The Black Hand ®

On 11/7/2023 at 8:12 PM, Ricksneatstuff said:

Archie 46 has a nice variety to choose from. 

One of the best covers.

For me, the GA began ending when superhero titles started turning into goofy humor books. For instance, Top Notch turning into Top Notch Laugh.

Regardless of all that, Betty Cooper is still my choice to be stranded on a deserted island with.

That Betty

On 10/9/2023 at 3:11 PM, MrBedrock said:

Captain Flag looks like he's about to mount the often misunderstood Black Hand who's having what could be construed these days as a playful courtship moment.

Here's my copy.

Back when I was actively collecting I had a large PO Box. Even though our rural neighborhood had a security mailbox, it had leaky seals on the doors and often my mail would get wet and sometimes put into a neighbors box. At the time all our neighbors were old but honest and on a couple of occasions brought purchases of expensive books to my door when they were misdelivered. Eventually the older neighbors died off and the scum moved in so I decided to get a PO Box. That worked well since I had been picking a lot of books up at the PO that had to be signed for anyway. 

When I was completing a Top Notch run the last book I needed, a TN Laugh 39 went missing and never arrived. It took me a while to finally find one.

On 8/18/2023 at 7:29 AM, Robot Man said:

Not comics but classic “girls in tubes” covers that I picked up at the Glendale Toy show yesterday. Guy had a small pile and I picked up a few. Told me he is bringing two new long boxes from an estate sale today. 

Women in Tubes! 

All the good old guys are passing away from the hobby.

On 8/11/2023 at 4:46 PM, Point Five said:

Thanks to Mark/RedGiant for this beauty! One of those lightly trimmed bound volume books. I love it. 

This is one of the BR's I never could find. Love Mr. Justice.

Are there any more collectors here who knew Barry Bauman and visited his "Bat Cave" up on High Street, I believe it was. I used to take the bus there. He was a bit older so he was like a hero to me.. What a kick it was to be able to root through all those boxes of books and thumb through them. I think it was Bob Beerbohm who told me how he passed all those years ago and the circumstances that may have led to it. Sad. For me that was the Golden age of collecting, but the girls and outside events took hold and I dumped the collection I had then. The second Golden age of collecting for me came in the late nineties early 2000's,  with Ebay coming in to play.

On 8/9/2023 at 8:03 PM, Bud Plant said:

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. 

I knew Bauman back in the day, Spent some good times at his mom's house in Oakland looking through comics.

Barks. Every panel a masterpiece. Every story still reads like new. His work is ageless.

I tried putting together a complete Blue Ribbon run in the early 2000's but ended up missing about five of them. I was able to do a complete Top Notch run along with TN Laugh and Laugh Comix and then Suzie for the first 20 issues or so. That was tough, even back then, but doable.

As far as Blue Ribbon goes, the reason I couldn't complete it back then was because I was too cheap to pay for higher grade copies of the issue I was missing.

I love the way she sticks out of the panels. Really cool effect.

Those are really cool!

On 6/28/2023 at 12:12 PM, Frisco Larson said:

Just remembered I still have this. It's a reader ...  

Even though it's a reader you still have a good view of the horse.

The Black Hand

It was fun living vicariously through Bang Zoom and this thread. The stuff that dreams are made on.

On 5/19/2023 at 3:09 PM, jimbo_7071 said:

This was the 6.5. It was $7,500, which was $600 more than what the 7.0 Rockford had sold for five months prior, so it was a strong price to say the least, but I like like the Promise copy a shade better because it was cut to show slightly more artwork along the bottom edge (and a sliver more along the right edge). The Rockford does appear to have deeper reds, so it's close.

The book is not rare, but it isn't easy to find a copy above fine. There should be some nice pedigree copies out there, but it's probably one of those books that collectors hang on to. It's my second-favorite Pep behind #34 (which I don't own).

Those Montana covers were always Top Notch,

For MLJ/Archie collectors it's a grail along with Jackpot 4, Archie 1 and Pep 36.

On 4/24/2023 at 6:57 PM, walclark said:

I was very happy to add this one to my collection:

With an incredible Will Eisner cover!

On 3/31/2023 at 11:59 AM, szav said:

How did a cut that bad slip buy?

Are the Promise books now stigmatized with people in the know if not the general buying public?