Letters
Evidence from the blotter, not a score.
These are notes from people who booked a named sitting. We keep the mild complaint in because a desk that only hears praise stops correcting the letter template.
I arrived with Doctor Strange (2023) #8 in three covers and no idea which one I had actually read. Mira lined the classic next to the vibranium wrapper and made me open the credits page on each. The letter later named the edition numbers I had mumbled wrong during the sitting. I still wish the follow-up had included a sketch of the Dark Dimension beat; the conversation stayed on objects more than plot, which was my fault for stuffing the hour.
The brief for the February waitlist listed the withheld block before it listed the pretty rarities. That order helped. I passed on doubling a secret-rare chase I did not need.
Forty-one files looked like twenty in my head. The sheet split readable comics from the Mightys Strange figure I had dropped into the same folder. Seeing the figure on its own line was the useful shock.
Arun would not let me start with the doppelganger issue. He put the marriage strain after the reveal, not before, and marked two covers as wrappers only. I read the run on the train to Nakhon Ratchasima and did not lose the thread.
A longer visit: eight files and a marriage arc
A Bangkok collector arrived with eight Doctor Strange (2023) files, three of them the same story in different wrappers, plus a closed-eye Agamotto artifact she insisted belonged in the same hour. Mira kept the artifact on a separate line in the intake. The sitting spent most of its time on which covers were wrappers and which edition numbers the collector had copied from a screenshot rather than the file itself.
The letter listed six readable issues, two duplicates, and the artifact as display-only. The collector later booked Arun for the General Strange / Clea order because the first hour had, as she wrote, “stayed on objects.” That sequence—objects first, plot second—is now how we warn new intakes.
A drop week in Phuket
A written briefing for a waitlist window went out the afternoon before a February drop. The collector did not take the call add-on. He later said the withheld-copy paragraph was the only part he reread. He did not buy a second secret-rare chase. We cannot claim that as a market result; we can claim he used the brief as a hold-or-pass note against the titles already on his shelf.