Q's Quality Rant

[Quato]

Here is a repost of something I wrote at www.comicscorral.com.
The topic of the thread was titled " I hate the High grade collectors." It was a thread debating the merits of high grade collecting. People were questioning me about my views. Here they are.

I look back to when I was 12 years old collecting stamps. I was going through old letters my mom and dad had. They were telling me about my uncles huge stamp collection. I was acquiring stamps from the 1800's and affixing a little sticky flap to the back and putting them in an album. I was having fun. I was getting involved with the history. My friends and my sisters were doing the same. It was a healthy focus for a kid. As I got more involved, I started meeting the snobs. I'd go to the stamp & coin store at the mall and see these expensive plastic sleeves to slide stamps into. The sleeves cost more than the stamps. I did the math and realized that on my allowance I couldn't collect stamps and buy the supplies the other collectors said I should use. Then the other collectors started telling me that canceled stamps were worthless. They told me real collectors only collect uncanceled stamps. Slowly and surely over time, the repeated scorn and "oh, he's not serious" attitude from my peers took all the fun away. It quit becoming a fun hobby I shared with friends and family. It turned into.... "Oh, you collect? (ha ha, snicker)" Eventually it robbed the fun because snobs had moved beyond the history, the illustrations, the completeness of collecting. They were too busy spending relatively high money on super nice specimens. Within a year I had walked awy from the hobby because nobody took what I enjoyed seriously. What fun is it to collect something when all your peers don't take your approach seriously. It's snobbish. It's rude. It's insulting. It becomes a self fulfilling act that alienates you from normal people and normal attitudes. Don't get me wrong. I am very glad I met people who have this attitude. My occupation now is that of a quality inspector. I'm nitpicking electrical and mechanical parts so that my company's product doesn't fail and the trains your loved ones ride don't malfunction. Hopefully my ability to nitpick allows a train to stop when it's supposed to and perform safely for all the hundreds of thousands of people that ride them.

Regardless, every single day I go to work I know that I am inspecting a part for fit/function/form. All materials have tolerances or allowed deviations. If our products were required to be absolutely perfect, your city would not be able to afford the trains we build. A half million dollar component we sell would cost 10 million dollars. Our product wouldn't be a better product because acceptability standards can be relaxed and still achieve the fit/function/form of what the train is designed to do. We already have some tight specs on our electrical products. We incorporate components no bigger than my hand that cost a thousand dollars a piece. That's our cost. I'm told that the process is so difficult to control that the manufacturer has to make ten before they can get one that meets our electrical requirements. That means everyone down the line is paying for the 9 pieces that were not good enough to do what we need it to do. The manufacturer has to recoup their operating expenses. Comic books shouldn't be that way. Collectors should not be expecting their product to exceed the parameters of what the printing/packaging/handling process can reasonably control. Unfortunately that is exactly what collectors are doing.

If I set a torque wrench for 30lbs and measure it's performance, it's not going to be dead on 30lbs. It'll measure 29.6, 29.8, 30.2. You can however statistically chart it's performance and see what is a normal range for operation. You can statistically determine an upper and lower control limit. You can investigate the root cause of a reading if it's outside the statistical range of the intended results. You can investigate if the torque results start sliding outside of the expected range. This is called Statistical Process Control.

Somebody in the manufacturing & handling process should be determining what the statistical norm is for the condition of comics when they meet the shelf. Top grade should be based upon the what is statistically likely, not what is possible. The old Overstreet grading system unintentionally did that. Pick up a price guide from the 80's and you will see a category called "Pristine Mint". The guide called those conditions very rare and it was not used as the standard by which we measure a comic book's acceptability.

Being a quality inspector, I can find something not perfect on any comic book. I might have to do destructive testing (the sample is destroyed), but I could find something sub par with it. I don't care if I have to measure the radius on the curve of the staple bends, I can find something wrong. Anybody so arrogant to think that their product is perfect is just being an @ss.

I prefer to back away and look at the big picture. What is healthy for the industry. What is healthy for the publisher? What is healthy to encourage an 8 year old kid to pick up comics as a hobby. CGC 10.0 is not it. The focus of this hobby should be the content, NOT the print & distribution process. I've been buying more VG books lately. I've been buying rarities. Charlton Digest, Gag comics & magazines... things like that. By no means do I turn away a nicer looking book, but I collect the contents. As long as the book isn't falling apart, I encourage people to buy the grade they can afford. People need to be enjoying comics just like I enjoyed stamp collecting at age 12. If somebody is ever offended by me mocking their quest for super high grade.... be offended. People mocked me for enjoying my days as a stamp collector. I was robbed of my fun. I'll ridicule any moron paying $1000 for a Spawn #1. You deserve it. As a kid at age 12, I didn't deserve the lack of respect I received.

Rant off. Have a good day.

Q

Kind of lengthy.

Q