50YrsCollctngCmcs

One fun thing about collecting WDC&S is the sheer number of issues (even just Barks' original run and not reprints) makes for a great long collecting journey. Add in the early pre Barks issues and post Barks issues and the fun never stops!!

Excellent! Thanks for posting and those pins were always fun to receive.

Awesome Eric! Some of the other giants like Christmas Parade have some great Barks' Scrooge appearances as well. But what a great run! Thanks for posting.

Worked for me!!

Scribbly is a great series; I lucked out on a CGC mislabeled issue #1 that no one seemed to notice on Comic Link. Picked it up for a great price. Buy the book not the label!

Wow! BTW do you have a complete collection of Sugar and Spike? That may be harder to finish!

Eric, when the last book arrives I hope you take the whole collection spread them out and send us a picture!!

For sure one of Barks' better cover outings. I was pretty enamored with that cover and went so far as to do a recreation for a fanzine I put out as a kid with an article on Duck comics!! Apologies to the great Carl Barks!!

That's a pretty book and a high price for a book that I think is all strip reprints. For my duck money I'm going to be picking up Barks books; that may hold back the value of Four Color 4 a bit. But it is a great duck cover and for CGC cover collectors I can see the appeal. In fact some of Barks' covers really don't grab you like some of the cleaner work of Kelly and Von Buettner; think of Frozen Gold vs. Old Castle's Secret. The magic is inside on the Barks' books.

Fun book. I picked up a copy because I love old forties black sedans, the Green Hornet and it is a big fat Golden Age book!! My copy is a reader but it also popped out of a box at me and screamed, "Buy Me!" There was a guy up the street from me who collected mid sixties Chrysler Imperials; they were mostly under car covers but occasionally he would have them uncovered. He had about three of them in his driveway and one in his garage. One day I walked by and the one in the garage was uncovered and it was the Green Hornet television show car; not sure if real or a replica but it was pretty cool to see just walking by his house. It's gone these days but someday if I see him outside I will ask him if it was a real model from the show.

Anyone following the prices on the Dell Four Colors in the current Heritage Auction. Some surprisingly eye popping prices on some early books; others not so much yet. It's hard to figure out the Four Color market in the auctions these days; some go for nose bleed prices on characters well out of the public's knowledge. Doesn't seem to necessarily correlate with condition either.

Sure you California guys had the down at the heels El Cortez but back east nothing said it was summer to a young teen than talking Mom and Dad into letting you ride the bus or train up to Phil Seuling's July 4th comic extravaganza. We not only got to experience the down at the heels Commodore Hotel but if you took the bus you had to make your way through the Port Authority. No finer hive of villainy and ne'er do wells must have existed on the planet (maybe Port Moresby). Once you ran the gauntlet of the bus station you had to navigate the filth of a summer NYC streetscape; the smells the humanity!! But heaven awaited inside that old down trodden hotel!! I still remember walking into the hall of my first show! Nothing like it before or since.

Awesome! I am not even sure if I have every Dell Scrooge but I am sure I have read every story!! The first fifteen issues always felt like Barks' Magnum Opus to me. Though some of the duck Four Colors might certainly qualify as well. The early Gold Key run has its own charms though particularly when Magica DeSpell comes into the picture. Those books have a playfullness removed from Barks work five to ten years earlier. I still remember laughing out loud at the Many Faces of Magica DeSpell!!

I assume you mean E. Nelson Bridwell. Do you know if he had an extensive collection of pre-hero DC's?

That would tend to make me think this is post war then.

My little piece gave up more secrets. The inside has some fun little images! Maybe they were meant to be little cards.

Thanks good clues!!

With the chaos that occurred in the post war era I am sure little was written down or preserved as people tried to survive. I have become very interested in that time period and have been doing a lot of reading on it. There is a series of three books by David Peace that interweave three famous crimes committed in post war Tokyo with fictional stories that are a fantastic read.

I'm curious if these pieces are pre or post war. I bet the piece above is pre-war but I'm not sure on the piece I have. The Imperial war powers would have frowned on the use of American imagery at some point in the 1930's as they became more repressive. After the war there was a boom in American looking products as the Japanese struggled to rebuild the economy under occupation forces. I've been on the hunt for iconic imagery from that time but it seems hard to come by or I don't know where to look. I've found one bookstore with a healthy supply of old movie magazines from the sixties. Bright red was a staple color cover!!

Yes that is easy enough to do but I couldn't find clues to the company name with Google translate. I suspect it may be the circular mark in the lower right. I wonder if I can cut out that portion of the image and do a search on that somehow?

I picked up this awesome unlicensed and unused package for some kind of children's rice treat at a Tokyo flea market. Wish I could figure out what year this was made but I think I would need to read Japanese to do that to research the company. MIckey and Donald must have been beloved figures here and I wonder if the back is a take off on Babar. And who is on that flag Donald is waving!!

Regrettably I only got the chance to meet Rich in person one time; but it was quite memorable. Rich had made arrangements to be in California to appraise some Outcault artwork from one of his descendants. He was accompanied by his wife Gayle and the board’s own TB. Knowing Rich was a big fan of the Disney parks and having just finished working on the development of the Carthay Circle restaurant in Disney’s California Adventure I made arrangements for a lunch meeting in the restaurant. Rich would also get to visit Disneyland on this trip which he was looking forward to with great anticipation. Our lunch was quite memorable. Having befriended the restaurant general manager during construction I was able to have us sit in one of the two private rooms for lunch. The Carthay Circle restaurant is also a wonderful homage to Disney being modeled off the theater where Snow White had premiered and contained at that time quite a few artifacts related to that movie. Rich was also quite pleased on perusing the menu to find that the restaurant featured wines from the Fess Parker vineyard; having been a big fan of Davy Crocket. He ordered a nice bottle for us all to share to commemorate the occasion. Lunch was a grand affair and Rich regaled us with tales of his Outcault appraisal. I was very happy to have finally had the chance to meet Rich, his wife Gayle and TB and to be able to share this wonderful time in a place of such happy memories for Rich. I’ve scoured my computer for a picture of that meeting but cannot find it which is a shame. Regardless, it is a memory that will always stay with me.

Rich and I were both big fans of the entire Dell comics line. Besides the Yellow Kid he was also a big fan of Little Orphan Annie and I would occasionally pick up a Dell comic or a reprint volume featuring her stories. Rich knew them all and would tell me which ones to look out for in the comic strip continuity. He was one of the few on the boards who appreciated my interest in all things Dell. We would even discuss the evolution of the Dell logo and Rich of course had every book featuring the obscure horse logo. As for Looney Tunes Rich always told me that while Leonard's store had high grade copies of all the early Disney comics that he never could find high grade early issues of Looney Tunes. So it is likely they are much rarer than their contemporary Disney books. When I got the book below for a bargain price Rich was pleased and reminded me again how infrequently one sees these early issues. Looking at the book below I just realized we never discussed the "L&M comics" logo!!

That's the one. There is a classic image of Carl Barks standing in front of Malcolm's 1930's era Cadillac which may be the one pictured here in the video. Malcolm was the first collector to have been able to dig up Carl Barks' identity as I recall and have him come over to visit. Later there was also a famous visit with both Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson that was documented in a sales brochure for their paintings as I recall. I have a few of those somewhere. I believe Malcolm's house was off Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena; colloquially know as Millionaire's Row as that's who lived there back in the early 1900's. It's still a pretty swank area though the estates have now been converted to luxury townhome developments.

I remember that auction and I think Rich and I corresponded about it because it was such a unique item and featured such wonderful Barks comics. I've no idea who won that auction but it is certainly a treasure!!