.
Slabbed, raw, and what a number in a title is worth
A slabbed or graded book has been sent to a third-party grading company, assessed, and sealed in a tamper-evident holder with a label carrying the numeric grade. The label also records the tier of the grade — whether it is a straightforward assessment, one that accounts for restoration, one qualified because of a specific defect, or one covering a signature witnessed by the grader. Reading the label rather than only the number is worth the extra few seconds.
A raw book is everything else, and the great majority of what any general resale showroom carries is raw. When a raw listing title says NM or 9.2, that is the seller's opinion, offered in good faith or otherwise, and it is not backed by anyone else. This is not a criticism of raw books — most collections are raw, most reading copies should be, and slabbing is only worth its cost on a minority of books. It just means the number is an input to your judgement rather than a substitute for it.
Two more terms worth separating. Pressing uses heat and pressure to relax non-colour-breaking defects such as bends and light spine roll, and is generally treated as cleaning rather than restoration. Restoration adds material — colour touch, glue, replacement paper — and is disclosed on a grader's label because it changes what the book is. If a raw book looks unusually flat for its age, pressing is a fair thing to ask about.
Bagged and boarded, and why it is in every description
The phrase means the book sits in a clear sleeve with a stiff backing board behind it. The board stops the book flexing, which is what prevents most new spine and corner damage. The sleeve keeps dust and handling oils off.
Not all sleeves are equal, and this is worth knowing before you store anything long term: the plastic itself matters, and some older sleeve materials actively damage paper over years. Boards are consumable too — they absorb acidity from the newsprint they protect and should be swapped periodically rather than treated as permanent. The mechanics of that, along with humidity, light and heat, are covered in the guide to storing a collection, which is the companion piece to this one.
Reading our comic listings
Our comics and memorabilia shelf is modern-age weighted — a lot of recent prestige-imprint titles and cover variants, alongside a scattering of earlier books — rather than a vintage key inventory. It is worth knowing that before you come looking for a specific golden or silver age issue, and if you are browsing by character rather than by issue, the DC and Marvel collections cut across the whole site including figures and memorabilia.
Where a grade appears in one of our titles it is a description, not a certification, and where a book has been graded by a third party the listing names who graded it. Everything is pre-owned, whatever the condition line says. We are not a grading company and we do not present ourselves as one; the condition and authenticity policy is explicit about it. If a photograph does not show you the spine at an angle, or the barcode box, or the staples, ask — those are exactly the three things this page says to look at.
