COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Black Hole 1 Modern
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Grade:
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9.6
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Page Quality:
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WHITE
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Certification #:
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3847395001
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Owner:
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Qalyar
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
The second printing Kitchen Sink books are fairly elusive, having been released very near the end of the company's life. In fact, Kitchen Sink very nearly went out of business in 1997 before being pulled back from the bring by Fred Seibert. Nevertheless, by 1998 the writing was largely on the wall, and the company's releases were almost exclusively trade paperback compilations or -- as with this book -- reprints of some of their more successful titles (the notable exception was Alan Moore's Spirit: The New Adventures, but that was far from enough). By mid-1999, Kitchen Sink was gone.
It's unclear how many of these second printing books were produced or distributed, and equally unclear if Fantagraphics may have picked up unsold stock when they acquired the remains of the bankrupt Kitchen Sink. Nevertheless, all evidence suggests they were not printed in any great volume.
The Kitchen Sink second printings are indistinguishable from first printing copies from the front cover. The back cover has a new ISBN, and a slightly reformatted bar code box. But without familiarity with the series or a copy to compare it to, the only realistic way to identify these books is to check the indicia for "Second Printing".
While the end of Kitchen Sink Press is a sad story, this particular copy of Black Hole #1 Second Printing has a sad story of its own. Purchased raw from an EBay seller, this was originally slabbed by CGC with certification #3939929001 and a 9.8 grade. Unfortunately, CGC failed to label this book as a second printing, so back it went to Sarasota under a mechanical error invoice. Upon its recertification as the correct printing, the graders opted to assign it a new number and a new, and lower, grade. I can't really say whether the book accrued any actual defects from its repeated shipping and handling; frankly, it's probably likely that the original grade was a bit of a gift and that this ought to be the 9.6 it now is. There aren't any grader's notes, but -- like many copies of Black Hole -- the issue likely comes down to whether the spine corners are viewed as blunted or whether their appearance is attributed to the fairly terrible quality that this whole series faces with regard to the cutting of the bound covers. All in all, while I'd love to have an unbroken list of 9.8 slabs in this collection, this will likely be one of the very last books that I attempt to push past 9.6.
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