AJD

It ran for five issues. And in all of the comic stories in all of the issues, no hill of beans.

Finally, here's Extra! #1. Quite a nice cover layout, I think. And here's the blurb on the inside page. It might just be hindsight bias, but does it sound a bit like even the publishers aren't sure about this one? Here's the title's first splash. Is it just me, or is Craig visually invoking the final scene of Casablanca here?

Whippersnapper.

Another Extra! With a nice (and recently topical ) splash by Reed Crandall (I'm pretty sure). "The sensitive Crown colony on the edge of the bamboo curtain..."

Crown to golden helmet

It's pretty well done. A bit like some of the Marvel covers that blended a drawn character with a photo background.

Brain to brain in a jar.

Soldier with face partially shaded facing away from the firefight depicted on the rest of the cover to .... well, you get the idea

Holy Moley! Put that down as a win.

It was a comic based around reporters, and tried to bring in adventure and spy angles. Not too many of the stories are memorable.

Apologies then. But my point about selling books remains - the recent female characters have been a bigger commercial success than previous iterations, so it makes perfect sense, even if we long-term fans would rather see more established ones.

Heaven forbid that a comic book company would (a) want to sell comics and (b) realise that > 50% of potential purchasers are female. Offset against that, of course, is the possibility that other potential customers who can't cope with sharing their hobby with - gasp - women might then not buy it because 'pandering'.

Yep, gotta love the purple label of affordability!

I have almost all of the EC New Direction books now - just missing Psychoanalysis #1. Here's a recent pickup of probably my least favourite of those titles - Extra! It's interesting to see that the letters column has an unusual number of unfavourable comments in later issues. That said, they aren't entirely without merit. In making the best of some fairly pedestrian story lines the artists had a crack at introducing some interest. And #3 has an early attempt at the 'picto-fiction' (generously illustrated text stories) format tried out in full book length later. A nice Johnny Craig one here:

I think we've all been there!

Legion of time to the passing of time

One more MM, and Goofy as well There's also Pinocchio on Four Colour #71 (or thereabouts).

There are quite a few by Walt Kelly among the first years of WDC&S. Mickey appears on quite a few, as do the dwarves and gremlins - but none by Barks that I can think of.

As I understand it, CGC never pinged archival tape as restoration, as long as it wasn't accompanied by other forms of work. At least that's what they said when they changed the rules on tape a few years ago. These days I think it would get a conserved label.

That is a thing of beauty!

Eye in the sky to many eyes in an imagined sky

Before this your description was just an interesting approach to business. But this takes ebay selling to the level of performance art.