50YrsCollctngCmcs

Sraw-Man, Great books, one day I too will get a Raboy cover. They are outstanding. Congratulations on your summer fun!

Funny how this happens. Suddenly, the germ of a collection begins to form!!

John said he thought it might be a San Francisco (I believe) copy. It has a very light stamp indicative of those books but not applied with enough force to be identifiable. Would appreciate more information on this pedigree if available.

I've been waiting for this to arrive. A SDCC purchase from John Verzyl. Thanks John! Very pretty, my nicest GA Adventure to date.

I spent some time at John's booth and I actually picked up an Adventure #74 from him that I will post in the Adventure thread when it arrives. He did have a few WDC&S books and I believe I looked at a couple. They were either so far out of my price range that I did not look closely or they were lower grade. Point me to the picture to jog my memory. Here's the picture: Those were not all there when I visited on Saturday. I recall seeing the duck in a bunny suit and the issue with the flag. I would have noticed a run like that. I believe the flag issue was over my price range meaning it was in very nice shape.

I spent some time at John's booth and I actually picked up an Adventure #74 from him that I will post in the Adventure thread when it arrives. He did have a few WDC&S books and I believe I looked at a couple. They were either so far out of my price range that I did not look closely or they were lower grade. Point me to the picture to jog my memory.

Beautiful books! And to get another chapter of the Blot just makes the 106 even nicer. Richard Thanks Rich and others, I was pulling some comic boxes this weekend looking for a Captain America Cosmic Cube story to show my daughter after seeing the CA movie. As a part of that exercise I ran across numerous Disney boxes and realized that I needed to do a better job of indexing my WDC & S collection. I buy pretty much from memory which tells you something about how memorable the covers really were! I also came across my collection of Walt Disney Showcase by Gold Key which I bought off the stands in the seventies and bagged in old polypropolene. There they still sit and need to get transferred to Mylar. Hard to imagine that those books are probably much rarer in grade than the corresponding DC's and Marvels of that vintage. There is some interesting stuff from that era.

A couple of pickups from San Diego. I always try to find a duck book to fill in the collection. This year issue #106 popped up. Oddly, late last year I found a copy of 105 at a local dealer. Both contain Phantom Blot serial chapters. Also, picked up the Lulu shown as a package deal. Please bear with Little Lulu here in the duck thread! Went to the Lulu fan meeting which is always a hoot as my kids get to act out a Lulu story. Would be a great idea for a duck fan meeting!!

That's a beautiful copy, congratulations. There's just something iconic about that image. It is really clever how the large, open eye is framed by the two parallel diagonal lines formed by the arm and the gun as well as the horizontal lines at the beak and where the gradient background turns into solid red. Your eye is immediately drawn to the bee and the stare-down by the flow of the composition. All of this surely didn't come together by accident. The Genius of Walt Kelly!!

NIce Andrew, I love that cover and have a copy of that one. I was looking at some of the other Heritage books but between the BP and CA tax, those books start to get too expensive. Hoping that I find something in San Diego this week. A nice Dell would make my day. Dell comics are good comics!

That book is a beauty. Where did you idig that up?

Happy 4th! I first saw this image as a kid in the suburbs in the mid-70's while browsing the poster racks that were so ubiquitous at that time. This image had been recycled for one of those posters and it has been burned into my mind's eye ever since. Bravo on this fantastic copy, it is alone the equivalent of a fireworks display for me. July 4th was also the traditional weekend of the old Phil Seuling annual New York Comic Con which I used to attend each year from about 1972-1981, the highlight of my year.

TB, Are you familiar with the Snow White magazine published by Disney in the early 70's. Just curious as it was an experiment to return to the larger size format similar to MMM and with a variety of features akin to that in MMM. I remember buying the first one off the stands for a big quarter when it came out. Cheaper than the much smaller Walt Disney Comics Digest but those were my favorites as they contained a wealth of classic reprints. My eyes were better back then and I could read all that small print and artwork too!! I echo Rich in thanking your for posting all the great material and appreciate your insight as not only a collector but historian of the genre.

I didn't realize that Little Hiawatha was a Silly Symphony or that is released so early. I always enjoyed his backup strips in WDC&S along with Bucky Bug and Bongo and Lumpjaw. Disney always hired amazing artists, so I am not surprised that he was able to achieve these incredible background effects as many of his artists were classicly trained. In Salt Lake City for the week but on return I will need to scan the Barks outtakes as well as a piece of original art from one of the early classically trained Disney artists, Hovarth. You don't hear much about him but I picked up a piece for a song on EBay from Red Melvin; aka The Dentist.

Yes, great stuff. Keep it up.

Yes, I will do that in a few weeks time. Pretty busy and heading out on vacation with the family next week. Honestly I thought it would be old news here.

Don't you apologize for the great stuff you're posting. I love seeing that gag panel again. +1 Your posts are incredibly informative, and I (used) to consider myself very knowledgable about the Ducks but now I realize I'm still a newbie In any matter it's great to see how stories changed from what was originally planned (as shown in your OA) and to what was actually published. Sometime back in the 70's you could buy from a CBG ad the missing or edited pages from DD #26 Trick or Treat for a few bucks. They were photocopies or offset prints and I purchased a set. I don't recall the whole story behind the editing but I still have those pages stashed with my duck books. I'll have to take a look again sometime this summer.

Love the Beagle Boy collection, you don't see those every day.

Interesting, I wonder if there is a correllation between the quantity of books issued during those years and the survival rate.

This is such a great story on so many levels. First, I love the happy ending here; you get laid off and given a crappy job to do to make a few extra bucks and end up getting to walk home with a treasure trove. No doubt that auction netted him more than a year's salary. Talk about a Gold Watch! Second, it is hard to believe that this type of find was still available in 1995. By then high prices for old comics had been old news for twenty to thirty years. Hard to believe that the Western Executives didn't know what they had there or maybe they just didn't care. I actually participated in the cleanup of thousands of drawings in our company archive and I can tell you that things certainly get lost and not everything of value gets saved. Oftentimes the sheer quantity of material gets in the way of understanding the value of some items. Thanks for sharing a great story.

I don't recall ever seeing any print run numbers on MMM, only WDC&S which were stratospheric. As for the file copy runs, I got to see the ones from the Disney Archives, which were amazing. Were the others from the Western files? Although I am not sure if they were the printers on these books. How about Kay Kamen? Did he have file copies, never heard anything about that.

The cover makes me wonder if this was an early version of Lil' Bad Wolf. It sure looks like it. I'm not sure of his first appearance but by the fifties he was a staple in WDC&S. Very impressive and quite the nod to the impact of the Three Littel Pigs movie in the depression years. I don't think most collectors today realize the impact that MMM and subsequently WDC&S must have had. Print runs of up to five million I believe and massive subscription sales meant these books were ubiquitous in their influence. Consider a population in the US of guessing (100-150 Million) and pass through and you are talking about a serious influence on the under ten set. Mr. Disney was wise in keeping the quality up on these books, making the parent want to purchase escpecially when viewed against the other fare on the newstand. He always tried to hire the best artists he could at the studio and put them to work on a wide variety of projects including these magazines. The quality still shines!

Back in the mid to late nineties when you could go to San Diego Comic Con on a Friday and have the hall to yourself (I am not making this up), Busted Flush and I were casually looking around and came across the dealer who had bought all these Mickey Mouse Magazines from the Disney Archives. He was very gracious and even though he knew we weren't buying he allowed us to look through them all. They were all amazing with colors and the kind of quality you have above. I have often wondered where they ended up but it looks like they are spread across many happy collections. They were a sight to behold.

It being Free Comic Book Day this weekend, sounds like the trip is worth your while. Might even find some free Duck books!

Dan, others have commented well re Barks' superior storytelling, so: In terms of the artwork itself, Barks has a beautifully clean, crisp and fluid style compared to any other then-current duck artist. Compare some of those iconic stories to other run-of-the-mill stories and I think you'll see what I mean pretty quickly. His characters are incredibly expressive, and there's an attention to detail and nuance even when not many lines are being used. Makes his work quite a pleasure to look at! And to add to that there is also an incredible fun attention to detail in the background. Picture frames are filled with humourous shots, city and landscapes are convincingly rendered and Barks wrote the archictectural digest on Money Bins! Don Rosa comes close to the spirit of Barks but his tales don't have the same goofy humor and are more adult. Barks had a raw humor, probably the result of his years on the farms and ranches before he became an artist. He was close to forty when he began working on the comics.