SOTIcollector

1993 Death stand-up, plus Death poster. From my comic book shop back in the 1990's: This 1993 stand-up advertises the various Death items that were available at the time: Death Gallery, High Cost of Living Hardcover, Death Talks About Life, Death T-Shirt, Death Watch. The 1996 poster is 17" x 22", and shows some wear because it was used to advertise the Death products in my store. It has some pinholes, and some waviness where condensation in the window got it moist. Still displays really nicely, though. Both items for $20 + Priority Mail shipping (about $7) anywhere in CONUS. The poster will ship folded, which is how I received it from DC originally. For shipping elsewhere, just LMK where you are and I'll get you a quote. I charge exact shipping.

Green Lantern Master Series Limited Edition Print from 1998. Warner Brothers stores sold this print 20 years ago for $300. It's a really cool print, but not really in my wheelhouse. I'm hoping somebody here has a use for it. It's a print with the classic origin sequence and preprinted sketches of GL over the years. The print is hand-signed by Gil Kane, and numbered #441/500. Plexiglas front framed to 29.5" x 21.5" with an inner mat opening of 23.5" x 16". In Excellent condition. Looking for comps, I found only one sale at HA in 2017 for $179 + shipping. https://comics.ha.com/itm/memorabilia/comic-related/gil-kane-green-lantern-the-masters-series-limited-edition-print-444-500-warner-brothers-1998-/a/121715-12629.s?ic16=ViewItem-BrowseTabs-Auction-Archive-ThisAuction-120115 The first "take it" in thread gets it. The fine print: No HOS or probationites. Payment by PayPal within 3 days. Shipping to US only. Shipping will be expensive for the print plus frame: About $59 by USPS for a package that is 30" x 33" x 2.5" and about 9.5 lbs. Returns at buyer's expense within 14 days. Local pickup in the Springfield, MA area will save you a boatload in shipping. I charge exact shipping price. Shipping will be cheaper if you live close to me. My ZIP Code is 01038. The quoted shipping price is shipping from me in the Northeast to you in San Diego, as a worst case scenario. It is likely to be cheaper if you live closer. I will be charging exact shipping cost at USPS, so feel free to contact me for a shipping quote. I'm willing to ship via USPS or UPS, whichever you prefer.

Well worth the price. This book is phenomenal!

Yes, a well built rack, filled out just so, can really draw people to your booth.

Here's a photo, but it wasn't really taken to show the rack so much as the books. [Just for the record, these books are either sold or off the market.] As long as nobody tumbles into the rack, the books are fine. A good breeze or a kick to one of the legs would get expensive, though.

I didn't see any responses to this question, so I'll jump in. Back in the 90's, I experimented with numerous configurations of self-built display wall racks. Some worked well, and others... well, let's just say there was a reason I had numerous configurations. Here were my requirements: I needed something that was 1) Sturdy. It can get expensive if a wall collapses or is knocked over. 2) Collapsible to a relatively small size. I've typically driven small hatchbacks (Honda Accord, Acura Integra). Longboxes fit just fine, but finding a display rack that could collapse and fit inside was a challenge. 3) Inexpensive. I suppose everybody has a different idea of what 'cheap' is. My feeling is that sub-$100 is a pretty good price for a good rack. 4) Easy to set up. I need to be able to set the whole thing up in about 5 minutes, so can spend time displaying things just right and maybe even doing some pre-show shopping. 5) Six feet long. Most tables are six feet, so that's typically the most wall space I get. 6) Flexible enough to display odd sizes. You never know what you'll need to sell. Magazines? Treasuries? Original art? Slabbed books? (ok, so when I was doing this, slabbed books hadn't been invented yet. But I did have some books in heavy Fortress-like plastic that was the precursor to the modern-day slab.) I tried walls with Snap-its, an erector-set type metal structure that required nuts & bolts, and other configurations. But in the end, I hit upon something (most likely copied from another dealer) that now seems pretty common: linen shelving. Linen shelving at Lowe's I built two wooden side rails, and attached some hinged support legs. Then I used cup hooks in the wood to support the shelves. Extra cup hooks strategically placed in the wood can also provide the support that keeps the rack from being able to slide side-to-side. Voila! A rack that meets all of my requirements. It has been to dozens of shows, and has never let me down. The cup hooks do bend easily, so I keep an extra supply of them just in case one breaks or gets bent beyond usefulness. This rack is very flexible. If I'm at a show that has a lot of space behind the table, then the display shelves can go all the way to the floor. If I go to a show that has 8' tables (uncommon, but it has happened), then I can use 8' linen shelving instead (or maybe just make the top 3 shelves the 8' ones). If I have a lot of tall items, it's easy to re-do the cup hooks to provide more space between the shelves. The lip on the shelves is wide enough that if I need to, I can stack several copies of a book on top of each other. And of course, a copy of Seduction of the Innocent fits very nicely on the lip with no danger of falling.

When I see somebody who has no wall books, I assume they have cheap bulk stuff that I'm not interested in, and I move on. The only thing that would get me to stop is if I could tell at a glance that it's a relatively "unpicked" collection. Other people may have a different approach; I'm just saying I'd probably spend some money at your booth if I stopped there, but I might not even stop. Theft can be a concern, especially if you're working solo. I've started taking a GoPro to shows, and placing it prominently on my wall rack with its wide-angle lens capturing the entire booth. I like to think it's some sort of a deterrent. If you have one or something like it, you may want to consider taking it. Lots of good advice here already: price the books at prices you're happy with and don't offer a sweetheart bulk deal to the dealers you'd prefer not to sell to. Set up but leave the tops on the boxes as long as you're allowed. I'd also suggest not pricing your keys too cheaply. If your run does get cleaned out of all its keys, you'll have a much tougher time of it if you ever decide to sell the rest of the run in bulk. You'll end up with only pennies per book for the rest. Best of luck! I hope you have a great show, and your books go to the right homes.

I guess I should have known that my post would be automatically edited, to remove a problematic word. I wrote that he's destroyed by a p**** cat, but I guess that doesn't fly in these parts.

Oh. Em. Gee. The first three books: on my wantlist, and in my price range. But I've got a buying freeze at the moment. Seriously, somebody please buy them and take away my temptation!

per PM

To be continued in 2019...

In January, Li'l Abner's Al Capp responded with this.

In August, 1948, Fiction House responded by naming one of their villains "Dr. Wertham." In the end, he's destroyed by a cat.

And now, here's how some of the comics responded. Let's start with Marvel's responses to Wertham's 1948 Saturday Review of Literature article. For months, most Marvel books contained one of these editorials.

Glad you liked it. Waiting in the wings to post when I get some time: pre-SOTI comics. The comic book industry wasn't going to take these attacks lying down.

I came across another one. And @sfcityduck, how's this for an obscure newspaper article? Choate prep school's paper, December 8, 1951. Check out "Modern Literature Plagues 20th Century Kiddies". I love the picture of "A Christmas for Shacktown."

More from Fortune, April, 1933

As promised, here's "The Secret Origin of the Comic Book." The year is 1933. It’s been more than three years since the stock market crashed, plunging the nation into the Great Depression. Your name is Charles Maxwell Gaines. You’ve been a school principal, a munitions factory worker, a teacher, a haberdasher. With unemployment at a staggering twenty-five per cent, you’re thankful to have a job. [It’s 1933, so “percent” is still two words.] You’re particularly thankful to have THIS job, as a salesperson for the Eastern Color Printing, a firm that prints the colorful Sunday funnies sections for dozens of newspapers. Full-color Sunday funnies are now the standard among newspapers, because Eastern made them so. This is a company that’s going places, and you’re excited to be going with them. Or perhaps taking them along. On this new career path, you’re eager to hit on the one big thing that will make you successful. You’ve been brainstorming with your new boss, Harry Wildenberg, trying to come up with a promotional gimmick for one of the company’s clients, Procter & Gamble. You have dreams. You’ll make it big one day, if you can just conjure up the right idea. One afternoon, you’re waiting outside your new boss’s office to see him. “Sing, Sing, Sing” plays on speakers in the background. [Never mind that it’s 1933, and the song wouldn’t be written until 1935. It’s the 1930’s, and there must be music to establish that it’s the 1930’s, so “Sing, Sing, Sing” is playing. Isn’t that song required in every scene from the 1930’s?] You casually thumb through Wildenberg’s copy of Fortune magazine. Although times are tight now, you dream that someday you’ll be sufficiently well-off to buy your own copy of this pricey monthly publication. In a day when the average person’s salary is $38 a week and a loaf of bread costs eight cents, you can only dream of being able to afford this magazine, because a single issue of Fortune would set you back an entire dollar. This particular issue has a lengthy article about the business of newspaper comic strips, which piques your interest because of your new career path. The article discusses in depth how the syndicates make money and how some creators make LOTS of money from comics. Some cartoonists rake in more than one hundred thousand dollars per year, and support lifestyles that would be the envy of any Hollywood star. Toward the end of the article, you sit up and take notice. It informs you that advertisers have recently taken a liking to comics. You learn that back in the dark ages of 1928, advertisers would have rejected the idea of placing their ads alongside the newspapers’ funny pages. It was beneath them. But now, with the Great Depression in full swing, advertisers had found that, decorum be damned, they would advertise in the comics if it brought them the results they were looking for. They would even be willing to use the comic strip format to hawk their wares from custom-drawn comics strips within the comic sections of newspapers, and pay a record-breaking sum of seventeen thousand dollars per page to do it. This is eclipses previous record-high prices for a published advertising page ($11,500 in the Saturday Evening Post and $12,500 in Ladies’ Home Journal). Over the course of the past five years, you learn, newspaper comics have evolved to become some of the world’s most prized advertising space. And it hits you. That’s it! That’s the spark you were looking for. Comics and advertising! That’s how you’ll make your mark. That’s the golden ticket that will soon allow you to plunk down an entire dollar for just one magazine, or buy anything else you darned well please. You’ll make booklets of comics, and sell them as premiums to advertisers. You excitedly storm into your boss’s office and tell him about your epiphany. Skeptical at first, your Sales Manager warms to the idea. You and Wildenberg propose the idea to Procter & Gamble, who orders copies of “Funnies on Parade” as a mail-in premium. Soon, other advertisers such as Canada Dry soft drinks, Kinney Shoes and Wheatena have bought your comic books. Gulf Oil is paying Eastern to produce original material for “Gulf Funny Weekly”, a weekly publication available only at Gulf service stations. You stick a price on some of your premium books and offer them to newsstands in New York City. A quick sellout shows you that the public is not just willing, but eager, to pay ten cents for your pamphlets that present four-color reprints of newspaper comic strips. The modern newsstand comic book is born, and you just invented it. Within a few more years, comic books will be a multi-milliion dollar business, all because you read that article in Fortune magazine that connected comic books and advertisers. *********************************************************************************************** Okay, much of that story above is complete and utter fiction made up by me. For something much closer to the truth, start with the Wikipedia entries for Max Gaines and Eastern Color. And if you haven’t done so already, for God’s sake, get a copy of David Hajdu’s The Ten Cent Plague and read it, cover-to-cover. In particular, I took some known facts about Max Gaines, mixed in the fact that the April, 1933 Fortune magazine has a fascinating article about the newspaper comic industry that was published about the time the comic book was invented, blended it with my recent enjoyment of the second-person storytelling in the podcast “Imagined Life”, and… voila! A mostly made-up story about the origin of the comic book. But unlike your average “what if” story, this one is actually possible. It’s entirely possible that Gaines or, more likely Wildenberg, was familiar with the article in Fortune. Wildenberg could have even been contacted by the reporter who wrote the article. It’s possible that this article is the reason the entire comic book industry exists. And then again, it’s possible that in 1933,everybody in the world who was associated with newspapers and comic strips was aware of the success of newspaper comics strips, and therefore this article and the invention of the comic book were both inevitable but separate fruits that sprouted from a single seed. We’ll probably never know. Needless to say,I was intrigued enough by the possibility of this article being the “secret origin of the comic book” that I just had to add one to my collection. I know, I know. Pics or it didn't happen.

Yet.

I have a very small number of clippings, but I'm always looking for more. They are just so darned hard to come by. I do recall reading some articles about The Nightingale, seemingly based on press releases sent out by the publisher, but I don't own any originals of those articles.

Thanks so much! I've had fun going back through these things that spend most of their lives in boxes. Stay tuned! Coming up is the one that I call the "Secret Origin of the Comic Book."

January, 1942 National Parent Teacher. "Those Troublesome Comics". Predates all that other stuff I posted. Up next... the origin of the comic book. At least, I think so. Maybe.

By the time I made it though the 1940's to 1954, posting chronologically some pre-SOTI items, realized that I had missed some. So now some other things that fit the category, not necessarily in any particular order. Here's the Spirit section of 2/27/1949. Dr. Wolgang Worry is worried about, of course, comic books.

The undated pamphlet "Comics and Your Children" cites figures from 1953, so it's likely the pamphlet came out in 1954. Perhaps it was before SOTI, or more likely after. Note thes pamphlet contains some of the same illustrations that appeared in SOTI, like the blood draining scene from Authentic Police Cases #3, and the "I'll tear ya" scene from Women Outlaws #1.

Seduction of the Innocent was published in April, 1954. For a thread of pre-SOTI items, many of the 1954 items I have wouldn't strictly qualify for posting here. But I do have some items that came out in 1954, and it's not clear to me whether they were pre- or post-SOTI. Case in point, the third book in the BELLEVUE STUDIES OF CHILD PSYCHIATRY series. This is The Dynamic Psychopathology of Childhood, by Dr. Lauretta Bender. Here we see a dramatically increased focus on comic books as compared to the prior book in this series. Comics warrant an entire chapter of the book plus numerous index entries.