Had my first comic book fail last week at a local con

I finally brought my prized first print of Saga #1 to a small convention in Detroit to get it graded. Got to the booth, pulled it out of the bag, and realized I left it sitting in direct sunlight on my nightstand for like 3 months. The spine was completely faded, looked like a totally different book. The grader just looked at me and said 'sorry, that's a 6.5 at best.' Has anyone else accidentally ruined a valuable comic with something this dumb?

3 comments

3 Comments

kelly.nora15d ago

Yeah, "the sun is just quietly wrecking everything we care about" is the realest thing I've read today. I had a similar thing happen with a stack of old New Mutants I kept on a bookshelf near a window, the spines all turned a weird yellowish brown on one side and the covers felt brittle. Best advice I can give is get some UV blocking film for any windows where you keep your collection, you can get a roll at a hardware store for like fifteen bucks and it makes a huge difference. Also, if you're bagging and boarding, throw a couple of those silica gel packets in the long box to keep humidity down, because heat and moisture will speed up the fading even more than the sun will.

carr.gavin15d ago

Did you get a UV flashlight to see how much damage there really is? That direct sunlight thing is a brutal lesson but honestly it applies to way more than comics. I noticed it with my record collection last year when I moved apartments and my south facing window basically cooked the color off a bunch of my vintage album covers. Even my cheap Action Comics #1000 reprint started looking washed out after a month on a shelf near the window. It's like the sun is just quietly wrecking everything we care about and we don't notice until it's too late.

verar2112d ago

honestly the thing nobody talks about is how the heat from the sun does way more damage than the fading itself. i had a buddy who worked at a comic shop back in the day and they told me the uv bleaching is bad but the heat cycles from direct sunlight basically cook the glue in the spine and make the whole thing brittle over time. your graded book might look faded but at least it wont fall apart if you sneeze near it. a 6.5 is still a solid grade for a book that got roasted for months, some people end up with covers literally separating from the staples after that kind of exposure.