SOTIcollector

That's it for tonight. Coming up... That Stan Lee item.... The Secret Origin of Crime and Horror Comics And more!

Bulletman and the Return of Mister Murder Dime Action Book from 1941. From back in the days when it was cool to fight against the nazis. A lower grade copy shows up in eBay sold items for $75. Current offerings on eBay are much higher than my price. Two available, $100 each. COPY A, FC COPY A, BC COPY B, FC COPY B, BC

Immoral! by Luther Gordon 1949 sleaze paperback by those purveyors of some of the worst comics ever made: Magazine Village, which gave us True Crime v1#2 (cited by Wertham as dangerous more frequently than any other book), True Crime #3 (classic "RAT" cover), and True Crime v2#1 (also cited in SOTI). Back cover rip, pictured. BC ad for such classics as "Unfaithful!" and "Bed Time Girl." $20

The Comics by Coulton Waugh. 1947 harcdcover, no dust jacket. The book is mostly about comic strips, but there's a chapter at the back all about those horrible things called comics. Contains a brief history of the industry up to that point. $25 shipped in the US. Here's what Waugh had to say about one of the comics he had read. Take a typical comic-book cover of World War II days. Scene, a Jap wireless shack, through whose open door is seen a vessel being dive-bombed and bursting into flames. Which side is that ship on? It isn't obvious. In the foreground a Jap is sending a message under difficulties; he screams, revealing hideous buck-teeth as he sends. A baseball bat swung by a tough youngster has smashed him on the head in a white explosion. Another Jap, with bloody Samurai sword in one hand, spitting gun in the other, has has also been socked by a noble, hooded male in brilliant blue. Meanwhile a blood-red blond man is smashing the power plant with his gloved fists -- Hey! Look out! There's a green Jap splut-sputting him with a machine gun! Yes, but see that blond, teen-age girl crouching on the pink table; she's got a blood-red ax; she's coming down on the Jap's head, or is she? A hideous, shaven crook is leaning through a porthole aiming a blowgun at her -- Yeah, but see that youngster in the blue business suit jabbing a bayoneted rifle at the whole group -- But another jap is reaching at him! Ah, but a gorgeous superwoman with blood-red hair and highly stylized harlequin mask, through which peer blood-white eyes is strangling the Jap with one of her delicate arms, as with the other, she -- oh, well. The layout artist, on completing this page, probably looked hopelessly at it, figured it was a failure. He had used up every inch of available screaming space, yet, there was no block of ice enclosing a glorious, frozen girl about to be sawed in half by a ghoulish hellscientist done up in a white coat and pince-nez. Probably the editor, looking at this cover, said to himself, "That layout guy Prangle is slipping. We gotta get more action." Check the spoiler for the comic he was describing. This comic is NOT part of this sale, but posted for informational purposes.

We'll start off with a book you have come to expect from one of my sales threads: a copy of Seduction of the Innocent. Seduction of the Innocent, second print, low grade with tape repair on spine, spine break. No dust jacket. All 16 illustration pages are present. Bibliography has been removed, as it was from nearly all 1950's copies of SOTI. Photocopy of the bibliography is included. $100 shipped in the US.

RECAP (unsold in bold) Page 1 SOTI Second print, low grade, $100 The Comics by Coulton Waugh $25 SOLD Milhousb Immoral by Luther Gordon $20 Bulletman and the Return of Mister Murder Copy A $100 Bulletman and the Return of Mister Murder Copy B $100 The Lure of the Comics $199 Death Valley #6 $20 SOLD Gunsmokin Love & Death softcover $70 SOLD Comics-n-ERB Yank copy A $25 SOLD Qua-Brot Yank copy B $25 SOLD Comics-n-ERB SOTI First print, $225 SOLD Comics-n-ERB Clubwoman $65 SOLD IngelsFan Batman Coloring Book FREE CLAIMED Gunsmokin Page 2 Your Child and Radio, TV, Comics and Movies Copy A $25 SOLD milhousb Your Child and Radio, TV, Comics and Movies Copy B $35 SOLD Dinesh_S Your Child and Radio, TV, Comics and Movies Copy C $35 SOLD Qua-Brot Comics, Radio, Movies - And Children $90 SOLD Comics-n-ERB Headquarters Detective, v1, #1 $95 SOLD Bounty_Coder Writer's Digest, November, 1947 $395 Patsy Walker $15, Canadian edition. $1 SOLD comicparadox Superman Musette record $7 SOLD comicparadox Tops v1#1 $95 Page 3 Close-up, August, 1941 $195

Hi there, I hope you and yours are able to stay safe and healthy during these trying times. Welcome to my thread with very few comics. Just really cool old comics-related stuff. SOTI, L&D, a Stan Lee item from 1947 you probably don't have, some cool comics articles, and more. I'll list things over the next few nights as time permits. Payment via PayPal goods & services. Returns for any reason welcome within 14 days. If the return is due to my error, I pay return shipping; otherwise, you pay return shipping. These items come from a smoke-free and, to the best of our knowledge, COVID-free house. No probationites or shameful ones. SHIPPING IS INCLUDED in the US. Shipping outside the US at exact cost, if I can ship it fully insured (which I realize can make it really expensive to ship). I am limiting my shipping to once a week during COVID. If you're in a rush, let me know in advance and I'll let you know what I can accommodate. PM's are welcome, but "take it" in thread beats everything else. Please understand that this applies to everybody equally. If you send me a PM, I'll get to it eventually but probably not while I'm in the middle of posting books. My top priority is my family and my second priority is my full-time job. After that, it's comics. So please understand if I don't reply to your inquiries immediately. I try to make sure that I check in at least once every 24 hours while I have a sales thread going. All books unrestored unless noted. I have never pressed a book or bought a book I knew to be pressed, so everything is, to my knowledge, unpressed.

Great. Thanks for the info. There are two other collectibles that I'm familiar with that commonly have the term "state" applied to them. Based on this, I typically thought of "state" as something that is done after printing. Seduction of the Innocent had a bibliography leaf when it was published (pp. 399-400), but that leaf was sliced out of most copies of the book by the publisher prior to distribution. A few copies made it into the marketplace with the bibliography page intact. Collectors typically refer to these books as "first state" (with bibliography) and "second state" (no bibliography). When the Beatles issued their Yesterday and Today album, it contained a "butcher" photo that many found offensive. So Capitol Records pasted a photo with a steamer trunk over the "butcher cover" and shipped the album with the innocuous cover displayed. Collectors got wise and found ways to peel off the steamer trunk cover, which would reveal the offensive "butcher cover" underneath it (although the peel job would usually damage the butcher cover). If you have one of those Yesterday and Today albums that never got pasted over, it's referred to by collectors as "first state." An album with the pasteup intact is "second state". An album that once had a pasteup, but from which the pasteup has been removed, is a "third state." That was pretty much the limit of my experience in using the word "state" to describe different versions of collectibles. I appreciate your perspective, which seems broader than mine, regarding how this term is used in the book collecting world. It does seem likely that these Peter Penny books are distinct printings, given that with each subsequent issue either the size changed, or the content changed, or both. Although, as you noted, we don't know for sure what was first or what may have come in between. Thanks for letting me (and other boardies) know how the term "state" can be used here.

And now the chicken or egg conversation. What sequence do you think these versions, John, Paul, George and Ringo, came out? [Why am I calling them by those names? In the absence of proof regarding which print is which, those are the names that I picked for this post.] It's pretty clear to me that John came first, then George, then came Ringo, and finally Paul. [Okay, Ringo was the last one to join the Beatles. I said these are just names for the purpose of this post! :)] Here's how I came to that conclusion about the sequence. Let's start with a comparison of Ringo and Paul. The dimensions are different enough that the art needed to be modified for one of these versions. But which one came first? I say Ringo, on the left was first. Look at the bottoms of the "longer" panels on the right, the portions that differ from the "shorter" panels on the left. In panel 2 on the right, the person who drew Bobby's arms seems to have flunked anatomy class. In panel 4, somebody neglected to draw Bobby's feet. Throughout the book, the bottom parts of the panels seems to have been drawn by an artist whose talent was significantly less than that of the original artist. Not that the original artist was all that great, but the bottom-of-the-panels artist was terrible). If the art started out with taller panels and then those were cut down, there would be no noticeable difference in style on the bottoms of the "taller" panels. I'm assuming the version on the right, with the "taller" panels, was created by cutting up the original art (or photostats of it) and creating new panels with the new dimensions. Then another artist, or maybe just a production assistant, extended the bottoms of the cut-up panels by adding some art to the bottom of each. Additional support for my belief that Ringo came before Paul is evident in the next two panels (Ringo on the left, Paul on the right). If you look at the bottom of the bushes in the right hand panel, you can see a line where there are almost no blacks, which I presume was the border of a pasteup. Just step back and take in the whole image of the bush. You can see the line where the pasteup started, supporting the theory that the one on the left came first and the one on the right was created by extending the panel on the left. So Ringo came before Paul. But when were John and George published? Because John and George have the same cover, they would have been produced in sequence. John doesn't have the 'revised' art. So John and George were first and second, but we don't know for sure which came first. Ringo was third, and George was last. We know that the sizes changed several times. It's more likely that the sizes shrank as time went on, rather than increased. So my theory is that the printings came out in this order: 1) John 2) George 3) Ringo 4) Paul. This is all the known printings so far. But since we don't know what may come to light in the future, I'd hesitate to call these by a particular printing number. The numbers above more to the sequence of the books that have been discovered to date than to the actual printing number. I find it likely that these are first/second/third/fourth prints, but since John was just discovered, we don't know when another one will come along and throw a monkey wrench into that theory. This sequence I came up with has the books shrinking in size over time, which makes sense because that's just want newsstand comics did over the years. This sequence also has the art content changing slightly (losing first the three panels on the front page, and losing the detail in the logo, then later gaining sloppy lower panels). All of this is consistent with a full package being delivered by a content producer to the American Banker's Association, and then as time went on the ABA made what changes they could make without hiring an artist to make those modifications. So, thoughts? Do you agree that these four versions came out in the sequence I outlined? I

Here are the four different printings that are known. There are two different sizes of the cover with two panels on it; there are two different sizes of the one with no panels on the cover. Up next: a discussion of which came first.

Yes, I very much appreciate the efforts of a kind Mod who was nice enough to move my misplaced thread when they would have been well within their rights to just get rid of it. I poked around the Moderation area, and I searched for the terms "mod" and "@mod", but I didn't see an obvious way to thank the Mod. So for now I'll just state publicly "Thank you very much, Mod!". If anybody has any recommendations for how I thank the Mod and ensure that they actually SEE my thanks, I'd appreciate it.

And while we're at it, there's even more Peter Penny news! It appears that there were at least FOUR printings of Peter Penny and His Magic Dollar! Previously, three printings were known. More about that in a bit. Leading up to it, we have, here is some background about the book's distribution and print runs for anybody who cares. The book was published by the American Banker's Association and sold to banks, who could order the back cover personalized with their own special message. How much did banks pay for these books? It depends on how many copies they ordered and what they wanted the back cover to say. Here's the back cover of a copy they used to sell the idea to member banks. And here's a picture of what one of those personalized back covers looked like, after the bank paid for customization. The Sylvia Porter article got me searching for other articles about Peter Penny. That led me to a couple different articles that mention the print runs and the number of printings. On June 13, 1947, the Post Standard from Syracuse, NY reported that Magic Dollar had reached a circulation of a quarter million copies in its first two months. Almost a year later, April 10, 1948, the Deseret News from Salt Lake City, Utah published this, indicating that there had been three printings totaling half a million books. Prior to this article, I had identified three separate printings, and I thought maybe that was all there were. But no, there are four known printings of Peter Penny and His Magic Dollar. Details to come...

I'm looking for a devil's advocate, so I appreciate the perspective. Sure, I want this to be a new discovery. But accuracy is what's most important. It seems to me that the verb tenses could be used to support the case for "Peter Penny Saves The Day" as being a SOTI book and "Peter Penny and his Magic Dollar" NOT being a SOTI book. In the article, Porter talks about Magic Dollar, in the past tense, and discusses the upcoming Saves The Day. Let's call the former MD, because that's easy, and let's just call the latter STD, because I find that acronym funny. At the end of the article, Porter is describing books to be published in the future, rather than the ones already published, when she writes, "So as you read the comic pamphlets that undoubtedly will be coming your way in future months, realize fully that the aim is not just to amuse you. Not by a long shot. It is to instruct you in specific things, mold your thinking in a specific way." So Porter was clearly referring to STD and its ilk. Wertham didn't refer to any books matching Peter Penny's description in his 1948 Saturday Review of Literature article, nor in his 1953 Ladies' Home Journal preview of SOTI. The first instance I could find of Wertham writing about one of these American Banker's Association books was in SOTI, which came out in April, 1954, a full five years after the Porter article. Wertham: "Sylvia F. Porter, the financial columnist, writes about a comic book got out by the American Bankers Association:" There's no way to know exactly when Wertham penned his words about Peter Penny, but it's virtually certain that by the time he wrote them both MD and STD had been "got out." The fact that Wertham quoted a Porter passage, and that passage referred to STD, could be used to support the assertion that Wertham was referring to STD. That's my perspective, but I'm writing here for additional perspectives. Everybody's welcome to chime in. I'm eager to hear other opinions.

D'oh! That's the second time I've posted something in the wrong forum when I was CERTAIN I had posted it in the right place. I know where it belongs, and somehow I posted it in the wrong place anyway. Thanks for clarifying. I get it now.

I don't understand the question. This is a golden age forum, and this is about a golden age book. What am I missing?

If you know me, you know I get totally jazzed when I discover new information related to Seduction of the Innocent. And I'm totally jazzed. On pages 310-311 of Seduction of the Innocent, Dr. Wertham wrote, There are publicity comic books to influence adults. Sylvia F. Porter, the financial columnist, writes about a comic book got out by the American Bankers Association: "The aim is not just to amuse you. Not by a long shot. It is to mold your thinking in a specific way." If that is true of good comic books for bankers, isn't it true, too, of bad comic books for children? They mold a child's thinking in a specific way. For many years, the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide has contended that this was a reference to Peter Penny and His Magic Dollar, the 1947 comic put out by the American Bankers Association. I had this quote on my list of things to research one of these days. Was Sylvia Porter's article really referring to Peter Penny and His Magic Dollar? Or the other known Peter Penny book, Peter Penny Saves the Day? I was pleasantly surprised to find the answer in a Facebook group for freebie comics. A gentleman named Michael Styborski had posted the original Sylvia Porter article that I had intended to hunt down. Thank you, Michael! That led me to some fun tidbits... First off, here's the article, which appeared in The Amarillo (TX) Daily News, January 20, 1949 as well as the Philadelphia Inquirer, December 27, 1948. Scroll past the photo if you like, because I've transcribed the text below. Here's the text of the article, with the relevant parts highlighted in red. Industry is finally discovering the comic book – greeting it with huzzahs and hoopla, taking it over with energy and enthusiasm. After all these years, the men who make American industry are recognizing that what Popeye has done for spinach and Jiggs has done for corned beef and cabbage, the descendants of Popeye and Jiggs can do for private enterprise, the profit system, labor management relations, independent banking, and the like. It’s a top-notch development right now. And, according to my friends in the public relations field, we’re seeing just the beginnings of your education to business via the comic strip. Which makes it important for you – the target – to know what’s up and what’s ahead for you and your children. Are you curious about jet propulsion or atom-smashing, interested in X-rays or diesel engines? General Electric is publishing a comib book series on “Adventures in Electricity.” A half-dozen of the booklets are on my desk now; I’ve studied them; they’re superb. And implicit in each cartoon, behind each word spoken by the comic characters, is a song of praise for the American industry which has made such wonders possible and for the company within that industry which has helped so greatly in the job. Do you ever wonder how our banking system functions and what it really contributes to your way of life? The American Bankers Association, that eminently conservative organization of financiers, has a “Peter Penny and His Magic Dollar” comic pamphlet to tell you the teal on an A-B-C level. And it’s putting out a new one, “Peter Penny Saves the Day,” to extol thrift. And here, too, implicit in each cartoon, behind each word spoken by the comic characters is a song of praise for the American system of private, independent banks. Only a few corporations and trade associations have so far explored the medium on a major scale – but these have had astounding success. The Institute for Life Insurance, for instance, decided to experiment with the comic booklet, “The Man Who Runs Interference,” to help sell insurance to you and me. They’re now counting distribution in the millions. Borden’s, W.T. Grant Co., the Milwaukee Railroad have pioneered in the field. You need no explanation from me as to the impact of such characters as Elise the Cow. Surveys indicate that 70,000,000 Americans are regular followers of newspaper strips or comic books; “100 million people have a fixed habit of reading comics in some form,” reports “Public Relations News,” a letter privately circularized among public relations executives. It’s estimated that just the handful of corporations and associations that have tried the comics have distributed 45 million booklets – half of them through the school systems. That last is a statistic in a class by itself. And the publicity experts state: “More and more companies are learning what the government learned during the war: comics have a higher readership and greater influence on the average mind than any other form of communication.” This alone should start the avalanche. As a comic strip devotee myself, I can appreciate the meaning of this development in its entirety. And at this point, there’s nothing wrong with it. If a cartoon will intrigue a stockholder into reading his annual company report, fine; let management put it in the cartoons. If a comic booklet will show the high school student – or graduate – how the private enterprise system operates and why businessmen must make profits under this system, fine; let’s have the comic books. But there’s dynamite in this development- dynamite hidden under its purposes, dynamite obscured by the very ease and simplicity of the communication medium. Selling a product such as spinach via Popeye goes in one class. Selling an idea on profits or strikes or the like via Popeye goes in an entirely different category. So as you read the comic pamphlets that undoubtedly will be coming your way in future months, realize fully that the aim is not just to amuse you. Not by a long shot. It is to instruct you in specific things, mold your thinking in a specific way. Read between, as well as on, the lines. So as it turns out, Sylvia Porter, when quoted by Wertham, was referring to BOTH Peter Penny books: Peter Penny and His Magic Dollar and Peter Penny Saves the Day. She mentions both in her article, and at the end she is referring to the general category of promotional comics when she says that they are intended to mold your thinking. At least, that's what I make of it, but I'm a little biased because I'm always looking to discover new SOTI books. What are your thoughts? Do you agree that both Peter Penny books should now be considered SOTI books? That's tonight's discovery... more about the various version of Peter Penny and His Magic Dollar coming up soon!

It was the covers of the Golden Age set that convinced me many years ago that I just had to own Mister Mystery #12 and Horrific #3. Such great books! GLWTS!

Ok, I'll hang out till then...

This absolutely one of the most awesome group shots I've ever seen on these boards!

I have a copy of Tween Age Digest #1 that I would like to get graded. This is digest-sized publication that contains stories, puzzles, games, and a few pages of comics. I have two questions about it. 1) Will CGC grade it, even though it is, strictly speaking, not a comic book? 2) This digest was referenced by Dr. Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent. If possible, I'd like that noted on the label. I can provide a photocopy of the page of SOTI that references this book. Would that be sufficient to obtain the "Used in SOTI" notation on the label? Or would I have to do something more? Thanks!

Last call bump. If you see something you like, let's discuss. Thread closes shortly.

That's a real bummer. I've never owned one of these, so I'm not all that familiar with the glasses. But the cover of the book says it comes with "2 3-D viewers". Does that mean it should have had 2 pairs of glasses? Would it have gotten a "qualified" anyway because it has only 1 pair of glasses? The note does specifically say that 1 pair of glasses is missing.

Did somebody say "Anti-Wertham editorial"?

Thank you!