AJD

As my wife pointed out to me, it's far more important that her shoes match her holster.

Henry comics were being included in "show bags" being sold at travelling fairs in Australia in the late 60s and early 70s. I remember hating them!

Yes, it's a great cover. Pretty sure it's based on this photo.

Sucks to be @Foley

As well as the GA reprints (that's where the Crimson Comet #1 pages came from above) I like the 'new stories with old characters' they're doing too. This new Shadow story from #6 (The Shadow was a 1950s Australian character unrelated to the US version) has a great noir cover with some excellent negative space work:

I'd say about par for the course for GA superhero stories - which is to say not so great. Here's the Crimson Comet's origin from #1:

Yes, quite a few. See the GA in Australia thread for more, but here are a couple:

Since the old journals are kaput, those of us still pecking away had to find a new home. I hope you guys don't mind this popping up here. I thought I'd start by putting up some group shots of my Australian Fiction House books. This represents about three years of buying 80% of the books that have come to market - the other 20% were too low in grade, or I was outbid.

Neat, maybe, but misleading. Comparisons should always be against a common baseline. Another useful comparison would be top price as a % of average weekly earnings. But, hey, use nominal figures if you want.

Rob, are you inflation correcting the prices? because the 2003 $350k sale is actually higher than a 2004 $350k sale, for example. Using the inflation calculator, the 2003 sale adjusts to $359k in 2004.

This thread is now My original journal is now in the gold forum: https://www.cgccomics.com/boards/topic/312774-ajds-comic-notebook/

I wish I'd kept a picture, but I saw a Dell book stamped 'for sale to US servicemen only' in an Australian eBay auction. During WW2 (and for years after) the Australian market for magazines and comics was highly protected, and I surmise that the copy was sold in a PX and stamped to stop it being 'black marketed' to the locals!

I have no problem with the name 'Mile High' being attached to this collection as well as Church. All the evidence suggests that this collection would not be around for us to marvel at without two people - Edgar Church and Chuck R. I think that if Chuck wasn't such a huckster there'd be much less push back about it, but he still did a net service to the comic world here.

As the least bad option, I've put in a request to move my old journal holus bolus to Gold. In the past I posted cover scans in gold threads and repeated them, with interior pages and commentary in my journal. I think I'll do the same, but to avoid looking like I'm spamming, I'll probably only cross post significant books to other threads.

I'm actually having trouble thinking of anything really notable that I've never read, at least in part. I've made a point of tracking down and reading most well-known or highly recommended comic material, including everything mentioned here so far.

My worth on this topic. When not to when the tears are not likely to propagate through normal handling of the book when the book is going to be slabbed anyway when monetary value is more important than conservation as tear seals will almost always reduce the sale price When to when the book is at risk of further damage through normal handling and you want to handle it Tear seals should always be done with professional materials (e.g. japan paper and paste, never tape - even the 'archival tape' you can buy in art stores). Incidentally, it's one of the easiest of paper conservation skills to DIY and there are some useful 'how to' guides out there. I don't know how much professional conservators would charge.

Thanks for the offer Scott. That's much appreciated. I haven't decided what I'd like to do with my journal. (Other than that it won't continue in the new format.) TBH, while it's gratifying that others have held my journal up as an exemplar, I'm thinking that there might be enough threads in gold already (including ones I started) for me to simply use those. Though it was nice to have it all in one place.

Very nice! Australian Archies had some nice covers that didn't appear on US editions. Here's another one that I don't think has appeared in this thread.

That would be dopey. Though this format might work for them. I hear that fart jokes go OK.

Yes. Not happy.

Well, that's a bit of a disappointment. Almost everything I've added to my journal thread in the past five years is now marooned. And to add insult to injury, @Duffman_Comics has migrated across as well. Will the indignity never end? (Thanks for dragging that last entry across Peter.) <grammarian> As for 'novelet', my style guide of choice, Garner's modern English usage, prefers 'novella' as the description of a short novel. In the entry for diminutives, he notes that french has -ette (feminine) and -et (masculine) forms, and since English does not have gendered nouns, either will do. Hence either bassinet or bassinette is acceptable. Same for novelet or novelette, I suppose. </grammarian>

One like and one "response", such as it was. Thus heartened, I shall continue. Here are the other couple of pulps I bought. The first is Vol 1 #4, fall of 1940. Like Duffman said, the covers are often fragile because they were made with an overhang. (They are often trimmed because the edges got ragged too.) But with careful handling I've been enjoying reading these. In the VGish grades they are, they're solid enough to read but already dinged enough that I don't worry too much about harming them. This one (Fall 1946) was a must have for me. The Bradbury story The creatures that time forgot is one of my absolute favourites. I first read it in a Scholastic books edition of R is for Rocket sometime in the first half of the 1970s. In that edition it had the much better and appropriate title Frost and fire, being a tale of the lives of the descendants of humans shipwrecked on Mercury and eking out an existence in the hour of twilight between extreme heat and cold. (Synopsis here.) It was nice to be able to read it in its first printing, but I must check the ending in the anthologised version - this one didn't gel with my (probably faulty) memory.

Wow. That's a really sweet looking copy. Amazing that books with long Barks stories haven't been read to death.

Since the maelstrom of responses to my previous post has died down in the more than a week since I posted it... ... it's probably time for something new. @mycomicshop recently got in a long run of Planet Stories, the Fiction House pulp partner to the wonderful, but increasingly expensive, Planet Comics. I showed them to my wife (who loves the Planet books) and we picked out a few to purchase. They are much more affordable than the comics, and have some great covers. Here are a couple of the ones I bought. My criteria were (1) cool cover and (2) Ray Bradbury (of whom more in the next post). More after the tumult from this post ebbs away.