Yellow Kid

This stuff is so rare. RM, have you com across this "reference" book? That's Bernie Shine. Disney collector extrordinarre. LA based collector. Probably the best Disney colection I have ever seen. He is pretty focused unlike me who likes anything "shiny" Oh, no sport coats for Robot Man. More likely a vintage Nudies western shirt. You know the ones with the bright saquorro catcus on the sleeves. I like my "going out" clothes vintage (like my collection). I ask, because there's a fellow pictured, and I can kind of see him as a version of you - though I think you'd have a louder sports coat . . . This is a classic picture of Robert Lesser in his very tiny NYC apartment, where he used virtually every inch of the place to display his collection. Bob loved Buck Rogers and robots but liked all old comic collectibles. In 1975 he also wrote, using his collection for reference material, the first great book of comic collectibles, A Celebration of Comic Art and Memorabilia. For years it was a must have classic selling for $100 or more. Now there has been a warehouse find or something like that because you can get it on eBay for $10 on most days. If you don't have it, and you have enjoyed this thread, you need to get it. While it is now 40 years old, it is still one of the very best books of its kind.

I love to see someone collecting what they like and not what someone else tells them is hot or a great investment. I doubt that many have enjoyed their life as much as you have. Keep it up, Bob!

Bucky Bug was great, especially the series about the Great War!

I don't think that Chuck or the other guys spend a lot of time on the internet.

Chuck is definitely still around!

Here is a little history lesson for you about the development of comic book stores in Southern California. In the late 1950's, some regular book stores, for example Jim's, started carrying old comic books because of customer interest. Usually this meant that they had one or two boxes hidden away that they would bring out if you asked. At Cherokee Books, Burt, his older brother, and his father ran a very nice book store. His father and older brother were very conservative, while Burt was young, flashy, and into other things they did not approve of so instead of having a box of comics, the exiled Burt to the attic and let him deal in comic books and smoke up there. He built an excellent stock, and it was always fun to go in the store and ask the father if Burt was in, and he would wave you up the stairs. During this same period, Leonard Brown and I developed a very successful comic book mail order business out of his parents' house in Long Beach--we were both young and lived at home. Even by the early 1960's, it was getting more difficult for us to make the great finds, and Leonard decided we needed to open a store so people would bring their books to sell them to us. I had plans to finish college and go to grad school, so he found Malcolm Willits and they opened the first store in the area, a few blocks down from Cherokee Books so customers could walk to both places in one trip, in 1964. It took a few years but eventually they moved into an empty bank at 6763 Hollywood Blvd., a nice location between Cherokee Books and The Chinese Theater. They eventually developed the best inventory of comics and movie material in the country and became the first store to deal in that material. What set them apart was that they were not a small part of a larger store, but the store itself. Steve Edrington opened Bond Street Books not far away and as Bob indicated, he mostly dealt in lower grade material but had lots of it and still has a store today. I am still in touch with Edrington, Willits, and McCleary, However, while Brown died almost eight years ago, the rest of that old group of dinosaurs who were there at the beginning are still waiting for the asteroid to hit. Sorry for the long post, but Bob encouraged me.

Great book! I really appreciate the breadth of your collection.

Great book! There are so many wonderful books and magazines that are relatively unknown to most contemporary collectors. Just last week a friend of mine who is a major Disney collector marveled at the fact that publisher's beautiful bound volumes of children's magazines with art by the greatest illustrators of their time like Kemble, Cox, and Cady, were available so inexpensively, often less than $50 a volume in nice condition.

You've got some great pinbacks! Thanks for sharing.

Richard Kyle moved south to Long Beach, CA, probably in the early 1960's, and opened a great paperback and new comics store. I never saw so many sci-fi paperbacks in one place before, but they were his passion more than comics. We always had interesting conversations.

Bob, You just keep pulling out one great item after another! As the Yellow Kid would say, "Grate Stuff. See!" Keep 'em coming.

The story about the naked guy actually involved Leonard Brown and Richard Olson. I have written about it several times as it was a night I will never forget. Stroud and Alexander went to the guy's house a month or two later only to find that we had already gotten all of the comics. Richard Olson

An outstanding copy of WDCS #2, which I think is the most difficult book to find in the regular series. It always brings up great memories for me as I can vividly remember buying a copy at the Chicago Con in the early 1970's from a young con dealer, Steve Geppi, to complete my run.

I always thought that #49-#156 books had the best stories. You could watch Barks develop his style, in writing and drawing, and become the genius that we all love. Your books look like the perfect kind of run--beautiful and yet they could be read. Congratulations!

From art to literature to pictures of what will soon be the world's most populated country, Flex's thread is always interesting and I thank him for keeping it alive.

Your art is incredible, both beautiful and rare, and by a great artist for a ground-breaking series. I have never seen an original Kemble Blackberries before and I am delighted to know that one exists, especially in the collection of someone who appreciates what he has. Congratulations!

Sorry, I couldn't find a link either, but it is in issue #19 which came out fairly recently. The narrative is okay but what I feel make the article special is that it contains the first definitive listing of Pore Li'l Mose Sunday strips. Working with my friends at The Billy Ireland Museum at Ohio State University and using my personal collection, I was able to not only list appearances but confirm absences. Also, one date that some people thought was a PLM strip did contain two black cartoons by Outcault but neither was a PLM strip, and it was good to get that clarified.. For the few of us left who still collect PLM, I hope the listing will be helpful. Did you mean that the Blackberries page you posted was from the book, or did you mean it was the OA for the page from the book? Last year I was extremely fortunate to finally obtain my first signed Outcault Yellow Kid art so a Kemble Blackberries piece is now at the top of my want list.

No hemmed addition, the hand print, a smaller stature, and barely the focal point of the strip equals early. As I recall, even the very first appearance of the Yellow Kid in the newspaper on February 17, 1895, in a small black and white cartoon reprinted from TRUTH magazine, one of several Outcault had drawn for the publication, had a dirty hand print or two. Also, any Outcault cartoon in Hogan's Alley would be early; i.e., during the first year and a half. After that, Outcault drew the Kid in McFadden's Flats for the Hearst paper and George B. Luks (later to become a fine artist of some renown) continued Hogan's Alley for Pulitzer.

The Yellow Kid pages are earlier ones. I forget exactly when he did it, but after a year or two Outcault added another piece of cloth around the bottom of the YK's nightshirt as he was growing and it is sign of a later strip. The 36 Sunday pages collected for the book are great, and they are even more attractive than the Sunday tearsheets because of the slick paper and empty backs. Sunday tearsheets used to be fairly common, but so many dealers tore their books apart when they realized they could sell the pages individually and make more money that now there are a lot of loose book pages floating around in the market.

By chance, I really like Outcault's Pore Li'l Mose and just published an article on him in the latest issue of Hogan's Alley. However, even there I mentioned it was the Blackberries who paved the way for black cartoon characters. Now I admit that most people couldn't name one of the Blackberries and the focus was on poor black children, but with the frequent combination of wealthy black children. Because I really like Kemble as well as Outcault and just wrote the article, I might be in somewhat of a unique position to name Billy Millions and Scotty as two of the Blackberries. My main reason for commenting was that all too often, Pore Li'l Mose is given credit for being the first black character strip and I wanted to make sure that there was no misunderstanding on this board. Actually, it is somewhat similar to what happened in comic strips in general. Jimmy Swinnerton started publishing The Little Bears in 1892 and ended up with a bunch of them each Sunday. Outcault started with a large cast in Hogan's Alley. It was only after the Yellow Kid's nightshirt went through several color changes and became bright yellow, that he stood out and became the star, while still working within the group setting.

E. W. Kemble's "The Blackberries" appeared in the Sunday newspapers on a regular basis a few years before R. F. Outcault began "Pore Li'l Mose."

In the 1960's, Collectors Bookstore had a NM/M copy of Tec 1 in their showcase for $50 and couldn't sell it. Finally they convinced a regular Disney customer to buy it. He ultimately sold it on the floor at the SDCC years later. They had an equally fine run of More Fun Comics from about #20-#50 they couldn't sell so ultimately put it in their monthly auctions in groups of five books. I wanted both of these items in the worst way but was in grad school and didn't have an extra penny.

Great copy! A nice reward for going to the con.

It is nice when the rarest of the three books is also the highest graded copy! These are such beautiful books and I am glad that you got them all from the same collection of an old-timer who bought them at Collectors Bookstore.

This is such a great cover because it is so easy to identify with. I still remember sneaking my dogs into bed as a child. Heck, over 13 years ago I had to sneak our new black lab puppy into bed with us and it has slept with us ever since.