OtherEric

I’ve sometimes found Mile High useful for low demand, low price, low population books I can’t find anywhere else. And I’ll always think of them fondly as the source of the first back issues my parents ever ordered for me around 1980 or so.

How are the rest of us ever supposed to get a 79 if you’re grabbing all of them?

I don’t even have a primary one, much less an extra. I think the only scarce or semi-scarce Whitman books I have extras on are Looney Tunes 33 and Mickey Mouse 207.

If you ever go a LITTLE bit too far, we’ll let you know.

It was either somewhere back in the massive Four Color thread or in one of several short lived bound volume threads that have popped up. My search fu isn’t finding the bound volume threads, but here’s the four color thread: I may repost my volume over there with new pictures when I get home.

Because that was the consensus when I first shared the book on the forums. The gilt printing on maroon boards, and the style and font in general, match volumes with known provenance. Even with all that, it’s only about 98% certain. Someone could have theoretically bound high grade copies of the relevant issues to make it look like a file volume. I just don’t get why anyone would, and by the time it worked its way to me I only paid $40 or so for it… I can’t remember exactly for sure.

Completely not what the topic is really asking about… but just as certainly an example of company produced bound comics.

I don't care how beat up it is, that US 179 is a major find! And the Looney Tunes 34 is the last of the very rare LT issues I still need...

Might as well include the front, although the miswrap really isn't obvious because of the top 1/4 being stripped as remaindered:

This one was badly enough miswrapped that it actually wound up remaindered... and yet I still wound up paying $21.50 for it a few years ago.:

That's pretty impressive for a quick hack! I particularly like the care you took to make sure the signature was still visible and not obstructed by the banner at the bottom. And we're clearly on the same page, because that's pretty much exactly how I envisioned it!

Eerie #6 thoughts: Cover: I really like Morrow's work here, but I think it might have been a bit more effective if they had cropped the image a bit. There's a lot of relatively dead space betwen the Eerie and the figures, and on the sides of the image. You could still get the scale if the upper part of the portal (or whatever it is) was behind the title. Eerie's Monster Gallery: Nice work by Severin overall, undercut by the fact the monster seems to be looking UP, and therefore not actually looking at what he's attacking. Cave of the Druids: Crandall does some beautiful work on a story that is more straightforward fantasy than conventional horror. It's good to see Goodwin mixing up what the magazines can do; although Eerie arguably goes too far away from horror by the end of its run for a lot of people's taste. Deep Ruby: Magnificent Ditko weirdness, dropping to a notionally more normal final page that just sells the horror of the tale. Running Scared: Mark Ricton is actually Sam Citron, doing his only story for Warren. He apparently started out as one of Joe Shuster's ghosts on Superman and worked all over the place. The art suits the story well, but I don't think it's one of Goodwin's better stories... the explanation on the next to last page doesn't explain what we've seen, and the last page feels tacked on. I can sort of get that the last page is trying to explain why the next to last page didn't quite track, but it overall doesn't come together for me. The Curse of Kali: A very nice Torres/ Goodwin piece, you can just feel the heat of the sun pouring off the splash page. Trial by Fire: A solid story by Johnny Craig as "Jay Taycee", but the art feels a little rough compared to his usual stuff, and I'm not sure if it's a deliberate style choice or just a looming deadline. Point of View: A decent mash up of Frankenstein and the ever-popular insane asylum stories. I think Mastroserio is second only to Morrow in "artists who have risen in my assessment" since I started the reading club. The Changeling: I think Colan was trying something different with the art here as well, the inking seems very think and heavy. I appreciate the experimentation but it's not really working for me here. Another solid issue but nothing to really make it stand out above the crowd for this run... although, as the Warren Index observes, an average issue is pretty good right

You could have warned us to put on sunglasses before scrolling down to that, you know. It's blindingly white if you don't have some sort of protection...

At least with the bags in the US when I was around 7, there were two huge appeals to the things. 1, they were frequently the only comics the store in question had. 2, and this was the bigger one: even if they were only a few months to a year old, the were the only source of back issues I was aware of. I spent a LOT of time trying to find issues I had missed in those things. (I never did find a bag with Star Wars 1-3, I didn't get those until a few years later when my parents ordered me some books from a Mile High Comics ad when we lived in Germany a few years.)

I'm not sure we can help you that much with what they're worth, the underground market can be even more variable than the one for mainstream comics. I, and I believe others here, would be more than happy to help you figure out exactly what you have, though, in terms of what printing/ variant and condition. Which is the first step to figuring out the value, at least.

It seems like you outperform my selling screw-ups, was another response indicated in regards to that graph?

To comment on these two points, at least. I agree that Stallman's art looks pretty bad to me. But here's a link to an obituary, where Mark Evanier and Gil Kane have some good words to say about his work: https://www.newsfromme.com/pov/col146/ I firmly agree with what it says about Stallman's art for the Tower Comics line on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and Undersea Agent growing on me, so I'm willing to grant that I'm possibly missing something here as well. And Stallman had far too long and successful a career to be described as lazy and sloppy... you can survive a long time in comics as one or the other, but you don't work for decades if you're both. With all that said, my initial reaction was similar to yours: it's a lowlight of the issue, at least to me. On the other end, "In the tank" is a phrase that has shifted quite a bit over the years. It initially meant throwing some sort of contest, but has evolved to mean uncritically supportive of someone or something. I was trying to convey that I enjoy all the Ditko/ Goodwin pieces so much that I find it difficult to be properly critical about them... when you start something assuming it's a masterpiece, it's much more likely that you'll end feeling that as well. I'm more willing to overlook the flaws and rank the good points higher than I might otherwise be if I was coming to the story cold.

Welcome to the club!

I think it was multiple issues, but the most famous is probably Weird Fantasy #17: They’re traditionally described as “Good Lord!” In Martian and Vesuvian in some order, but I have no idea which is which.

Goodwin’s “Sinner” from Witzend #1 is a small classic that he wrote and drew. It’s a shame he didn’t draw more stories.

Classic Robot & Babe cover and a Lovecraft reprint. I see this one having an awful lot of room to grow with the current surge of interest in pulps.

Yes. Yes, you do. 🤪

Partly that... I would love to get one or two pence variant Looney Tunes for my collection, and if some existed in the FC run they would be obvious targets. Guess I'm stuck with the main LT title if I want one, though. But the other reason was I couldn't resist dubbing the FC pence variants "Four Colour" after your comment about them not editing humor in the subtitle.

I'm going to ask how many of the Dell Pence Variants are known to exist in the Four Colour series specifically?

I really need to read the one issue of Supersnipe I have. To follow up on the original observation, there is very little in all of comics that is Sheldon Mayer Red Tornado good. But as my profile pic attests, I'm a pretty big Mayer fan...