Bigger Is Better Comic 23
Roser Blazado
It somewhat comes down to personal preference and what your objective is. It's like the 9.8 vs lower grades thing. Are you looking to invest? Some buyers prefer white pages, some don't care; so if you're buying to resell, you may consider going after white page copies to broaden your sales base. Are you keeping it in your personal collection? Then it comes down to what you value. If I saw two identical books for the exact same price but one was W and one was OW/W, I'd buy the white pages. If the OW/W was significantly cheaper, I might buy that one. If they were the same book, but the W page one had a miswrap where the cover was off-center and the OW/W one was perfectly centered, I'd take the centered copy over the higher page quality.
In term of cost, if a 9.4 book with off-white to white pages is cheaper than a 9.4 white pager, I will take the cheaper book. It is not a huge to do for me. Plus I have seen it enough times where a white pager gets reslabbed and comes back as off-white/white....vice versa too. So to me it's all the same and like grading itself, subjective to a degree.
it's a bit silly, seeing often times a OW or OWW book pressed & resubbed will come back with White pages... but generally speaking a W designation is a bit better regarded. I get the sense that there are many collectors severely discount for non-W pages, more who discriminate for Cream or C/OW pages, even more who do so for Light Tan and a big bunch (majority?) who will avoid brittle pages (which means it's falling apart). Myself, I discount a bit at cream and avoid Light Tan or below...
Sure, there's some wobble in the CGC page quality designations, but not as much as there is in the CGC numerical grades. Offentimes, it happens with comics without any cleaning and pressing being involved.
An early lesson learned: I bought the ASM 14 shown below in a 9.0 original label slab and cracked it out, as I did for the first 30 or 40 slabbed comics I bought shortly after CGC started up. A couple years later I started re-slabbing a few books that looked strictly graded to me, without any cleaning, pressing, or any other manipulation involved,. The ASM 14 came back a 9.4. There's a lot of wobble in the numerical grading, so much so that I find it surprising when the wobble in the page quality grading invariably comes up in these types of discussions. So many collectors won't give a second thought to paying a much higher price for an ultra high numerical graded comic over a comparable looking copy with a slightly lower assigned structural grade. Why not pay a tiny bit more for one carrying the white pages designation, especially since more often than not a re-grading would confirm the white page designation, at least from my experience with re-graded books.
Just as with the assigned grade, once a book has been encapsulated, the listed page quality becomes a factor in assessing desirability, even if it isn't consistent from book to book. Unlike with assigned grade, where we can evaluate the known flaws or make our own judgment on eye-appeal as a consideration apart from grade, we can't judge the comparative page quality without cracking the slab. Still, we can assume that barring environmental impact post slabbing, that pages that are listed as off white or better are going to be superior to those that are listed as cream or darker.
While White Pages is a plus for books in nearly any grade, and might help in selling it, I suspect it only becomes a consideration vs. off-white when purchasing books generally available in very high grade but still commanding a big premium with each incremental grade improvement. If one is willing to pay multiples for a 9.8 over a 9.6, then they probably prefer premium page quality as well.
As far as discounting the importance of internal features to a book that's encapsulated, consider this - would you care if a book had scribbles on the inside pages, or if it was missing a MVS, or if there was a smooshed bug in the centerfold? You can't see any of that from outside the slab - but they all do have a big influence on desirability don't they?
There's an old song by the Carter Family called "Hello, Stranger." It's more or less a musical greeting in which the singer tells whoever is listening: "We don't know each other, but let's be friends." I'm no singer, as anyone who's heard me can surely attest. But I like the song. And I like making friends.
As I write this, it's early January 2015, which means that my comic strip, Big Nate, has been in print for almost exactly twenty-four years. I'm pleased and proud to have hung around that long, because cartooning is not necessarily an easy way to make a living. But even at a young age, I got the feeling that it was an occupation that would suit me. I remember reading a quote from my boyhood idol, Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame, which went something like this: To be a cartoonist, you need to be a good artist, not a great artist; and a good writer, not a great writer. And I thought to myself: "I've found my dream job."
But, finding my dream job didn't mean I practiced a lot. The drawing shown here notwithstanding, I wasn't one of those kids who spent countless hours mastering my craft. I loved to draw, but I enjoyed plenty of other things, too - like playing sports, watching Saturday morning TV shows, and having the occasional near-death experience while climbing trees or riding bikes. So even though I identified myself as a cartoonist starting in about 2nd or 3rd grade, I always knew there were plenty of other people who could draw better than I could (as Charlie Brown's lower body in this masterpiece clearly indicates). To be honest, I spent more time reading comics than I did drawing them. I collected a few comic books avidly - Uncle Scrooge, Batman and Spiderman were some of my favorites - but my real passion was newspaper comic strips. Peanuts was at the very top, of course, but I read "em all. I loved B.C., Doonesbury, Andy Capp, Tumbleweeds, Blondie and Fred Basset. Later, in high school, I began to learn about the great strips from the Golden Age of comics, like Krazy Kat, Thimble Theatre, Terry and the Pirates, Little Nemo and Polly and Her Pals. And I read plenty of comics I DIDN'T like, too. That's a good education in its own right.
My progression as a cartoonist through my teens and early twenties was not particularly noteworthy. In high school, I drew comics savaging the teachers I didn't care for. (Good taste prohibits me from including any of them here.) And in college, I created a weekly comic strip called Third Floor. Here's a sample:
It was basically a Doonesbury rip-off. And this might be the worst drawing of a moose in comics history. But that's okay. Imitating other cartoonists' styles, either consciously or unconsciously, is a stage most everyone goes through. So is drawing stuff - like a moose - you have no clue how to draw.
Speaking of having no clue, I'd begun submitting ideas to the major syndicates by this time. They were all terrible. I'll give myself a small amount of credit for making incremental improvements with each submission, but progress was slow until I created a comic strip based on my childhood in New Hampshire. The characters, most of them kids, were loosely modeled on friends I'd grown up with. It was, literally, a neighborhood comic strip. I named it Neighborhood Comix. What an imaginative title!
Here's what happened to Neighborhood Comix. United Media liked the strip, but thought that Nate looked too much like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. So I decided to turn the two brothers into one character. I kept Nate's name, but made him look and act more like Marty, who had a bigger, more outrageous personality. Then I changed the name of the strip to reflect the fact that Nate was now unquestionably the main character. "Big Nate" was what I'd called my brother Jon when we were kids (long story), so I was already attached to the name. Neighborhood Comix was out. Big Nate was in.
Check out Nate's long, skinny legs! Poor kid, he's actually grown shorter and stubbier with the passage of time. (And, thank goodness, my drawing skills have improved.) Anyway, back then the strip had only a handful of characters: Nate, Dad, Ellen, Francis, Jenny, Mrs. Godfrey and Mr. Rosa. Characters who have since become important contributors - Teddy, Chad, Coach John, Artur, Gina, Mrs. Shipulski, Principal Nichols, Spitsy, Mrs. Czerwicki, School Picture Guy and others - have been added along the way. Some of them are really fun to draw and write for, and it's impossible for me to imagine the strip without them. But Nate is the star of the show, and always will be.
When I'm asked to describe Nate, I often say that he's his own biggest fan. He's only eleven years old, remember, and I think most kids that age tend to be interested primarily in their own lives - not because they're selfish or conceited, but because eleven year-old children aren't SUPPOSED to be filled with empathy and humility and all that stuff. That's what adulthood is for, and Nate's definitely not an adult yet. So I don't want to make him wise beyond his years, or endow him with traits that an eleven-year-old couldn't possibly possess. I want him to look, act, and sound like a real kid. Real, but not ordinary. He's a little more over-the-top than your everyday 6th grader, but after all, it's a cartoonist's job to exaggerate.
Soon after I started the strip, I discovered that the jokes and stories I enjoyed the most were the ones that focused on Nate's school experiences. That wasn't a surprise, since I'd been a high school art teacher/baseball coach for three years after finishing graduate school. So P.S. 38, the school where Nate attends 6th grade (year after year), moved to the center of the strip and stayed there. I like it that way. Schools can be very funny places. Here are a few strips I like dealing with school themes:
After 24 years of this, I have to admit that coming up with fresh, funny ideas is getting more challenging. But my routine hasn't really changed. I begin each day by reading the comics in each of the two morning newspapers. (My favorite strip is Monty, by my friend Jim Meddick. Hilarious.) Then I go to my office, which is a three-second commute across the dining room, and get to work. I write and doodle in small sketchbooks or on Post-it notes, and that usually helps spark an idea or two.
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