AJD

Just for fun while I had this box out.

And now, the end is near… etc. Here’s the final lot of my bumper 2014 crop. For a variety of reasons – not least of which being the Australian dollar – I don’t expect to get anywhere near this level of buying in 2015. But, man it was fun. I had to have this one because the cover art is so striking. It doesn’t sit so badly beside my war bonds covers in any case. And it’s cheap! This one was just for fun. It’s a great book to show non-comic people, and it always gets a response. (It’s cheap too.) I picked this up from a boardie who I suspect prints these in his basement. I also decided I needed to get some of the GA greats into my collection. I started with Schomburg/Xela: and Frazetta (thanks Sha/skypinkblue for this one) and L. B. Cole Finally, not GA, but what’s not to like about Steranko? I have a small collection of his work – all the Nick Furies (first series), Captain America and this. I must get an X-Men #50 sometime… As the pig says, “that’s all folks”. I hope you liked the show. If you got 10% of the fun I had I’ll be happy.

Yep, great show here Mr AJD. Thanks guys. I should take the opportunity here to thank Mr Point Five for his part in all this. Jon has very kindly acted as a mailing house for books where sellers won't ship to "internationals". Without him this would be a much poorer show. So thanks Jon, and may the comic book Karma reward you with low BINs in perpetuity. I'd also like to thank my mum and dad.... oh, wait, that's my Academy Award speech, so you'll have a wait a bit for that one. Anyhoo, today we'll do the cartoon books. As my sig says, I've been working away at the WDC&S 1 - 100 run for a few years. Earlier in this thread I mentioned that I am now complete from 49 - 100. Here are the last two I needed to fill out that run. Both came from stellar eBay seller Blissard. This one was an upgrade. My previous copy was a freebie in with some other books I wanted, and is probably about a 2.0. (Note to self: exile it to Duff manor.) This one came out of a 6.5 slab. WDC&S books shouldn't live in slabs. This was actually my first purchase in 2014, from a boardie. And the first coverless I ever bought. But the price was right, and this book has taken off $$$ wise in the past few years. I bid on an incomplete copy with a low grade cover on eBay, but even that went for more than I was willing to pay. Another helpful boardie made me a reproduction cover for it. I know I should look at this as a frankenbook that's unworthy... etc, but darned if I don't smile every time I look at it. I also finished off the Silver Age Dell run of Peanuts books this year - all three from eBay. These aren't great reading (they're mostly not Shultz stories) but as a set of colourful and striking covers, they're right up there. OK, one more push tomorrow and we're done. It's the imaginatively titled category "other". Thanks for looking again.

Thanks for the kind words Brandon. And Ed - find some things to sell me again next year. OK, 2014 was a great year for my collection, and today we'll see my Fiction House pickups. If you look at the Class of 2013 at the start of this journal, you'll see I was collecting the GGA issues of Wings. I had one more of those to go, which I got in a Heritage auction at the start of the year: With that crossed off, I decided to move on to Planet Comics. My wife loves the Fiction House books - a point we'll come back to later - which makes them a domestically painless acquisition. I got this one from Mycomicshop. (Those guys are a class act for grading and customer service.) This was from a Heritage weekly auction. Hard to go past the 'girls in glass tubes' theme. It was cracked out of a PLOA slab. According to CGC, it has a trimmed RH edge on the cover. I think it's a very slight trim and the book looks great. In a Heritage auction towards the end of the year, I was hoping to get a Planet 71, which has a classic Whitman cover. To say I underestimated the likely cost is putting it mildly. I thought it might sell for $250, but it soared well over $1,000... Given that, I jumped onto some dealer sites to see what their Whitman covered Planets were selling for and bought three of them right away. I really wanted some of these, and I didn't want to miss them in a price spike. (I still don't have a Shock SuspenStories #6 and really kick myself for not buying one three years ago before it took off.) Anyway, Bedrock City had these two: I think that 72 is one of the best covers in the run. Metro had a Whitman Planet as well: And they also had this beauty: But probably the best pickup was getting this compensation from my wife for Christmas. This is looking over me as I type: Tomorrow we'll change gear with funny animals and cartoon books. (And, yes, we're getting towards the end.)

Nice books. All three covers are by Barks. He did most of the WDC&S covers during that period. Yep, and #140 has the first Gyro Gearloose. (thumbs u

While I'm here, three more 'odd' ECs I got this year. Piracy is a cracking good read, and the classic cover - credit to Marie Severin for the colour work on this one - makes it a must have. This is the first one of this series I've picked up. Another good read. Impact, Aces High and Piracy are the best of the New Direction titles I've read. I have a single copy of Extra and it's very mediocre. Valor is OK, but some of the stories seem to lack 'oomph' for a title that has fighting as its main theme. I haven't read any of M.D. or Pyschoanalysis, so I'm not sure about those. I'd like to find a nice Impact #1 next year. Finally, this bargain eBay pickup finished my run of Valor. Despite my comments above, it's worth picking up this reasonably priced run for the cover art alone. That's it for the ECs. We'll move on to Fiction House tomorrow.

Thanks Griff - that would be great! Today's offering is the EC sci-fi pickups for the year. These were the favourites of Gaines and Feldstein of all the EC titles, and the ones they were proudest of. I think the war titles were stronger (or maybe they've just aged better) but these books are great too. The funny thing is that I have no interest in the EC horror comics at all. I know they're why EC is as famous as it is in the history of comics, but I just don't see the appeal. I don't like horror movies either. Oh well, that just means fewer comics to have to try to find. The first Weird Fantasy. A really nice looking 4.0 bought from Ed Owens here on the boards. I'm seriously contemplating cracking out all of my ECs these holidays. I think I've bought about 40 slabs in total, and half of them have been liberated. The only thing that holds me back is the loss of value... Another Don and Maggie book. This looks great in hand, especially for the grade. (It has a long faint crease on the cover.) Another Ed Owens book. ( Ed). The perfect comic book - presents great on the FC, but a bit messed up on the back = affordability. eBay pickup - really nice, especially for the price. A surprisingly reasonably priced book from Metro. The one that got away twice. I had a couple of tries to buy a WF18 before I got this one from Ed. On eBay I had a snipe that failed to lodge because the sniper encountered one of those 'prove you're not a robot' pages- and it sold for under $50. This one cost more than that, but it's a beaut, especially now it's out of its plastic tomb. A great Frazetta PLOA book. (Purple Label of Affordability). I don't understand the aesthetic that says that a book with a couple of dots of marker is to be shunned as unworthy - but I'm happy to take advantage of it.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the new Don Rosa hardcover volumes from Fantagraphics. I got mine before Christmas and am really pleased with them. They remind me of everything I like (and a few things I don't like) about Rosa's work. Not having read some of these stories for some years now, it really struck me how the early Rosa stories were nt far removed from underground comics. The art isn't as polished as you'd normally see in a major publisher's books and the stories often have a frenetic feel to them. There's none of the careful pacing or extended setting up of a scene like you'd often get from Barks. My favourite example is Barks' Atlantis story in Uncle Scrooge #5 - it's 32 pages long but half the story is taken getting the ducks to Atlantas - and there's a great pie fight along the way. In Son of the Sun, Rosa has them on a plane on page 5, having already flagged where the quest would be on page 3. Now to be fair, early Barks wasn't classic Barks either, and Rosa's stories get better as you go along. The volumes cover the first couple of years' worth of stories, and they're head and shoulders better than the middle of the road European stories that appeared around the same time, or almost all of the post-Barks American duck stories. Also, Uncle Scrooge #219 with Son of the Sun is the reason I picked up comics again as an adult, so I well recall how exciting it was to find someone at least trying to do classic duck stories. I'm going to enjoy collecting this series. I'll find some of my highlights from the early stories and post them later.

AJD's Class of 2014 - Part III I started this year with 15 of the 24 issues of EC's Two Fisted tales, and with the vague hope of completing the run this year. I didn't expect it to happen though. Even though these aren't expensive books, finding the right midgrade copies is usually a matter of patience. The first copy I bought was #26 back in June 2008, so this was a six year job. As it happened, the remaining issues just happened to pop up at various times over the year. Job done. Incidentally, if you haven't read TFT, track down a reprint of one or two copies (any between 19 and 35 would be my recommended introduction) or of its sister title Frontline Combat (any of those, though #7 is my favourite). These are simply some of the best war comics ever. I first became aware of these through the books 'The International Book of Comics' (Dennis Gifford) and 'The Classic Era of American Comics' (Nicky Wright). Intrigued by the descriptions in those books I bought TFT 26 to check it out. The rest is history. Harvey Kurtzman's work alone is worth the price of admission. Here's what Kurtzman had to say about his approach to them: "... it was fashionable to do war comics in terms of fantasy and glamour, which I thought was a terrible immorality. They made war a happy event where American supermen go around beating up buck-toothed yellow men... but the way war really is, you get killed suddenly for no reason". OK, so onto the books. This one was a boards purchase. The first in the series (#18) is more an adventure book than a war book, so this is the first of the war themed TFT. (36 - 39 go back to the adventure stories, and really suffer in comparison.) This was the last one I got. Because I was only missing one, I bit the bullet and (over)paid Metro's asking price. An eBay purchase and a lovely book. From the same eBay seller. Not quite as nice, but still right in my wheelhouse. Another nice book from Four Color Comics. A bargain basement eBay purchase. Not so bargain basement, but still well under guide from eBay. One of my least favourite books in the series, but cheap enough on the 'Bay. My least favourite book in the run, but a nice upgrade from the boards of the .5 I had previously. We'll do the rest of the ECs tomorrow. Thanks for looking.

Happy holidays all. I was sitting with my now adult daughter today looking over the new Don Rosa hardcover volumes, and she made some comments I thought worth passing on here because of the fresh perspectve she has. I'll post my comments on the Rosa books tomorrow (Cliff notes version: well worth having), but first a little background. My daughter was born in 1990, and she grew up with a houseful of Disney comics. First of all me reading them to her, and then on her own. My hardcover Barks Library just about got worn out. Today we got talking about her all time favourite stories, and it became clear that her strong preference was for Rosa. That surprised me, because I think that Barks was a clearly superior writer (usually) and always a better artist. I just assumed she'd feel the same. Here's what she had to say: 1. Barks' stories are very much a result of a much larger and more remote world than she has ever experienced. When he sent the ducks off to exotic places, to most of the readers they were places they'd never experience (or at least assumed they wouldn't) - such as Trala La in the Himalayas. Today many of her friends have trekked in Nepal. Barks got reader interest through techniques that don't really translate as well today. 2. Rosa does physical slapstick comedy better than Barks. (Actually, I partially agree with that, and the new books reminded me of that in places). 3. The Life and Times series is wonderfully coherent in a way that Barks never was. A story would finish in one issue, and those events wouldn't impact the next issue at all. (I think that difference reflects the view of a generation reading comics decades after Stan Lee perfected the serialisation of stories.) She also made one comment that struck me as a deep truth I hadn't realised. We were talking about something that required a factual data point to resolve and she pulled out her smartphone and Googled it in seconds. She observed that she always wanted a Junior Woodchuck Guidebook - and now she has one. Talking to your kids about comics.

I set out in April 2011 to get Mad 1 - 10. Almost there now, missing just #5. Though I strayed outside the range in 2013 by buying a #22 and I weakened this year as well, picking up a 20 and 21 when they were going cheap at Heritage. I might end up going for the 1 - 23 run at some stage... Got this one from Joeypost. This is still my largest purchase $$$ wise. Heritage for this one: Bought this one from Four Color Comics. I really liked the couple of books I got from them - I just wish they had more things I want in their inventory. Heritage - from the Don & Maggie collection, cracked out (graded 5.5 by CGC). Heritage again. A fun book. Also from Heritage and a bit disappointing because the tanning is worse than it seems in a scan. At least it wasn't too expensive. Next up will be Two Fisted Tales, a run I finished this year. (See earlier post.)

Happy Christmas everyone. It's the time of year to do the AJD Class of 2014 posts. I've had a great year collecting this year. I've been on the road a lot, which left me in hotel rooms with comic browsing often the best way to kill an hour or two - oh, and extra income from the extra work. The result, as you'll see, has been a big fun year of GA collecting. For this first post, let's start with the few war bonds covers I've got this year. (You can see the rest of my theme collection here.) This one was an eBay pickup for $30. I haven't managed to find one in years of looking, and feared this one might go for multiples of guide - it didn't. Still looking for a #6 if anyone has any leads. Heritage for this one. Gotta say, the cover is about all this comic has going for it. the interior artwork and writing are mediocre at best. I found this really nice copy at Metro. Quality wise it seems like a Dell file copy, but there's nothing to indicate that. Super comics 86 Love this one. Apart from the chip out of the bottom, this is a really sweet copy - nice and tight and with great cover inks and gloss. Not a bad read either, and the cover is a nice whimsical bonds cover. Tec 101 This one is just great. Every page is a war bonds ad, with contributions from lots of well known and a few not so well known cartoonists. I've shown a couple of sample pages below. This book should be a grail for bonds collectors. War Victory nn Finally, I've wanted one of these for a long while and thought I'd better grab it before the Aussie dollar goes too much further south. A Heritage win from last week. Batman 17 Just for fun, here's a pic of the splash page, nicked from an eBay listing. That'll do for today. I'll start on the ECs tomorrow.

Thank you much. I thought the 9.4 sold from Geppi, through heritage? Gotta figure that's locked away too, until it isn't. Here's the old pic of the run of WDCS I picked up oh those 10 years ago. FC 9 on the arm of the couch too. I think the difference between OW to W and White is a matter of mood for the graders that day. I own some of those now. They went to a good home.

One of my favourites. Still not sure why the bomb is pink.

Just arrived yesterday.

Very cool! Extremely cool. There are some Australian editions coming up for auction in January that I will own in a just world.

I figure if Walt Kelly can use the same gag four times, then I can repeat post it, right?

Whoa, the original of a seriously iconic cartoon! Is it yours, or did you just get the pic from FB? That's a really nice piece to own if it's yours. Welcome to the boards and the thread in any case. (thumbs u

Good for the seller. But, you know, it wasn't without some appeal. And a cover by a well-known EC artist as well.

Yeah, that came up in my eBay search today. I did a double take until I looked at the inside front cover image. The inset panel is a little more obvious from the inside! From the outside it mostly looks OK.

Welcome back Marty. I guess we'll file that one under "well-loved".

Don't encourage him. Still, the way things work here, the rug will be decorating Duff Manor when I get a better one.

I'm with you all the way on the Avengers #1. Your purple copy is superior in every way that matters to me. As you say, "a little marker".

As I mentioned above, I was waiting on delivery of a book to complete a short run. It was Four Color #969 (Peanuts #2). It arrived this week, so I could finally put this photo together: This isn't my usual stuff. As you'll have noticed elsewhere in this thread, I'm almost exclusively a GA collector. But these silver age comics have a charm I just couldn't resist. The strong (mostly) single colour backgrounds and the big bold character drawings give them a similar appeal for me to the early Barks 'gag' covers on Uncle Scrooge. I think they're my wife's favourite comics in my collection as well.

Sorry, just meant this seems seriously addictive, and I don't need another 'focus' - and I use the term lightly. And, yes, it's a fun read. (thumbs u