AJD

The metric system Luke... use the metric system.

Because you only live once and posting on here is unlikely to be on many bucket lists. Go outside.

Van Gogh

Wow, it's been a while since I had anything to post. For a variety of reasons my comic collecting has taken a back seat to life recently (and not in bad way). And I have to say that the rise in the US$ and international postage rates over the past 12 months has really taken a bit of the fun out of this... But there's always local comics (when Americans aren't buying them because of the exchange rate and Australia's low postage costs) and I did get this nice Australian Fiction House reprint recently. The cover is from Jumbo #145, March 1951 The contents are different and the australian book is only 24 pages in total. No 'killers of the crypt' for me. There are two stories in there from Jumbo #125, a ZX-5 spy story and The Hawk. I'm not sure where the untitled Sheena story is from. It has a gorilla and a leopard in it, which should help narrow it down.

That scene cracked me up, along with the Jethro Tull parody going on at the same time.

Me too! The desperate expression on Donald's face really sells it.

Barks.

Here's a few I have in my Bucket. From Champ #25 Doll Man Quarterly #6 Wings #105

Great book Marty. But my, doesn't the hammer and sickle have a different resonance after the Cold War?

An early WDC&S that was the right price (even allowing for the steadily declining exchange rate ). It has a few flaws, but it's really solid and a delight to read. I'll post some inside shots later. I really like these big format early books.

Congrats! You just made the most ridiculous post of the day. What is wrong with people!?!? This type of post deserves an insta-ban. Interfering with someone trying to sell a book to pay for medical expenses. Saying your book is better (you forgot to write na na na na boo boo) which is irrelevant. Disingenuous "good luck with the sale." You officially look like a spiteful 10 year old with no social skills. If I were you i'd be embarrassed. Uh... guessing that Revat is not the culprit and he's just sarcastically paraphrasing a post in the sales thread that has since been deleted.

Fair enough. However people may feel about the sales presentation, that is a matter of opinion, and your thread is otherwise conform to the rules. There were some good natured and constructive posts, but some were definitely neither and I agree with you that those negative posts should be removed. As one of the negative posters, let me set the record straight. My post was over an hour after the first (and at that time only) post in the thread. The post was wordy, visually distracting and confusing as to where the books for sale were, and the only link took me to a list of moderns. As it happens, the OP was coming back with the moving parts required to turn it into a G/S/B sales thread later, but that wasn't obvious at the time - I thought 'work in progress' meant 'more books to be added'. As others later suggested, he could have used the test thread to build it. For my part I'm sorry if Dr Chaos took offence, but it was fair criticism at the time - and a mod could easily have decided to poof his first post if he'd come across it at the same time I did.

I've got one of those too: It goes nicely with the other LT war bonds/patriotic covers:

I can play in this thread. At least I thought I could... stupid photo bucket on iPad. I'll post a few when I get home to Australia next weekend. Corey - loving the way this thread is heading. If anyone can fix the code and display my pic, go for it.

Yeah, I wish I'd seen it 20 minutes earlier.

Here we go again. http://boards.collectors-society.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=8794641#Post8794641

I've never seen one in person. Heritage has auctioned a couple of copies. Link please? I couldn't find them in the sales archives, just some unpublished artwork and a cover proof.

OK, now it's time to get under the covers guys... guys? No, wait, come back... I think I'm going to start my random walk through the interiors of my comics with this one: It's not a great comic, but it's a very significant one for me. I bought it in 1973, just after reaching double figures in age. My entire collection got given away when I left home for university, which didn't bother me too much at the time, but I did miss them later. Then this one turned up on eBay and I had to get it back. I knew it was once mine because the large rubber stamp on the cover was one my dad gave me, and I marked almost all my books with it. When I opened it up, I found a Barks one page in the interior cover, a few pretty mediocre duck stories... and this on the inside back cover: The 10 year old me had done the puzzle! I vaguely remember trying to work out what the hell the third one was - that star shaped object meant nothing to me at the time. We used to play jacks, but always used 'knucklebones' rather than those ones. Still, the context let me triumph, and now I can preserve my efforts in 'internet carbonite', as Duffman_Comics put it. There are at least two others of my early collection still floating around. I got sniped on one on eBay once, and the No.315 here is also one of mine. I hope to track down others, but they're the only ones I've seen in 10 years.

Last bit of aviation esoterica before getting back to the comics... the tail on the model kit is highly reminiscent of the WW2 German design (which wasn't built) of the Ta 183. It wasn't unusual for the Soviets to trial German designs in the 1945 - 50 period, and there were rumours that they'd put the Ta183 into production (they didn't). My guess is that an 'artist's impression' added the tail.

**Warning - aviation nerdiness ahead ** Continuing on the aviation theme here, I promised to come back to the subject of the Soviet fighter on the cover of this Australian Fight comic (which shares its cover with Wings 121): It's interesting because there was no Soviet fighter that looked like that in service. While that mightn't mean much - after all, there are a few imaginary aeroplanes on comic covers and Wings 112 even has a flying saucer - but in this case I think there's a bit more to it. The same plane appears on Wings 118 here (the aircraft in the foreground is a US Navy F9F Panther, quite well rendered): And again on Wings 119 (the unlikely looking American aircraft is actually a quite accurately drawn F7U Cutlass - an exotic bird to be sure). I thought I had this sorted out, because the appearance of this 'non plane' is the same as this model kit, first released in 1953: My first thought was that the artists used the model as a... err... model. But that can't be right, because the Wings appeared in 1952. So it's more likely both of them used some other source material. But what source material? The aircraft they drew/modelled isn't a MiG-19, which looks very different, but was actually a one-off Soviet protype that first flew in 1949 or 50, the MiG I-340: I can't find any western source reference for that aircraft as early as 1952, but there must have been. (Air Trail magazine in June 1953 has an article.) The I-340 never entered service, and would have been nothing but a footnote in Cold War aviation history, except that it somehow got immortalised on comic books and in model form (with two wrong designations, Yak-25 and MiG-19)! You can read some more about these aircraft, model kits and the mystery that was Soviet aviation in the early 1950s here.

Argentina...

I'm likely to be on a buying hiatus for some time, but I'd like to keep this thread going by actually enjoying and sharing the books I already own, including the insides of them. So before I do that, here's the last couple of purchases I made. A Mad #12, in the style of Harper's literary magazine: And a wonderful war bonds cover from DC (how many breaches of the Geneva Convention can you spot, boys and girls?) Next time around, stand by for a thrilling new feature - "Under the covers with AJD". (Don't worry, it'll be better than that sounds.)

Great stuff Brian. I don't think that cover is by Barks (looks more like Strobl to me), but there are several Barks stories inside.

It gets really expensive to collect that way, and the last few can get VERY expensive. That's why it's better to try to swap for the ones you need once you have a goodly number of them and the inevitable dupes. On average, assuming they're evenly packed, you'd need to buy 55 of those Lego packs to get all 16. See here.

This one has an evil looking moon! And the moon's moustache is very Dali-esque too.