Typically when collectors think of the benefits of comic book pressing, they will think of removing spine and surface wear. While pressing certainly does offer those benefits, it also provides wonderful benefits to improving the appearance of a comic book’s edges.
It’s commonplace for comic books from the Silver Age and Bronze Age to exhibit certain types of edge wear. Silver Age Marvel comic books usually show some amount of top edge overhang. It’s almost always crackly in nature and therefore tends to “break color”.
Bronze Age books, especially squarebound books such as Giant-Size X-Men #1, usually suffer from right edge overhang with the cover curling down and around the pages (as pictured below). Right edge overhang is most often caused by the book being stored in too tight a bag & board, where the right edge of the book is being pressed down by the bag.
Whatever the flavor of edge wear, whether it breaks color or not, flattening that wear out always makes the comic book present so much better. If you have some comic books whose edges could use improvement, please send me a message and I’ll get your books squared away!
