Posted in: Comics, Golden Age Good Girl Collection, Speculator Corner, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Absolute Batman, Black Cat Mystery, cgc, Facsimile, kickstarter

$1000 Bounty Placed On Black Cat Mystery #50 Facsimile Graded CGC 10.0

A $1000 bounty has been placed on anyone who gets a Black Cat Mystery #50 Facsimile Edition, graded 10.0 by CGC, currently on Kickstarter

Published Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:27:08 -0500

by Rich Johnston

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Article Summary

$1000 bounty offered for a CGC 10.0 Black Cat Mystery #50 Facsimile from the current Kickstarter.
Metropolis Comics' Vincent Zurzolo and a client are ready to buy any 10.0-graded copy found.
High CGC grades are extremely rare due to handling from printer to grading slab.
Publisher Omar Spahi selects the cleanest copies at the printer with CGC for the best chance at a perfect grade.

Bleeding Cool has been running a series of articles on BleedingCool related to the Pixelmon Media Golden Age Good Girls Facsimile Kickstarters of late. Well, the Kickstarter for the Black Cat Mystery #50 facsimile offers donors the option to guarantee a slabbed copy by CGC, 9.8 or better, for $89. And they are also suggesting that folk could get a CGC 9.9 or 10.0 with that level. And an old friend of Bleeding Cool, Vincent Zurzolo of Metropolis Comics, and behind the $15 million Action Comics #1 sale, is offering a $1,000 bounty to anyone who gets a 10.0-graded copy of this Black Cat Mystery #50 facsimile edition, as they have a client willing to pay it. Anything is worth what anyone is willing to pay for it. And you can read up on the original, right here.

$1000 Bounty Placed On Black Cat Mystery #50 Facsimile CGC Graded 10.0 — Black Cat Mystery Comics #50 Facsimile 10.0 CGC

Such grades are rare, very rare, unless the comic has some kind of chromium or foil cover, and suddenly there are a lot more of those. There are far more copies of X-Men Prime #1 in 10.0 condition than you might expect from a comic published in 1995. But for something like Absolute Batman #1 first printing, for which 250,000 copies were printed, CGC has graded five thousand of them. Only three were at 9.9, and none were at 10.0.

But what about this Kickstarter bounty? Well, the reason for that utter lack of perfection in the grade is too many people between the printer and the mylar bag and board. Once the comics are printed, printers who care less for dings and rubbings than you and I pack them up. Then the books are shipped to distributors, rubbing against each other. Then the distributor ships them to comic book stores, shaving more molecules off the sharp paper edges, no matter how soft the bubble wrap, or secure the double-layer boxes. And then they have to be picked up and placed on the shelf. Picked up by other customers and put back. Again and again. Or, if lucky to land in a pull box, there can still be… rifflage. And after all that, you ship them once more to CGC, to slab them. It's a miracle that any are 9.8 let alone 10.0.

But for this Kickstarter reward level, publisher and another old friend of Bleeding Cool, Omar Spahi, is travelling to the printer to take comics off the conveyor himself, picking them out personally, with help from a representative from CGC, to find the highest graded books as they roll off the presses, then flown to Florida to be graded. And if it's a 10.0, there is a $1,000 buyer waiting. Would that make a 9.9 worth $500? What about a 9.8? They will be doing the same for the facsimiles of Phantom Lady #17 and Startling Comics #49 as well. But right now, only Black Cat Mystery #50 has the thousand-dollar bounty on it… for now. May the fates be ever in your favour…