E-BIGS

Grade Your Comics

Alex Ness

Ian Pengilley is someone who I met through someone on a chat board and he was a very bright, funny, well spoken fellow. He is a talented writer and computer specialist, a new father, and an eye doctor. His quest to collect nearly all Iron Man comics led him to amass a collection, and as such, he came into contact with comic sellers, and traders, and he realized a need for a service. THE EXAMPLES-BASED INTERNET GRADING SYSTEM or E-BIGS is that system. I spoke with him. Here is that conversation.

What kind of collector are you? What do you collect?

As you may notice from the site I am a huge Iron Man fan and have been from when I was a kid - I would have to say I am a completist in that respect and also look for foreign language reprints. I have a good run of Editions Heritage French Canadian reprints and different versions from Germany, Brazil, Chile, Australia; really whatever is available. I have put together a complete run from Tales of Suspense #39 (1963) to the present, have all the graphic novels and also like to find cartoons and collectibles. I have collected a lot of early Avengers, and have nice runs of Thor and Uncanny X-Men.

When it comes to what makes a good book for me, I would prefer to have a great looking vibrant cover rather than pick over small mechanical defects in a book. It is eye-appeal that drives a lot of my spending rather than buying in ultra-high grade.

Talk about, if you will, the genesis of your site. How did you start it and why?

E-BIGS began partly out of necessity and partly as an experiment. I wanted to be able to figure out a condition grade for books that I wanted to sell, as this is of prime importance to many collectors. Additionally, I wanted to know if a system could be worked out to grade comic books numerically by analysing their constituent defects. So far it has worked well and agreed with subjective grading and also third-party (professional) grading.

With respect to objective grading, it is often not easy to be objective about a book that is one of your major purchases. It is very easy to imagine that it is in better condition than other people would consider it to be, particularly when pricing is involved! If you love a book as, for example, I am very fond of my copy of Tales of Suspense #49, I would definitely tend to over-grade it. I therefore needed a way to break down the condition into smaller individual assessments, then let the E-BIGS tool do the calculation.

How does your site work? I use a computer with only the smallest market share, would it work for me?

Without getting too technical about browser support on the internet, there are usually some difficulties in making a webpage do what you want and appear exactly the same for all users. The more elaborate the pages' functions, the more scripting is involved which becomes more browser-dependent. E-BIGS has been tested with Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox and Opera.

How does membership work?

Before mentioning signing up to get the full features, I should say that you can get a flavor of E-BIGS by trying the free version at this link.

You can see the full range of defect categories but the functions are very limited compared to the full version. If you would like to try the full version for a month, you can do this for usd $3.99 when you have submitted some basic information to the site, just so we can get in touch with you. For complete peace of mind the full version is usd $14.99 per year using the same signup details.

-- Just pick a username and password and send them along with your name and e-mail. We keep this information locally and will not pass it on to anyone. The benefits of using the full version are;

-- Creating grading labels for your comic books; these can include book details such as title, issue, variant, publishing company and date, and also your own notes (for example, creator notes, story rundown, key details) and page color is included automatically. If you select 'allow qualified grades' a qualified grade label will be generated for you if there is a sufficiently large defect beyond all others. The labels include both descriptive and numerical grades for your books.

-- Using the toolbox which gives access to all the functions no matter where you are on the page. It also has controls for the database facilities.

-- The graded book database can store labels for all the books you have analysed on E-BIGS. After submitting the details you can store and recall an unlimited number of book labels for printing later.

-- See contextual popups (by double-clicking) where you can relate the size of the problem in question to the whole page of the comic.

-- A help page is available to explain the process and details of grading on E-BIGS.

-- No advertising!

Who does it appeal to? Does the collector who prizes perfect mint comics actually need to grade, as his quest is already done upon purchase?

There have been a number of positive comments so far from people who have purchased books over the internet and used the site to determine grades for the books they have received. In this way, due to its objective nature, it can act as an arbitrator for purchasing in a similar way to the services of professional third-party grading companies. I should stress at this point that E-BIGS was never considered to be a remedy for professional grading; as the title of these services suggest, comic graders are employed professionals who are engaged to find problems or give opinions on books as a result of their experience in the field. E-BIGS cannot describe eye-appeal, paper quality, reflectivity and other subjective measures that could not be reproduced on a computer screen. These may be significant factors in determining the final grade given to a comic book, so we would encourage any E-BIGS users who are considering selling valuable comic books to send them to a professional third-party grading company.

Having spoken with many people on the subject of suitability, experienced collectors may still prefer to give their books grades on their own. This is mostly due to the limitations mentioned above. If you feel uncertain of an approximate grade however, E-BIGS is an excellent way to get a figure for the condition grade of your comic. There may also be some defects that you have not encountered before, or the severe nature of some problems with your book may make it difficult to guess what the grade should be. In these cases close scrutiny of the book with the help of E-BIGS can give a close estimate of what a professional grader may decide. Obviously we cannot give any guarantees of this!

If you have found a mint copy of any book, you may still find a great deal of pleasure in running it throug