Bud Plant

Wow, Mitch. I apologize for seemingly belittleling your comics career. But I don’t think I needed to get lambasted quite so seriously for itl You’re enough to drive me off the message boards, in my first time posting anything! Two flaming retorts to a couple lines I wrote? I remember the whole national media thing over yours and Theo’s (I thought it was mostly Theo) just seemeda little strange and suspicious to us fans in my area. But that’s the opinion of a very young collector, as I was at the time. And I will admit there might be some envy or jealosy on my part, and/or my buddies part, as clearly Theo had a more money than any of us had. I greatly appreciate sfcityduck for coming to my defense. Michelle Nolan told me once “Sorry is not good enough”. Mitch, I hope you don’t have the same attitude and can accept my apology for stirring up a real hornet’s nest with you. Sorry I brought it up. I don’t know yours and Theo’s story, I just know that in my fandom experience, pretty much full time since 1970, I wasn’t aware of you or of Theo byond that one big media event. I have interacted with publishers, fair promoters, dealers, and collectors, people I’ve worked with or known of for decades, across the country, not just in the Bay Area. My impression may have been totally wrong, it was just an opinion. Not sure what “book” you are talking about. Unlike Beerbohm, I’m not writing any fandom histories. I was just responding to a statement someone made in this chat room. I hope we can move on to more interesting topics now.

Ok, I keep seeing your references to Obata, so I finally googled him. I didn’t know the name. I’ll read up more on him…looks like one of the “western” influenced Japanese woodblock artists, who I very much like. That is, the guys that came along in the early to mid 20th century and moved Japanese woodblock work, such as landscapes, mountains, buildings, into a slightly more modern look. I’ve actually handled a couple books on the subject, including a excellent one on the Yoshida family. Here’s a quick example: Bill Thailing…on one of our trips east to Seuling shows, has to be pre-1980, we went through St. Louis during amassive thunder storm…like nothing we’d ever encountered in San Jose. Explosions like bombs going off, massive rain. We were tracking down Bill Thailing at his home. I don’t remember much more about the visit, sadly. But Bill is responsible for getting me back into hardcore collecting of Golden Age. I’d moved far more into vintage illustrated books, in the early 1970s.Out of the blue he sent me a big thick catalog, which I still have. I bought a bunch of things, now which seemed suddenly attractive and afffordable, as my income had gone up since my college poverty days. One was a More Fun #54 with TWO centerfolds out. I know that sounds like cheese to most of you guys, but for $45, I had a primo iconic early Spectre cover and lead story that I’d could only have dreamed of owning before that. That got me going again, going after alll the Quality line I hadn’t put together before, adding to my Fiction House books (many of which came from Henry Keller, who used to have a big table of them at the Seuling shows; I’d buy all his remains out at the end of at least two shows, for like $1.50 or $2 each, and bring them back to California to resell…. Early (before #90) More Fun and Adventure remain two of my very favorite titles. I stumbled into a nice but coverless copy of More Fun #52 a few years ago, some guy brought it into an Emerald City I had set up at. I made him an offer of $500, he took it around the rest of the other dealers, and came back later and sold it to me as the high bidder….

I think I managed to get onto this thread, we’ll see. Marc at House of Comics introduced me, since I met sfcityduck at the Berkeley Comic Show last weekend, introduced by Steve Duin who had just visited me in Grass Valley last week. Wow, I spent the last two evenings doing through this thread about Dave W. Just amazing stuff. And the capper, that Russ Cochran bought his EC collection. The wheel comes around. Nice work sfcity…I guess I don’t use your real name? Hey, hello to Leonard Rifas, old friend. It’s been a long time. Now, about Barry Bauman, since he came up…Michelle Nolan drove us teen-agers (John Barrett, Jim Buser, maybe MR. Swan) up to see Barry for the first time in early 1966, from San Jose to Oakland. Barry had all his comics in an attic at his folks house. He had a table with the best of the best laid out face up; the one and only book I remember was Action #1, which he wanted $400 for. Of course, as you guys noted, $400 to a kid (I was 14 in ‘66) was a fortune. In fact, fellow San Jose collector, teacher Rudi Franke (Voice of Comicdom, which published some of the earliest Richard Corben work) sold HIS complete EC collection to one of the San Jose boys, Tom Tallmon, for $600 not terribly long after that. Not mint like Dave’s, just good readable copies in say VG to Fine probably at best. Again, an impossible amount, but Tom was a little older than I was and had a job. We all bought bits and pieces of it from Tom, since we all collected EC’s along with our particular specialtys: mine was Quality, John’s MLJ, Jim’s DC, Michelle’s Nedor. We always gave her a hard time about Nedors, back when they were considere the Charlton of the 1940s, the bottom of the barrel. Anyway, Barry had scored his huge lot of Golden Age from the Liberty Book Store in Sacramento, if I have the name right. There was another long-lived bookstore there, Beer’s Books, but I think it was Liberty. And sadly, yes, he died in a car crash driving his elderly Corvette north on Highway 101, just before or after his 50th birthday. Barry is a story himself; he may have never had a social security card, so he avoided the draft and lived off the grid. He made quite the living quietly bringing grass in from Mexico in those very early days; I think he’s been gone long enough for that to come out. Nuff said. He drove back from one of the Sueling Cons with us around 1971 or 1972, and yes, I don’t know of his collection per se, if he even had one, burning up. That probably was Lucas and/or Ted Dang, who also lived in Oakland. Lucas resurfaced a few years ago, he’d been a bank president. Comics still show up with their stamp on the first page…. The times we went to see Barry, he was selling comic book bags (which we had not seen before) for .03 cents each, so we’d buy several for our new acquisitions. I was collecting Quality Comics group…not sure what else I bought, but I was buying Blackhawk Quality-era issues for $1 or $2 each. Fortunately, I have journals I kept from 1964 to around 1971, so I have an amazing amount of details about the comics I was acquiring at the time, and events around our opening Seven Sons Comic Shop in 1968, and Comic World in 1969. The journals were gone by the time Comics & Comix started in 1972. John Barrett had been one of the first collectors I met in 1965, and we were partners in both the previous stores. We two came up with the idea for opening C&C on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. An, please don’t hold it against me, we took on Bob Beerbohm as a partner when his car blew up on the way back to Nebraska and he decided to join us instead of going back to college. Worst decision we ever made. Bob continues to claim to have started C&C. In a way, that’s true, he was there from nearly the beginning. But it was John and I who came up with the location, the starting money, and the manpower to get it rented and off the ground—no matter what Bob says. I’m persona non grata with Bob like most of the rest of mankind, which suits me fine. On to other topics. Let me see if anyone read this…it’s certainly an fun thread, enough to finally get me into these boards…..I’ll check out some of the others you guys recommended when time allows. Oh, and Mitch and Theo Holstein…I can’t give much credit to them for anything more than publicity for spending the most money, up until then, on a comic. What I remember is the whole thing may have been made up for the sake of getting the local paper, and the,the national wire services, to pick it up as a story…all so that some more comics might come their way. I’ve run into Mitch years later, now that he’s into original art, and he seems like a perfectly nice guy. But I would not give either gentleman a lot of credence as “early collectors,” as someone earlier in this thread had put out there. They were Johnny-come-latelys in my book, with little involvement in the early days of collecting, fan publishing, and going to comic shows like the rest of us were doing.