CGC: Независимая оценка и экспертиза комиксов

American comic book grading service

Certified Guaranty Company, also known as CGC, is a Sarasota, Florida comic book grading service. CGC is an independent member of the Certified Collectibles Group of companies. It is the first independent and impartial third party grading service for comic books. The company was launched in early 2000 and has since gone on to become a notable part of the comic book collecting community. as of 2021 they have graded over 7 million comic books.

Prior to advent of CGC grading and authentication services, collectors, buyers, and sellers were at the mercy of the marketplace. There was a clear possibility of a conflict of interest as a seller would benefit from exaggeration of the condition to inflate the value and thus increase profits. Likewise a buyer could dispute the condition of a book with the intention of purchasing at a lower price. CGC's primary service is to provide a reliable, consistent, and non partial comic books grading and authentication, which can greatly mitigate all these challenges and pitfalls that are inherent with comic book collecting.

Condition is a significant factor in the valuation of a comic book. An example is Action Comics #1, the first published appearance of Superman. In 2010, two copies sold on the comic book auction website comicconnect. com for record prices. One copy was CGC graded 8.0 and sold for US$1 million. The second book at a later auction, a copy CGC graded at 8.5 sold for a record setting $1.5 million, the most ever paid up to that time for a comic book. A 9.0 rated version sold at a 2014 auction for $3.2 million. This underscores CGC's ability to provide a grading service as a neutral third party from a transaction, this created a degree of impartiality that did not exist before. This has shown that there is a demand for graded books as consistently these books have set sales records.

CGCs gold label Signature Series is a signature validation service in which a CGC representative witnesses a comic being signed by a specific individual as requested by the comic book's owner. Furthermore, the CGC establishes a chain of custody of that specific comic until it is “slabbed” and subsequently returned to the individual who ordered the signature series grading and verification. This mitigates signature forgery concerns.

For highly valued comics, a higher grade can result in a price difference of thousands of dollars. Similarly, a comic book marked by CGC with the purple "Restored" label can suffer a significant price reduction.