Yellow Kid

These three books are one volume in Delacorte's library of Large Feature Comics between the two Donald Duck issues. These are high grade copies with rich color covers.

A good friend of mine, Ray Funk, assembled a complete run of Famous Funnies from #3 when Buck Rogers started, to the last issue. When he was dying, he asked me to take them because he wanted to know they had a good home. I scanned copies of #1 and #2 and adjusted them to fit in the matrix. Here are the first 72 issues.

Next year will be OAFcon's 50th anniversary and I have been told that they are going to go all out to make it a special event.

One year when I was visiting Leonard Brown at Collectors Bookstore, I told him I had decided to get a run of LTMM #1-10. He laughed and said he had multiples of every issue but not one in high grade. We went in the vault and checked them all, but there was nothing above Fine so I passed. He said he couldn't remember ever having seen a high grade copy of any of the first ten issues or he would have pulled it for his collection. Ricky's book is the nicest one I have ever seen--a true rarity.

Thanks, Bob, for letting us see two superstars in action singing one of the great early classics! Hi-D Hi-D Hi-D Ho!

I agree with Steve that those ubiquitous little storage facilities that look like a series of garages are not safe. However, there are specialized storage sites like The Security Center in New Orleans that are worth considering. It is located in the old Federal Reserve building, offers space from a safety deposit box to a full-sized room, and is open 24/7. Extremely secure facilities are also available in some other cities from other sources.

I always thought that the first 13 issues of this title were the best, and to have a copy from that run signed by Barks just makes it even better!

If you live in New Orleans, or just want an excuse to visit, the Security Center is outstanding and offers 24/7 access.

In general, Malcolm handled movie material while Leonard handled comics.

Steve Ellis, His partner at the store when it closed, Mark Willoughby, called me with the news. He also called Leonard Brown's widow. You might try tracking down Mark. Richard Olson

It was a wonderful place and time to be a comic book collector, and timing is everything. I would take the bus downtown and go to four bookstores, the Goodwill Store, have lunch and take the bus back home. Then I met Leonard and my collecting world expanded. We took the back seat out of his 1952 Chevy so we could carry more comics and we put note cards or business cards in every supermarket we could find and you would be amazed by how successful that was. At the same time we were running ads advertising old comics for sale. After a few sales, word of mouth did the job and we could tell even then that selling old comics was easy but maintaining our inventory was going to be difficult. It was great meeting you, Bob, and my only regret is that I couldn't have stayed longer and enjoyed more of your fantastic collection.

The original store was at 1717 N. Wilcox Avenue, about a half a block above Hollywood Blvd. On the evening of March 5, 1965, Brown and Willits hosted a champagne reception for a dozen leading collectors, and opened for business the next day. After a couple of moves, moved into the empty bank at 6763 Hollywood Blvd., about midway between Grauman's Chinese Theater and Cherokee Books. After Leonard retired, Mal sold nearly all of the comics, moved the store to Hollywood and Vine, and it didn't move again until the contents were sold in a major auction. The large catalog only contained one lot of approximately 23 comics, which I bought for nostalgic reasons.

The world lost another collector on Monday, 4/15/2019. Malcolm was a collector of antique cars, original art, pulps, movie memorabilia, and old comics. He had a special love for sci-fi and Disney, especially the work of Carl Barks. He was teaching English in an East L. A. high school when Leonard Brown approached him about opening a store for collectors of popular culture. He couldn't say yes fast enough, and in 1964 they opened Collectors Bookstore in Hollywood. They had some rough years in the beginning but the timing was right and eventually they were able to move into a large bank building and be successful. I always enjoyed going into the vault where the left side was for comics and the right side was for movie collectibles. One year when I was visiting, Leonard told me to look at the Batman section and I saw a dozen copies of the fist issue. Over the years, many Hollywood Stars visited the store, which eventually led to them being the first store to auction an Oscar. The thing I liked about Mal was that he genuinely enjoyed his collection.

I had a good friend in Southern California, Ray Funk, who bought most of the big keys off the newsstand. He collected trains, pulps, and comics as his primary interests, but was also an expert on farm toys and always did a chapter on them for Richard O'Brien's book on toys. His primary passion was Buck Rogers, and he put together a run of Famous Funnies from #3, which contained the first Buck Rogers in the series through the last issue. He even made a 15 volume set of Buck Rogers books that contained Buck that that represented a true labor of love. He used to tell me how he and his friends would make string networks outside to fly their Buck Rogers rocket ships for long distances. He grew up on a farm, and whenever the family would go into town, his mother would give him a dollar for comic books. To buy the keys, a person would have to be at least about 90 today, and Ray would have been in his early 90's today.

Building our inventory was mainly a function of taking the time to make note cards saying we bought old comics and then putting them on the bulletin boards of as many markets as possible within about 100 miles from Long Beach and then visiting the promising callers. Usually $5 or $10 would seal the deal for hundreds of old comics, However, even then, word was starting to circulate and each year buys cost just a little more. One of the last big buys I remember was in September of 1962 and we got about 3500 old books for $65. We sold one of those books, the Flash Gordon FC 84, to a dentist for $65 a few days later--those were the days! Rick died; relatively young, it seems like it was around the early 1970's. His wife hated the collection because of the way it had dominated their life, and wanted to sell it. Leonard asked me to buy it for the store, and it looked like we almost had a deal where I offered to buy it all for cash at fair market value. It was a lot of cash and no one else came close to matching my offer. At the last minute, she said she was sorry but someone else had offered her triple what I offered, and she was going to take his offer. I tried to explain to her that something was wrong, and no one would pay that much. We parted ways and she sold the collection to Ernie Gerber. The first problem occurred when he didn't have the cash he promised her. Ultimately she agreed to let him start selling the books and pay her out of the sales. Her biggest surprise was yet to come. Ernie told her that to maximize sales, he had to do restoration work on most of the books and he gave her a bill for his efforts. What she didn't know was that Ernie was using sales to help fund his books showing old comic book covers. At this point, she got an attorney, and things really got exciting. B

Leonard eventually reached that point and Collectors Bookstore became the dominant power.

Walking up the back staircase at his dad's Cherokee Books to visit Burt was always a thrill. Usually there was so much smoke of one kind or another that we never stayed very long but it was always fun.

There really were two comic worlds in the beginning, the east coast and the west coast. I grew up in Long Beach, CA, and have been a serious collector since the 1950's. I met Leonard Brown, another serious collector, and we started a mail-order business out of his parents home. We built an amazing inventory, added to our collections, and met some other serious collectors on the west coast, mostly in Southern California. Eventually he opened a store in 1964 with Malcolm Willits as I opted out to finish college and go to grad school. The most serious collector we ever met was Rick Durrell, who I think was the earliest "super collector" on the west coast.

This is a wonderful array of Captain Marvel books starting with one of my all-time favorites, Special Edition Comics No. 1. Great books, Bob!

Kemble's art is fantastic. His earlier newspaper comic, The Blackberries, doesn't get the recognition it deserves even though it became one of the first collections of published newspaper comics. Mark Twain thought that Kemble's work was so good that he insisted Kemble do the art in his books. Most of the art for the Gold Dust Twins wasn't done by Kemble, but his early signed pieces like this advertising booklet are prized collectibles.

3-2 in 18 innings, I hope it is a turning point!

I have written about the most unusual find of my life before, but if you haven't read it, you will enjoy this one and it is absolutely true. I have found more books, but never had another experience like this one. Leonard had contacted a middle-aged man who was supposed to have some great books and we made arrangements to visit him at 7:00 p.m. on a hot summer night. He lived on a very steep hill in an older part of Los Angeles but we had bought comics in worse neighborhoods. I rang the doorbell and could hear someone coming to greet us. He pulled back the door, pushed out the screen door, stood stark naked in the doorway, held a half gallon of wine in one hand, and said, "Won't you boys come in? I hope you don't mind I'm not wearing any clothes but it is just so hot tonight." I was stunned. Leonard was nine years older and just said thank you and pushed me in. I was only 18 or 19 and was scared to death. As soon as we sat down, he insisted that we have a glass of wine with him and that only made me more nervous. However, as he turned to walk to his chair, we dumped our wine over the back of the couch. When we saw that would work, we insisted that we all have another glass of wine, and kept repeating this until the bottle was empty. At last we got to his comic books and they were fantastic. He had two boxes of early high grade Timely books as well as DC's. The third box contained ten mint copies he bought off the stands of each of the first 23 issues of Mad Comics. We worked out a deal on the comics and I started carrying them out to the car while Leonard paid him. After taking the second box out, I returned and said I had them all. Leonard looked at me and pointed at the third box and said I had forgotten it and to take it out, which I did. As we drove back to Long Beach, he started laughing and said the guy had given us the third box. A few weeks later, Stroud and Alexander visited the guy and they looked all over for the box of Mad Comics but I think they did get some pulps. It was a night I will never forget.

I'm really sorry you have to go through this, Rick. After Katrina and no power for 21 days, I have some idea of what you are going through. It does get better--hang In there, my friend.

In the fall of 1962, I started college at the University of Redlands. As soon as I moved into my dorm, I ran an ad in the local paper saying I bought old comic books. I got one response, an older guy who lived with his parents. He had three large chests filled with books from about 1945-1952. After hours of negotiating, I bought them all for $62, and took them back to my dorm room. My new room mate thought I was crazy and did ask me to remove them ASAP. I called Leonard and made arrangements for him to come the next day and pick them up. That night I pulled a couple of hundred of the best books and put them In my closet to surprise him. He showed up in his 1952 Chevy that we had removed the back seat from so we could haul comics. After about 1,000 books were loaded, he turned to me and said, Where are they? He could tell that most of the good books were missing. We had good laugh, loaded the other books, and he gave me a check for $62 from our account. He said don't cash it until I call you, and he lifted a book from one of the piles, Flash Gordon FC 84, and said he would sell it to a dentist in Culver City for that amount. He did, and we finished the week with 1,200 books at no cost after selling that one book. Those were the days.

Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, the Long Beach Press-Telegram would let students post free classified ads during spring break, and I always took advantage. One of my first ads led to meeting Leonard Brown, and we became life-long friends. We actually started a mail-order business out of his parents home and were surprised to discover how many other collectors were out there. We wrote buying ads on 3x5 cards and then posted them on every market bulletin board for miles around. We finally got smart and had business cards made and just posted those with great success. As fate would have it, Robot Man was one of our early customers, along with Rick Durrell and other dedicated collectors. Great memories!