AJD

Not that I'm going to tell you anything you don't already know, but Sharon is AWESOME Seriously, it doesn't get better than this. I threw out a hint that I would like a book I knew she had, and before I knew it, Sharon had offered it - and ANOTHER book I wanted - at cost. Then she worked to minimise the shipping cost to Australia and THEN found an even cheaper way and offered me back the difference. And, of course, every communication was a delight. Sometimes I read the horror transaction threads and wonder about this hobby. But it can't be in bad shape with this lady around.

Thanks to our wonderful Sharon, I can now post this group shot of Marvel Family war stamp covers. I really like these war bonds/stamps covers and I have about twenty from half a dozen publishers now (thinks: group shot, hmmm). There's four more Fawcetts I need: Captain Midnight 22, Don Winslow 17, Funny Animals 6 and 20. I'm buying if you're selling...

Group hug!! I love this one.

Only 3? They were much more popular in Australia then. There were 25 of them in the equivalent of the Four Colour series down here. Here's a link if anyone's interested. I even have one of them: Not because I love LBW so much, but because it has the first ever printing of a Barks' Scrooge one-pager on the back:

Will do - I'm waiting for the 29th and 30th to finish their journey across the Pacific. When they turn up I'll do a group snap. BTW - anyone eyeing the 'high grade PGX' WDC&S books on ebay right now should read this thread. It's times like these that these boards are worth their weight in gold.

The topic of the source of Barks' Egyptian landscapes from FC29 came up in the 'Ask Gator' thread. As most of you duck fans would know, they were cribbed from National Geographic. Here's some examples I scanned in from the first volume of the Another Rainbow Barks Library:

ah, to try to narrow to one "single" greatest is nary an impossible task, as each Barks fan will no doubt have their favorite... for me, as a scrooge mcduck fan, I have to say FC 178...but your milage will vary (thumbs u I prefer the FC 291 story but I think US 5 is a close second. I also read the "Second Richest Duck" story many times. If I had a copy of FC 29 I might be singing its praises but I don't. The Egyptian scenes in the book are great. Did Barks visit England and visit the artifacts in the British Museum or go to Africa? Neither - the Egyptian scenes are cribbed from a National Geographic article. The Another Rainbow Barks Library has comparisons of the panels and the article's photos. But agreed - they are very nicely done. (I'll try to remember to scan them and post a few.) Just posted over in the Show us your Ducks thread.

ah, to try to narrow to one "single" greatest is nary an impossible task, as each Barks fan will no doubt have their favorite... for me, as a scrooge mcduck fan, I have to say FC 178...but your milage will vary (thumbs u I prefer the FC 291 story but I think US 5 is a close second. I also read the "Second Richest Duck" story many times. If I had a copy of FC 29 I might be singing its praises but I don't. The Egyptian scenes in the book are great. Did Barks visit England and visit the artifacts in the British Museum or go to Africa? Neither - the Egyptian scenes are cribbed from a National Geographic article. The Another Rainbow Barks Library has comparisons of the panels and the article's photos. But agreed - they are very nicely done. (I'll try to remember to scan them and post a few.)

Looks like a Barks' name on the box. Was that a Kelly or Carl Buettner joke or did Barks do the cover? I don't think it is a Barks cover - GCD doesn't note it as such - and his only "credit" seems to be something like a tribute from Buettner or Kelly (I'd favour the latter). Legend has it his editor(s) were none too happy with the display, but let it slide on the understanding "never again". It's Walt Kelly - he did some wonderful covers on WDC&S.

Not quite - turn sigs on

A slow start to my aim to get stuck into WDC&S 1-100 in 2011, but at least it's a nice one. This was on eBay - 'looks good for its age' and had a cropped photo. Sometimes it's worth taking a punt...

Oh yeah, good point. A thread on Australian comics without marsupials - what was I thinking? Here's another from that well-known publisher All Australasian Comics to make up for it:

Good questions. US books couldn't be imported into Australia because of import restrictions. When the dust settled at the end of WWII, Australia was a very reluctant entrant into free trade agreements due to the dependence of the local economy on agriculture, which was a subsidised industry. Most local manufacture was protected by high tariffs, import restrictions or both. That included comic books. The last restrictions were raised in (I think) the late 1970s. The last Australian Disneys of the ongoing series came out in 1978, when Gold Key/Whitman issues replaced them. (There were two later attempts to start up Australian Disney comics, one in 1984 and again about 5 or 6 years ago. Neither lasted long due to the smaller overall market for comics and the competition from imports.) Presumably G.I.s brought comics with them when they arrived here in 1942, and I have wondered if US comics were available on Australian bases. I saw Dell once with 'for sale to US personnel only' stamped on it, but I don't know for sure that is the explanation. But I think that comics brought here by soldiers would have been a tiny fraction of the total market, and they don't seem to have left much of a footprint 65 years on.

And one last bunch. Felix the Cat was originally a WWI vintage work of Australian artist Pat Sullivan. He went on to fame and fortune in America (kind of the Nicole Kidman of his day I suppose) before coming back home as reprints. I'm struggling to explain 'Boofhead' properly (although there's a few of them on the boards). It roughly translates into 'stupid but mostly harmless'. Maybe 'bumpkin' comes close? (Duffman, help me out here. Either a definition or a demonstration will do. ) This one looks to me like a swipe from a US book: And last, but certainly not least, we had GGA too (such as it was - Moira Bertram started working in comics at 14 and her work was always 'good for a 14 year old' - even 20 years later.) Thanks for looking, and have a bonzer Australia Day!

Australia had its own superhero comics. Here's a couple of them: Captain Atom, at one time the most popular comic in Australia (probably didn't hurt that it was colour when most of the competition wasn't: (Most Australian comics were the standard layout, but there were plenty of landscape formatted comics too.) Here's the Crimson Comet - classic GA stuff: And an 'Adventure' style title: And Dr Mensana - he took pills to be either super-strong or super-smart:

First up, some reprints. Here's a couple of Disneys from my collection. WDC&S began in Australia in late 1946, five years after the US series. We picked up on the most recent issue, so the numbers are offset by sixty or so. So #31 has the cover of Dell's #91: This pocket sized book was an early reprint. It's digest size suggests WWII paper shortages. And just for Bill, an Australian D-ickTracy (The last one is from the Bonzer book - as are the ones to follow.)

Since 26 January is Australia Day, I thought I'd mark the occasion with some Australian GA comics. Some Aussie comics were reprints of US comics or newspaper strips, although the interiors don't usually match up to the same cover on the US editions. The ones with a 6d (sixpence = 5 c) cover price are cheap in every sense of the word. They have non glossy paper covers and the interiors are mostly b&w, although some of the better sellers like WDC&S had colour pages for a wrap or two. They were also shorter in page length - my Australian WDC&S 31 (below) has 24 pages. The 9d (ninepence = 7.5 c) copies are on slightly better paper and with more colour, and the 1/- (1 shilling = 10c) are often colour throughout, though B&W wasn't unusual in Australian comics right into the 1970s. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of documentation of these, except for an excellent site on Australian Disneys and one on Australian DCs. There's nothing similar for Marvels or any others. Incidentally, I didn't see a Marvel in colour until the late 1970s when import laws changed and it wasn't until the late 80s that I realised that SA Marvels were in colour (or color, as the case may be)! There were reprints of hundreds of US titles. I was at a fair last year and found an Australian reprint of Piracy #3- the first EC reprint that I know of. I have no idea if there are other EC titles. I'd like an Australian Weird Science - but no one I have spoken to knew there were any Aussie ECs, so who knows? There is one book on Australian comics that I can't recommend highly enough for anyone interested in comics outside the US. Called 'Bonzer: Australian comics 1900s - 1990s', about two thirds of the book is GA and it mostly focuses on Australian original characters (Felix the Cat is one) and titles (The Potts, Silver Starr, Supa Dupa Man etc etc). This book has a checklist of original Australian comics (but not reprints) and goes a long way to filling a gap. A lot of long time collectors still get surprised when a collection comes to market and stuff that no one knew about pops up. As for the pre-code covers, I think Australian editions were a bit tamer than some of the more lurid GA ones. These days we're culturally more like the US, but right up to the 70s we were very much an outpost of more conservative Britain. (You can tell by comparing an Australian TV guide from the 60s with one today.) But even with the tamer covers, there were anti-comic drives and laws passed in the states of Victoria (where I grew up) and Queensland. When I get the time, I want to track down some Parliamentary speeches and other anti-comic rants, and I'll add them to this thread. Most of the Australian GA comics aren't common. Comic collecting here has never had the profile it has in America (or maybe even England from what I've seen). There are no comic stores with back issues of that sort, and the most active community of collectors are Disney and Phantom (in production here continuously since 1946 and now up to #1600-odd and commanding big prices for the early issues, $10k+). eBay is the outlet of preference - no CLink, Heritage... As a kid I certainly haunted the local equivalent of Bonnet's, and I never saw most of the comics reproduced in the book, mostly Disney, Phantom, Gold Key and Harvey reprints. I've sometimes thought that it would make a nice retirement project to see what I could find and set up a website. I now wish I'd copied more cover images from Diamond on eBay - Geppi's collection of Australian comics may have been the world's best. You can see the latest ones here. (Some Archies and Tarzans in there that might be of interest to some here.) Anyway, this thread is useless without pictures, as they say in the clasics, so here we go...

Great work pulling those four together. The Mile High is a beauty - do you know if there were copies of the others in the Church collection?

nice war bonds book! here's another from the same month. Here's another. I'm in the process of getting the other two Marvel Family war stamp covers. I'll post a group shot once I have them all.

Great book! Yep, high grade GA funny animal books have an appeal all of their own.

I remember when this book was for sale some years ago. Barney Bear. I never actually saw a copy so I don't know the quality of the publication. I have it - they are almost photocopy standard from the Our Gang pages. Readable but a long way short of archival quality.

Speaking of Barks, wouldn't a well-reproduced collection of the Barney Bear stories from Our Gang be nice? They have some really good art and are close in spirit to some of the WDC&S 10 pagers.

That's not a WDC&S 1-100

Latest addition thanks to Flying Orb. Soon to be released from its plastic tomb.

Just got another War Bonds issue. (Thanks Gary) I'm looking for nice copies of Wow 27 (if you ever tire of yours Sharon, you'll know where to turn...) and Master 56 to round out the Marvel Family War Bonds issues.