AJD

More underwater action

If anyone has nice copies of Heroic 25 and 31 they want to profiteer from, hit me up!

Then you can start adding in foreign editions as well...

I just got a few more nice Australian Disneys. These books have a nostalgia value for me far above and beyond their cost. The newer they look the more they take me back. This one has been on my want list for ages - it is the first comic I can remember buying on a trip to Melbourne with my mother aged 8.

Dinner date to date stamp

Worth to worthless

Er, not as such, no. Here's the end:

Oops - yeah, it's a twenty. I'd say so, yes. Just looking at the images that come up when you Google "Maurice Bramley artist", the style seems spot on. Thank you Duffbloke! Though I now blame you for a hankering I have to get some of his war covers too...

I really like the crime comics published in Australia by Horwitz publishing. The insides were mostly reprints of stories from Quality Comics' crime titles, but the covers appear to be new - and often really good. Here's a new one into the box. No GGA this time, but a really well constructed layout. I like that the foreground character is shaded while the guy behind is fully lit: The pictures of death is reprinted from T-Man #9. I just wish the $ bill with the skull replacing GW was a bit more featured in the splash. I think it would be quite a striking image (though a bit more effort in drawing it wouldn't have gone astray...). Here's another Horwitz book, with another good cover - this time on a nice glossy stock, which is unusual in my experience. And as a treat to my dedicated readership (all three of you), here's a test of your detective skills. (And you may marvel at the evidence handling techniques on display here!)

I hadn't made the connection, but I think you're right. That's awful. Yes, modern humans exhibit much more neotony - carrying childhood physical characteristics into adulthood. Look at a baby chimp, and you'll see it has a much more human face than an adult. Chimps become more, er, chimplike as they age, while we don't.

Wheel tyred to real tired - and very suitable for the weather here this week! 40+ C every day...

So I can look forward to receiving my "bumper book of comics you'll never own" from Heritage? One of these days they'll realise I never buy anything in these auctions and stop sending them.

Portrait classic to landscape classic

A few new Australian books have joined the fold. This one is my 91st Australian Fiction House book. It has a filler 'educational' look at gorillas, with some accurate and some dodgy claims. (Is there really a documented instance of a gorilla bending the barrel of a large gun? Or of a gorilla wrestling a cheetah/leopard?) I thought the tacit discussion of the human-neanderthal-gorilla evolutionary relationship is interesting. But it doesn't mention that gorillas are vegetarians, and I think the portrait might have been drawn from the ugliest gorilla (with the worst orthodontics problem) on record!

Pretty much any AF15 is worth grading. Yours looks solid and complete with very amateurish colour touch. The tape won't matter so much as CGC will just grade it as if the tear wasn't sealed at all. If I had to guess, I think it might be 3.5 C-1 or maybe C-2. (C= amateur resto, 1 = slight, 2 = medium). I'm sure others will know more than me.

Treasure chest to Treasure chest

Sticking with the Egypt theme

Is Major Herringbone happy with the results? Err, not quite: Because having "pinup pictures" of your daughter up on the wall at work is completely non-creepy...

The last of the latest batch of books Most of the M.D. stories are pretty dense on medical technologies and general practice as it was in the 1950s. Having a daughter in the medical field, it's interesting to see what state of the art looked like back then. This story is a bit different though, centering on a mental illness - in this case hypochondria.

No, I had both hands full with glasses of beer and couldn't get to my knife.